My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #22, November, 1996

In the closing days of our presidential race, frantic campaigning was going on everyplace. Most of us voters had made up our minds, without being thrilled about the candidates we're going to vote for. But the true believers were out in force, on the radio, in our mailboxes, in our churches, assuring us that the republic was doomed if we chose the wrong man.

I understand that. I think it makes a great deal of difference to our lives which flawed human being we choose (and they are both flawed--I'm no more impressed with Dole's "character" than I am with Clinton's). I understand that passionate partisans need to persuade others to their point of view.

What I have more difficulty understanding is the abhorrent tactics righteous people are willing to use in their cause.

I don't understand how people who claim to be religious can produce videotapes and pamphlets and books accusing a president of murder and drugdealing and spying for Russia. Clinton has to have the most thoroughly researched past of any living American, and there is simply no evidence in it to support any of this nonsense. Furthermore, Jerry Falwell and his followers have been told repeatedly that there is no truth to their accusations. This simply leads them to greater lies.

The older I get, and the more I see of human behavior, the more I am inclined to suspect that there are two essential needs in our make-up. We need someone to love. And we need someone, or something, to hate.

The problem with the need to hate, of course, is that our religions and our ethics enjoin us against hatred. We are told to hate the sin and love the sinner. Here we are, good, religious people, and here we have a perfectly serviceable emotion, and we're told we can't indulge it.

Bummer.

The way around it, I guess, is to hate in the name of God. After all, if we are on God's side, it stands to reason that the people on the other side belong to Satan. They are not, in any important sense, real people, who must be treated with courtesy and normal human decency.

At least that's the only way I can explain the hatred in the voices of the talk-show callers, trembling with anger as they talk about Clinton's draft-dodging, or drug-running, or whatever. Or in the voices of the people who insist that Vince Foster was murdered--probably by Hillary at that.

It's the only way I can account for the people who throw firebombs at women's clinics. How can those who believe themselves to be good, religious people rationalize sending death threats to clinic personnel? How can they possibly believe it to be right to stalk the children of clinic workers?

One of the most extraordinary acts of human tackiness I have ever witnessed was at the funeral of Randy Shilts, the gay journalist who single-handedly forced America to acknowledge the existence of AIDS. A minister of the gospel brought his flock to the funeral, to explain to the people who loved and mourned Randy Shilts that this was God's punishment on him for an immoral life.

And let's not forget the people who were so outraged by the government's attack on helpless children in that compound at Waco that, in retaliation, they bombed a federal building they knew contained a daycare center. This was a crime made possible by moral certainty.

If this sounds like the morally certain, the haters, are concentrated in the right wing, I hate to say it, but, 'taint so. Remember, I lived among the flower children, who wanted peace and love for everybody except the men who fought for our country in Vietnam. Some of us were mean enough to approach these men in their uniforms and call them murderers and babykillers.

I can live with myself because I didn't do that particular act of hatefulness. But I surely did find out how pleasurable hate could be. Because we hated Richard Nixon. Passionately. Life took on a particular color and excitement during Watergate. Every day, a new revelation. Every day, the noose around Nixon's neck got a little bit tighter. We watched him struggle, and twist and turn and try to deny the truth. And then he resigned, and oh, what celebration, what parties, what uncompromising joy!

And what queasiness.

Because it didn't seem right to take that much pleasure in someone else's downfall. No matter how we hated what he did, Nixon was still a human being, fallen and wounded. It was like cheering the gods on while they stomped on Oedipus. I didn't like us very much, then.

I'm not comfortable anymore with moral certainty. Oh, I know how I believe I should behave to other people. But I've had a relatively easy life. I've had to make very few truly difficult moral decisions.

You know, my house was burglarized once, while I was in it. The man put a pillowcase over my head, and pushed me onto the bed--and ransacked the place. I yelled at him, insisting that he couldn't go into my son's bedroom and frighten him. I gave the man what I had, which wasn't much. And then he left. I found out later that the man was wanted for rape and murder.

It occurred to me then that, were I less fortunate, I could have been raped myself, that I could have become pregnant, that I could have had to make that terrible decision other women have been faced with--whether to carry the child of my rapist to term and raise it to adulthood, or to have an abortion, or to give birth and give the child away. All of them are horrifying choices. And I have no idea what decision I would have made. All I can know--all any of us can know--is what choice I hope I would have made.

And if you can't know for a fact what choice you would make, you can't hate others for the difficult decisions they make. You do not have to like them or befriend them. You do not need to agree with their decisions; indeed, you are free to argue the issue with them. But you do have to treat them as you would any other person, with courtesy, with dignity. You owe it to them to treat them as fellow human beings.

More to the point: you owe it to yourself. Hate is a seductive emotion in some ways. But it does awful things to you. Once you start saying, "I am a kind person EXCEPT to people who...", you begin to define yourself by your hatred rather than your kindness. Maybe some people can live that way. I know I can't.

It matters who is elected. It matters what our laws will be. But not enough to lose our essential selves in the process of changing our government.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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