{"id":3213,"date":"2012-05-27T22:50:50","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T02:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=3213"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:43:18","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:43:18","slug":"what-explains-the-hatred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2012\/05\/what-explains-the-hatred\/","title":{"rendered":"What Explains the Hatred?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What explains it?\u00a0 What explains the darkness, the stark hatred inside people like Charles Worley<\/a>, the so-called pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church in the town of Newton, North Carolina?\u00a0 Worley says his adherents “should build a great big large fence 50 or 100 miles long.\u00a0 Put all the lesbians in there.\u00a0 Fly over and drop some food.\u00a0 Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals.\u00a0 Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out.\u00a0 You know what, in a few years, they’ll die out.\u00a0 You know why?\u00a0 They can’t reproduce.”<\/p>\n

The problem with people like Charles Worley is that they know their choirs, how to draw them in and how to preach to them.\u00a0 Such choirs come from the uneducated, the fearful, the bitter, the prejudicial, the resentful.\u00a0 Should we hold Charles Worley to account, or should we instead indict his more numerous, complicit<\/a> lay supporters?<\/p>\n

As Barack Obama said, infamously, in Pennsylvania, in 2008:<\/p>\n

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing\u2019s replaced them. They fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it\u2019s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren\u2019t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, that’s one explanation.\u00a0 But I think it goes deeper.\u00a0 People the world over do the same thing every day.\u00a0 Blame the immigrant.\u00a0 Blame the government.\u00a0 Blame the newcomer, the different one, the one who doesn’t believe what I believe.\u00a0 Blame him.\u00a0 Not me.\u00a0 Hate him.\u00a0 Not me.<\/p>\n

Call me naive, but I think that public school education is the key.\u00a0 I had no idea, when I moved to North Carolina, that educated people could be viewed with such suspicion, and that education itself could be held in such low regard.\u00a0 Frankly, it is depressing to see what amounts to willful ignorance among a significant part of the populace here.\u00a0 It is not just some knee-jerk right-wing resistance to teachers’ unions.\u00a0 It is against teaching, period.\u00a0 Parents want to preserve their right to teach their children to hate the people they hate.<\/p>\n

I don’t think I will live long enough to see this change.\u00a0 If it does, and I do, please come visit me in the rest home, give my shoulders a shake to wake me up, and shout to me, love won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What explains it?\u00a0 What explains the darkness, the stark hatred inside people like Charles Worley, the so-called pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church in the town of Newton, North Carolina?\u00a0 Worley says his adherents “should build a great big large … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3213"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28386,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213\/revisions\/28386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}