Unleashing the Ugliness of Hatred

Hatred is ugly.

Adam Jones was doing a job he loves, playing centerfield for the Baltimore Orioles, when a hate-monger sitting in the stands behind the ballplayer, began a racially motivated rant.

An African-American woman, running to catch a train, accidentally bumped another woman. She apologized and her apology was met with a snarled comment that included the mother-of-all-curse words, followed by the ‘N’ word.

Swastikas are blatantly painted on Jewish houses of worship and other buildings, including daycare centers, violence is rained down on anyone daring to dress “differently” or speak with an accent, and it is open season for the torment and ridicule of the disabled.

Men in positions of power, (read Fox TV), feel free to degrade, diminish, and sexually harass female colleagues. Disturbingly, they are defended as “good, decent men” by other men!

An LGBT man is beaten senseless simply because someone didn’t like his sexual orientation and wanted to “teach him a lesson.”

The hatred that spawns racial, ethnic, religious, sexist, and the idea that if someone is different, that someone is not as good as the rest, has been unleashed to a horrifying rate. The current political climate has made bigotry and hatred okay. What once simmered under the surface and was kept to isolated incidents by fear of the law, has now become commonplace. It’s perfectly all right to openly vent your hatred and, most alarmingly, to feel that those in power in the political forum furtively, and sometimes openly, support you.

Hatred is a by-product of bullies and bullies have followers. Bullies tap into the dormant “bullying gene” that lies in some individuals, individuals who have to have a scapegoat for their own failings in life. These are people who refuse to take responsibility or criticism for their own actions. Blaming “people who are different, people who are not like us” takes the onus off the misery in their own lives. A friend of mine who is a psychiatrist, once said that people who hate don’t like themselves very much. That truth is so evident in the haters.

A bully, in a position of power, permits the hatred to rise and the violence to become commonplace. To see this happen in society is terrifying as well as heartbreaking. The saying that history repeats itself is not just rhetoric, it is a fact.

Empires and monarchies fell because of bullies and their followers, countries went to war because of bullies and their followers. The horror lies in the fact that, before the empires fell, before the wars, the hatred and torture of “people who are different” was not only allowed, it was encouraged and accepted by those in power.

The word hate comes from the the Old English word ‘hatian’ which means to, treat (someone) as an enemy. If we see, and treat, others as only enemies then there really can be no hope at all for a strong nation. Hatred will continue to rear its head and fracture all who come into contact with it.

Hatred is ugly and so are the bullies who permit it.

Kristen Houghton’s new novel, Unrepentant: Pray for Us Sinners, book 3 in her best-selling series, A Cate Harlow Private Investigation has been voted one of the top five novels by International Mystery Writers.

Houghton is the author of nine novels, two non-fiction books, a collection of short stories appearing in anthologies, and a children’s novella.

She is the author of the Horror Writers of America award-winning Welcome to Hell and is hard at work on a new series that features a paranormal investigator with distinct, untried powers of her own.