Hatred?

Dec. 5th, 2012 04:58 pm
[personal profile] gildaurel
Reading the Scarlet Letter with my thirteen-year-old students is always interesting, if only for the creative ways some classes try to rewrite SparkNotes. This class, however, is particularly insightful and, through their comments, caused me to look much more closely at a passage.

Hawthorne was such a misanthrope that the fact that he would even write this is beyond bizarre, but he says, "It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility." Well, needless to say, I did manage to get all my relatively well-off private school students to agree with Hawthorne and to confess that they don't truly hate ANYBODY. What inevitably followed was them asking me whether I actually hate anybody.

Interesting question. I don't think I do, even when I ply my mind for all the insensitive comments exes might have made, or the rudeness of my first employers. Then they asked me if I hate Osama Bin Laden. Why? Why is he the fallback man to hate? I mean, seriously, what about Hitler? Not to sound insensitive, but I'm pretty sure the Holocaust affected a hell of a lot more people than 9/11. Now they're just spouting back what their typically Republican parents indoctrinate them with, but I just don't understand how so many people can blindly accept to despise someone. I know I'm treading in brackish water here, and I do feel for anyone who was personally (or selfishly, as Hawthorne would say) affected by the tragedy, but as a total outsider, can I really feel worse for the people who died in the twin towers than the thousands and thousands of civilians who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Of course I didn't respond with that whole monologue, which could have potentially thrown me into the Head of School's office. But I can't help but feel that his crimes, though heinous, have been so inordinately exaggerated, and that people do throw around the word hatred with a strange degree of casualty. I was in DC (where I'm from) when he died, and seeing people celebrate a death made me a little sick inside.

I guess my answer to Hawthorne is that humans SHOULD tend to love, but with the advent of TV indoctrination, do they? Were the Puritans he writes about really fuzzier teddy bears inside than the Bush government? Apparently so.

At any rate, the kids really are great. It's like having Book Club, only I'm paid for it, and my opinion trumps all others. HA!

Date: 2012-12-06 05:53 pm (UTC)
thene: Fang, Vanille and the space between them. (awakened)
From: [personal profile] thene
heh, when 9/11 happened I had just started at a sixth-form that was maybe about 20% Muslim (my previous schools had all been extremely white & rural, so this was new on me socially & culturally, though my parents had a few Muslim friends). So in that time right afterwards, when the news media was still only just starting to seize on OBL as their boogeyman, I got to listen to many fascinating discussions/arguments between Muslims of different factions, and sometimes between Muslims and others, about what had happened. The one I'm most reminded of here was probably later the same week as 9/11, right before a Politics class; our teacher walked in in the middle of it and one of the participants (a fairly traditionalist Muslim) wound up saying to him that she didn't see how a Muslim could have done this. /face.palm.

I don't think the GOP are totally to blame for the boogeyman-ising of OBL...it seems like it's been a fairly equal opportunity media sport, on both sides of the Atlantic. I was in Atlanta when he died and was working an early-morning shift, and I felt sick when someone told me, because I knew I was surrounded by white Republicans who were going to be celebrating it, and by then I had this general dread of the culture around me (hence why we moved up to Boston earlier this year). tl;dr america on a revenge bender is awesome. :/

Date: 2012-12-07 06:08 am (UTC)
thene: PROTIP do not fuck with Minette (minette)
From: [personal profile] thene
hahahaa indeed >< I have the opposite problem too from time to time, but usually manage to catch it before posting. ('christ' has some great consonants, what can I say...)

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