IT IS HARD TO HATE STRANGERS | 2005-09-10
A doctor will fight day and night against a disease caused by a virus or a particularly deadly form of bacteria.
But it never occurs to him to hate the virus personally.
When Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote "The Cancer Ward" about his own battle against cancer, he said "Everyone in the ward just wanted to LIVE. Even the cancer just wants to live."
You have to be a very old Southerner, and from the Deep South at that, to remember Brother Dave Gardner. One of Brother Dave's many classic sayings was, "Jesus was right. You should LOVE your enemies. It'll drive 'em NUTS."
Hatred is like a duel. Robert E. Lee would never have fought a duel with a hunk of white trash. He would ignore him or take a whip to him, but he would NEVER duel with one of them.
You do not HATE a virus. You do not HATE a cancer or a bacterium. If you were in a hospital foaming at the mouth about the personal biases of the virus that was getting you the doctor would assume your temperature was out of sight and you were delirious.
There is an old joke that contains a lot of wisdom and is therefore banned by Political Correctness. And old black man is offended by a younger black man and says,
"You know, our race is divided into three groups. There are colored people, the better class, and then are niggahs, the general run of the population."
"Down at the bottom are the real trash, the coons."
"Niggah, you is a COON."
In other words, this offensive black guy was to him what a hunk of white trash was to General Lee.
Below I had an article called "A Conscience of His Own" about a black writer named Levy who used the most viciously insulting terms he could think of to describe the blacks who acted like savages in New Orleans. He took their behavior as a personal insult to himself, the way I take it personally when a white Southerner is a traitor.
That is REAL hatred. To repeat, real hatred is like a duel.
What drives minorities up the wall about old bigots like me is that they know that I do NOT hate them.
To me, the "niggahs" of New Orleans were acting like a bunch of coons. I would cheerfully shoot them down with exactly as much compunction as I would kill a cancer.
But HATE them? HATE a cancer? You've got to be kidding!
But for Levy, a decent black man, this is nothing like what it is to me.
Levy HATES them.