I’m pissed. Chronically. Irredeemably perhaps. Someone asked me the other day to write about the things that piss me off, and I realized: I’m so pissed about so many things, I’ve lost track. So I thought maybe it time I prioritize—what pisses me off most? You know, come up with a Late Show-list of the top ten things that piss me off, then figure out how each one made the cut.
Hands down, the thing that pisses me off most is hate. I realized that the other day as I was making my rounds, driving by one of several mosques I pass on my way to work and back each day. There was a Nation of Islam guy going from car to car in the meridian selling the latest issue of the Final Call with a headline that read STOP THE HATE.
As recently as last year, he probably would have stopped at my window, too, and I would have bought a copy, brought it to work and placed it on the reading table in the lobby. But he took one look at my face—one pale pink fleck in a sea of others guilty of DWB —drew his own conclusions, and headed pointedly to the car behind me. Yeah, STOP THE HATE. The guy couldn’t stand to so much as look at me. Was it because, to the naked eye, I look like the Haters, just by virtue of my skin color? Maybe he just didn’t want to take the risk. And you can’t fault him for that. I've come to call it hate's backwash.
The headline stayed with me as I retraced the steps along the long, winding road leading to hate’s illustrious rank at the top of my list of things that piss me off. “Hate begets hate,” I thought and, trying not to count the potholes jostling the loose change in my purse on the seat beside me for fear that this comparatively minor annoyance might make the cut on my budding fuckit-list, I was reminded of an incident that I hadn’t called to mind in decades, but which, in all likelihood was one of the first stations on hate’s rocky climb to the top.
Sixth grade after school arts and crafts class, 1972. A pile of posterboard, small plastic bottles of Elmer’s glue, tubes of glitter and a handful of magic markers were spread out on the table. We filed into the room, and we were instructed to use these items to make posters for our rooms. We gathered materials from the table and plunked ourselves down in our respective corners on the floor, while the teacher came around supervising and surveying our work. By the time the teacher got around to me, it was too late: I had already sketched out, in freehand Woodstock font, the words: “Love begets love,” and was proceeding to fill in the letters with a psychedelic palette of colors poured from the glue and the glitter. She stopped me right there, I was paraded out of the room by the scruff of the neck, and thoroughly grilled on just where I had learned to use “that kind of language”. That kind of language? “What?” I wondered out loud, “What’s wrong with ‘love’?”
As it turns out, the ‘love’ wasn’t the problem. The ‘begetting’ was what the teacher took issue with. Indignant, even outraged, she explained that the word actually meant “to father” or “to sire.” You know, like, to copulate. As with the devil? I was flabbergasted. Deflated, devastated even. I was proud of my poster, and couldn’t wait to hang it on the wall of my room. Instead, it landed in the trash. Oddly enough, that didn’t piss me off. It just hurt.
In a perfect world, I suppose I’d have gone home and reported the incident to “Mom” and/or “Dad” who’d have comforted and consoled. In the best case scenario, who’d have marched up to the school, called the cranky old bat to the carpet and asked her who the hell she thought she was, explaining that they personally thought it a pretty extraordinary sentiment for a sixth grader, that the original source of the quote was, um, Virgil, and that if they had their druthers, this teacher would be subject to disciplinary action, preferably forced to write it on the board 500 times: “Love begets love, love knows no rules, this is the same for all,” in English and in Latin.
Problem was, I was already “home.” I was a ward of the state, and, as such, the class was conducted in my “home”. Yeah “home kids”—that’s what the townfolk called us. Residual linguistic traces of a time when the juvenile residential treatment center had still been called “The Winnebago Home for Indians.” It was in that same classroom that I later discovered photographs of my older brother who’d been placed there “back in the day,” when it really was still an Indian boarding school. By the time I arrived as a sixth grader, the “home” was making the transition to a school for children with special needs.
“Special needs”? Like the need for teachers who at least bother to consult the dictionary before imposing their American Puritan Ethic on their charges who—it must go without saying—have already been traumatized by slings, arrows and outrageous fortunes. Forty years hence, working as I do in public schools that lack everything from folding chairs to toilet paper, that is looking more and more like a “luxury” to me.
Two years had passed from that day in the fourth grade, when I’d scored off the charts on the Iowa Basics Tests and the teachers at my school—totally freaked out by unaccustomed to that kind of performance coming from “dark complected” people’s kids—had alerted family social services to the “problem”—I’ve come to call it the “99th Percentile Problem.” Not long after, a social worker came to the house, and my younger brother and I were removed from my mother’s home and placed in foster care, with an optometrist and his elementary school English teacher wife, who also happened to be the local Chair of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Yo. Nixon Now! Now more than ever, we need Nixon NOW! (Sing it with me, people: could be worse, I coulda become a Republican!) I didn’t last long with the CREEP people—though I remain eternally grateful to them for having taught me standard English and introduced me to the library. They kept my brother, but after about a year and a half, sent me off to the “home,” saying I was too much to handle. That much was true.
My mother, with her “dark complexion” (this is the way she is described in adoption papers for my younger sister), her 8th grade education, her five kids, the burn scars on her arms from the third shift at the foundary, her food stamps, and her chronic alcoholism, had been declared “unfit.” My new “mom”—local CREEP chair, was no less of an alcoholic, her husband a terrible philanderer who did not, in my young and already jaded opinion, serve as much more of a “role model” to my little brother than the birth father neither of us ever knew—but no one bothered to ask me for my opinion.
I’m not sure, but in retrospect, I suspect that my child’s mind probably spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what all that “siring” had to do with my getting my ass in a sling for quoting Virgil on the subject of love. I didn’t know at the time how I’d come up with “that kind of language.” I probably culled it from some poster somewhere. I didn’t find out where it was from until yesterday when I looked it up on the Internets. What I do remember is that the incident prompted me to befriend the dictionary and look up the word “beget”. So I’ll give the cranky old bat a charitable tip of the hat and thank her for one of the few lifelong friendships that has rarely done anything to really piss me off. I sometimes wonder if I’d recognize her touting some hate-filled screed in glittering unglued script at a Teabagger rally.
Hate. The air is thick with it. Everywhere you go. Hate. All of us have developed strategies for dealing with it: far more, for not dealing with it. That is, for avoiding it. I’ve tried my best not to pay it any mind, especially not in the media frenzy surrounding the nutjob Qu’ran cooker with a following of 30 some-odd fellow haters. But my own rather unusual circumstance and station in life has certainly landed me smack dab in crossfire of the shit (don’t ask, I’d feel compelled to tell).
But these days, hate is everywhere. And what pisses me off most is the way hate begets hate.
The hate is to be expected, for whatever god-begotten, freedom-forsaken, fucked up reason, I know not. About ten years ago, the chair of my dissertation committee told me, “Hey, it’s best to always try and make friends, because the enemies will come all on their own.” And a good friend once said, “Hey, if you don’t have at least 10 haters, you’re probably doing something wrong.” That’s part of what pisses me off about it. How and why do we accept hate, hatred and haters as a fact of life in these goddamned getgotandgatbegotten United States? Escaping the hate, avoiding the haters, ignoring the hatred sucks so much energy from the project of loves begetting.
STOP THE HATE. Helluva headine, innit?
Hate. It really pisses me off.