The Gift

    When I was a teenager I believed in Hate. I believed in it the way religious people believe in their stories, or the way young people always believe in what they believe in; it was an organizing principle. It was my armor against the meaninglessness and ugliness of the world I was born into (which is that much more meaningless and ugly, when you’re young), the means by which I distinguished my kind, my allies, from the mass of Enemies I lived among.



Hate was a natural ideology for me, as for so many of us, at that point in my life. It may be that hate is important for young people, because it indicates that the journey toward a free mind has started: a young mind wakes up to the world it is immersed in, recognizes what is happening around it, looks to history and the present for answers, sees none, sees in fact a trap, another iteration, disguised as solutions, and decides that the only way out of the current world is total nullification, total destruction. When I was young, radicals and anarchists were my enemies as much as Christians and police; I preferred hate to their solutions because at least my hate was honest, not a self-serving false hope delivered half-heartedly by sanctimonious two-faced hypocrites, full to the brim with the same unacceptable feelings and desires as the rest of us underneath their veneer of moral certitude.
    Hate made more sense, hate was a natural ideology, a natural extension of what I understood of myself and the world at that time. This was so because I had no hope, and under those circumstances a person can make a bid for self-respect by favoring their own integrity over meaningless pie-in-the-sky fantasies of actual social change. It was also so, in a very teenage way, because I did not have the understanding at that time to recognize other people as being like me in any meaningful way. I didn’t know, as many people don’t know as teenagers and often as adults as well, that other people were people like I was. People always look like stupid, useless sheep until you allow yourself to recognize the validity of their perspective, until you allow them their weakness, which can only happen once you allow yourself your own weakness. At this point everybody belongs to the same order of being, and it begins to make sense to be kind and work together instead of wishing a swift mutual death on everyone.
    It takes some miraculous combination, of personal bravery and the willingness of others to bring you around slowly to a new perspective, to lead a person into a mature “political” analysis. It is amazing that this ever, ever happens. If anyone really still needs proof of the value of love, let them examine how friends help each other discover how to not be such awful people.
    Somebody somewhere (Jean-Paul Satire?) said that the one who says No is always also saying Yes, that every denial of the current world is also an affirmation, a gesture toward the world they do want. Nihilism, in my opinion, is a normal step in the development of a free mind-the rejection of the standards of the present world makes sense as a step toward the drafting of new standards. Nihilism is not, however, mental freedom. It looks more to me now like the kind of rote, automatic behavioral tics you see in abused people as they reiterate the circumstances of their abuse in relationship after relationship. Nihilism is reactive, which means it is fundamentally dependent on the present world. The nihilist is the equal and opposite counterpart to the moral citizen, the good Christian, the Good German.
    Wouldn’t it be interesting if public schooling were to include these ideas in their scope of study? What if we acknowledged the natural nihilism of teenagers and used it as a point of reference to help people into “political” and social maturity? What if we taught Nihilism so we could teach hope afterward? In my version of the Future we won’t be needing Government but we will still be needing Citizens.
    It took a tremendous amount of work, on my part and others, to unlearn Hate as an organizing principle and replace it with hope. Hope is profoundly less certain than hate is; if we who believe in another world are honest with ourselves we will have to acknowledge at some point that all we really have is faith in the possibility of another world rather than any concrete hope of anything changing.
Perhaps more problematic, however, is the persistence of hate in everyday life. Hate doesn’t just go away once one decides it is undesirable; instead it shifts in status from a philosophical fact to an emotional fact. It continues to assert itself, but now is outside of our control. Whereas before hate was fun and made me feel powerful, now it makes me feel exhausted and helpless. I would rather not hate, but I can’t figure out how to stop. The popular radical analysis would suggest that reconciliation with the subject/object of hate would lift the burden, but reconciliation requires both parties to be willing and interested in participating. Without a willing dance partner, each is required to continue hating. And now, though there is so, so little hate in my life, that little I have I am stuck with until they who I hate, who hates me, is willing to come forward and stop hating me. I have a choice; I can suffer under the burden of our mutual hate (and what is it to hate? It is to be controlled, to organize your life around the choices of another, to live for another), or I can take the suffering I feel in relation to our hate and turn it into good feelings, return to the ideology of hate I abandoned in favor of the hope of another kind of world, allow my hate to expand and cover the whole of my life and order my whole life around that hate.   There is nothing I can do but live with the Gift they have given me, one way or another, until they choose to take it back.

You gave me a gift
Which I have kept for years
I’m tired of being sick
I want to give it back

Please help me

Your gift is part of me
I use it every day
I wish I could put it down
I can’t do it on my own

Please take it back
Take back the gift

Please help me
Share with me a moment’s weakness
Forgive so I can forgive
Let a crack run through your features

You gave me a gift
I will keep my whole life
Please take it back
Take back the gift
I don’t want it anymore
I’m tired of being sick
Please take it back
Take back the gift