I'm beginning to think my daughter is right.
Calling the hate-filled extremists who represent the Nixon-Bush excess "hippies" is demeaning to hippies. The correct term should be "haties."
Haties (pronounced hate-ees) get off on bigotry, on violence, on all manifestations of hatred. They use hate as a drug, the way kids 40 years ago used marijuana. The danger, of course, is that today's expressions of hatred are just a "gateway drug," as it were. The LSD and opium, the heroin and cocaine, of the haties is going to be real violence. Watch your back.
Following are some recent Hatie sightings. (Pass on the meme.):
A white bus driver in Coushatta, Louisiana forced 9 black kids to sit in the back of the bus. - A talk show host says he is "driven out of his mind" by signs in braille.
- Two anti-war demonstrators in New Jersey were arrested for "inciting motorists to honk" in agreement with them.
- Forbes blamed working women for the problems of bad marriages, and Fox News agreed.
- A Florida Senate candidate said Jews "believe in sin."
These are just a few examples, obtained in about a half-hour of paging through my RSS reader. I'm sure you can come up with more, and feel free to post them.
The point is these are all signs of excess. While the excess of 40 years ago was relatively peaceful (until the very end of the movement), mainly involving self-destruction, the excess of today is rhetorical, and could become far more dangerous very quickly.
Yet those people who are engaging in hate speech, and who might later commit hate crimes, need to know this. History shows that they are making themselves anathema. You are the new counter-culture.
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