Hate: Reaping the Fruit

Hate is as all-absorbing as love, as irrational, and in its own way as satisfying.  As lovers thrive on the presence of the beloved, haters revel in encounters with the one they hate.  They confirm him in all his darkest suspicions.  They add fuel to all his most burning animosities.  The anticipation of them makes the hating heart pound.  The memory of them can be as sweet as young love.

The major difference between hating and loving is perhaps that whereas to love somebody is to be fulfilled and enriched by the experience, to have somebody is to be diminished and drained by it.  Lovers, by losing themselves in their loving find themselves, become themselves.  Haters simply lose themselves.  Theirs is the ultimately consuming passion.

Frederick Buechner,

Listening to Your Life, p. 123

Geography of Hate

Although it is making the rounds online, the major news outlets don't seem to have picked up yet on a map designed by a group of students from Humboldt State University, which displays (here) the intensity of hate in America measured by the use of hate language on Twitter.  The students read a 150,000 tweets containing racial and homophobic slurs and located them geographically on what is actually a set of maps, one for each slur.  One of the things they found was that these slurs tend to originate in places where there is a less diverse population, particularly more often from rural areas than urban.  The result is graphic evidence that we still have a long way to go in overcoming bigotry in America.