Hate

I suppose I should give fair warning to the couple or three people who might pause to read further. This is not a pleasant remembrance of some bygone moment of life in or around Emmitsburg. For those preferring a politer view of Emmitsburg- please pass this one by.

So it begins. I hate having to think, to ponder unpleasant moments. Sadly, I often have no choice.

“NIGGER!”

I turn in stunned disbelief. Wanda and I are standing on the walk in front of our house in Emmitsburg. Our son’s girlfriend is on the door stoop, just about to go into the house after a long day at her job “down the road”. She stands stone faced as I turn from her to a speeding away, dark green, older SUV and back to her.

“Did he yell what I thought he did?” I’m no longer sure I’m standing where I thought I was in space or time. I feel… confused? I definitely feel a rage building. I’m wondering if I’m about to go into the house to get a weapon? What’s handiest? Bow and arrows? Rifle? Pistol? Ball bat? Hammer? Something explosive? So many options and he’s speeding away.

“Yes.”

I’m in the middle of the street now, staring after the vehicle, trying to will it back so I can drag the driver out of his cage (biker talk for the wheeled boxes oblivious idiots travel about in) and break his bones. Hurt him as badly as I see my friend hurt. Cripple him physically so he’s forever in pain as this friend of mine is now forever hurt by someone on my street! In my town! In my county! My state! My country! MY WORLD!

Her words penetrate the rage. “Old Man, he’s just a dumb ass Emmitsburg cracker who doesn’t know a spic from a nigger. Leave it be.”

I can’t leave it be. I shake with rage. Rage that I long ago learned to turn into foaming, incoherent cursing rather than hurt the people around me.

Then she tells me that this has been going on since the first day she moved here almost 3 years ago. “I’m afraid to get out of my car in Thurmont.” she says. “And there are places in Frederick that are worse. Emmitsburg isn’t so bad. This is the first insult I’ve gotten in town in at least a couple of months.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I don’t want to believe what I’m hearing. I thought the town had changed. That the racists had at least learned to keep their prejudices to themselves. I know some local people who are still in the Klan, but they keep their mouths shut publicly. I’m aware of the Kluxers in the Thurmont area and have had young friends tell me of their fighting with children of Klan families in Catoctin High School over the years. But in front of my house?

“Old man,” she says. “Why do you think I never walk around town unless I’m with your son? I’ve been called nigger and have been told to go back where I came from since the first day I got here. Believe me, I have seriously concidered doing just that! I was never called a nigger in any part of the boroughs of New York City. No! I had to come to nowhere Emmitsburg to experience that!”

Now, I’m a racist… as well as a bigot, a sexist, a homophobe and probably a few other unpleasant things I’ve yet to grasp the meanings of. Many people I know share these… traits with me. Some of these traits are probably survival instincts hardwired into our animal selves, unlikely to ever not be just below the surface of our thinking. Other traits I know I learned along the way to this place. They can be unlearned. When I meet someone for the first time I notice skin color and sex. The brain automatically slips the person into a category- say… black/woman. Cute, handsome, plain, unattractive also get tagged with “black/woman”. Depending on the meeting I might discover a pleasant attitude and the person gets tagged as friendly. If she says something of interest she gets tagged with that too. If I have time I begin asking questions to learn what I can of her. I may even decide I like her and consider cultivating her as a friend. But she is first, and always- black- different. Which is good, as I have little use for people exactly like me. They bore me. In the case of the “cracker” in the SUV- they embarrass me.

And there’s the rub I think triggered the rage. All the racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic thoughts and utterances that have ever escaped me caught up with me the instant I saw the hurt on my friend’s face.

The puzzlement I’m pondering- What feeds my rage? The hurt my friend took, or the guilt I experience?

Fortunately for me, and the cracker, the spic won’t let me hurt him, ever. Not that she thinks he’s worth saving, but she thinks I am.

Bullstuff Meter

“You must do this. You must believe this. How can you not see this? What are you, stupid?” So the comments pour over me from those who have decided they know more, are greater thinkers, better “papered”, more moral and obviously better bred than I. It doesn’t matter if I’m talking to a socialist or a conservative, an atheist, a xian (anyone claiming to be Christian, but obviously not), an agnostic or pagan, an academic or pseudo intellectual. I’m always wrong, they, always right.

The Catholic Encyclopedia for instance says this about Paganism: “… in the broadest sense includes all religions other than the true one revealed by God, and, in a narrower sense, all except Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism. The term is also used as the equivalent of Polytheism.”

I’ve been anxious for decades for someone to present me with proof there is a god, any god! I’ll settle for a Greek or Roman god. Heck, I’d take proof positive that Mother Earth is a god, urr… goddess. I’d even settle for proof that Obama is the One!

I’ve endured countless lectures on why I’m going to Hell if I don’t accept Jesus as my savior, yet no one has been able to prove to me the man actually lived, let alone taught the religious philosophies people keep pressing on me. When I tell them I want to believe, that I simply can’t without some proof, I’m usually told I’m stubborn, or foolish, or willfully stupid, or my favorite- damned. Rarely, am I pitied and told I’ll be prayed for.

While I’m searching for proof there is a god, I’m hoping the atheists will prove to me there isn’t one. So far, they’ve succeeded as well as the “true believers” in presenting nothing concrete to support their belief in… nothing? However! They are, by and large, as certain of my stupidity as the worst of the religious are.

Then there are the ideologues who hound me with their beliefs claimed (just as the religious do) as fact. The high priest of the cult of Man Made Global Warming, urr… Cooling, no wait! Global Climate Change! Yeah, that’s what it is (at least for this decade), tells me I’m destroying the planet with my lifestyle. Really?

I fly around this rock in jet airliners to give paid speeches to people who live and think the same way I do? I live in a house big enough to comfortably shelter Emmitsburg’s entire extended Cool clan, make huge chunks of income off the oil stocks I own, monthly pay an electric bill partially generated by the burning of more lights in and about my home than some small countries can boast?

Well, I guess he’s right. I am leaving one hell of an immense global footprint. Except I don’t live like that. He does. Yet I’m killing the planet by working within a half mile of my home? Which, by the way, didn’t/doesn’t require a smidgen of the resources his mansion sucked out of the Earth, to build, or maintain. I’ve only once in 56 years been off the ground in anything that flew under its own power. That was a De Havilland “Beaver” that took me twenty minutes into wilderness Canada and brought me back out. I doubt that roundtrip flight used the fuel his jet consumes while warming one engine. But I’m told to change my extravagant ways?

Of course, I don’t get it. It being the opinions and dictates of my betters. I’m one of those leeches sucking on the blood (collected taxes) of town, county, state and federal governments because I’m under-educated, under-employed and not paying my fair share of the tax burden while demanding government services and assistance. Or so I’m told in news articles on-line, by way of a DSL service we pay for, via a computer we bought, operated with electricity we pay for, while sitting in a house bought without aid of a government loan (which we probably qualified for) while working locally for less combined income than the average “down the road” employee spends on their combined new home mortgage and workday travel expenses each year! But I’m the problem?

Okay, for the sake of enlightenment, I’ll accept that I’m the problem. Now, some genius please come along and explain it to me; slowly, in small, simple words, and please be patient and not get angry when I ask for clarification because I truly do want to be a safe little sheep and have someone or thing watch over me and assume all my worries and burdens. I don’t care if it’s a god or a state. I’ll follow. Show me the way! Convince me, not with utopian/dogmatic (same end result, different spelling) or ivory-towered fabrications untested in reality, or pronouncements from those never stooped so low as to entice their food from the soil. No! Just simple facts I can grasp, taste, and use. Line up your proofs, show me how you live and I’ll get in line if my bull stuff meter doesn’t register much above zero. (So far, it’s been pegged at “overload”.)

In fairness, I have engaged in conversations with philosophers I respect, mostly because they are living what they preach. One of them (a communist at home on the farm, a serious capitalist off it) has claimed to have looked upon Babylon and found it sorely lacking in anything truly useful to, while being repressive and destruct of, the soul he believes he is. He has climbed his mountain, cleared a bit of ground, sown his seeds and taken to raising/educating his clan along with most of the food they consume. His goal is not to avoid Babylon (Babyland, as he sometimes calls what the rest of us live in), but to view it in its entirety! To understand what his god (Mother Earth, Nature?) demands of him counter to the Siren promises of Babylon.

Another pagan, living in the heart of Babylon, ministers to those lost in its tangle and desperate for some connection to reality, their Mother. Oddly both pagan philosophers work, or have worked, in fields of science. One worked for a drug company and the other a telecommunications satellite company. As different in lifestyles and worldviews as these two pagans are, they have been very patient with me, taking time from their busy lives to explain what they are about and to answer my questions.

I’ll listen to such philosophers. Philosophers who live what they preach. All others? The BS meter is still pegged at over-load.