By Will Malkus
Elm Staff Writer
Let’s talk about hate.
Hatred can motivate. It can destroy, it can create, it can drive us to tell the truth, and also to lie. It can inspire us to hurt people, and it can show us just how much we love others. At the end of the day, how much of human progress can we actually attribute to things like love and empathy, when hate seems to make so much more sense? It spews from our mouths every five minutes. “I hate that teacher.” “I hate you so much right now.” We toss it around casually, and maybe, we use it too lightly. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We don’t mean it. We don’t use it in the way it was originally intended. We’ve given it a newer, more casual meaning.
Let me begin by answering the obvious question. Do I actually hate it here? Absolutely not. In fact, I really like it here. I like the people, the environment, the location, and the attitudes (mostly). When I think about the fact that I’m graduating, it makes me genuinely sad, because this school has been a home for me. So why call the column “I Hate It Here?”
There are things I hate in this world, and I’d like to write about them, but they aren’t specific to WC. I hate complacency. I hate the belief that one person can know enough to justify that complacency. I hate that fear and hatred justify more than love and morality. I hate that there’s truth to the American stereotype.
I like to write about things I feel passionate about.
And you may not like the things that I feel passionate about. You may not agree with me, and, you know something? I. Am. Fine. With. That. Don’t agree with me. Question me. Disagree. This is an opinion column, and my opinions are no more valid than yours just because I get 550-650 words worth of it put into print every week. The way I figure it, the more passionate we can get about a subject, the more likely we are to talk about it, and the more we talk, the less likely we are to hate blindly.
I’m in a train station as I write this, it’s the day after Thanksgiving, and I want to talk about that. I want to talk about Thanksgiving, and what it means. Let’s start by defining what it doesn’t mean, first. Here’s an obvious one: hate. Sound familiar? Yeah, let’s bring this full circle. Thanksgiving is NOT a misguided celebration of hatred; it’s not about the Anglo-Saxon subjugation of the Indians, and I wish that we could all stop treating it as if it was.
It really is a beautiful day when you get past all the crap. Maybe it was when we first started celebrating it, but now? Now it is the one day out of the year that my whole family can sit down with one another and be civil and grateful for everything we take for granted in our everyday lives, and it is a damn extensive list. I mean, we all have that list, right? “Awesome Stuff That I Don’t Appreciate?” And the idea that there’s a whole day out of the year devoted to just admitting that and taking a moment to cross some things off that list is kind of wonderful. It should give us hope for ourselves.
It’s kind of like the word “hate,” you know? It used to mean one thing, but since then, we’ve taken it and changed it. We’ve adapted it for our convenience, just like Thanksgiving. Instead of getting up in arms about a holiday that exonerated genocide and conquest hundreds of years ago, how about we all shut up, eat some damn turkey, and appreciate one of the only days left in the calendar where we’re all a little better afterwards than we were the day before.