Hater?

There's a man in Connecticut who thinks there's something wrong with me. I wonder if he's right.

This guy took issue with my use of the word "hate." He argued that there is nothing in the world we should hate; that hatred is just a choice to invest in negative energy instead of positive. I promised to think about it; I have, and I still disagree. But maybe I have to, because there are so many things I do hate. 

I hate terrorism. I've hated it since October 1982, when I was in Germany as part of the semi-annual ReForGer exercise we did to show the Soviets how quickly we could put boots on the ground in Europe. Back then, terrorists weren't Muslim extremists, they were mostly communist groups like the Red Army Faction. That was the group that killed a young soldier in Munich; a woman promised him sex and lured him into an alley, where they cut his throat. They killed him for his ID card, which they used to try to get a bomb onto an air base. I didn't know him, but I saw him at his worst, laying there in the garbage and blood with his fly open.

I did know Marilyn Gabbard; I met her shooting pool when she was a Specialist and I was an Officer Candidate. We crossed paths a lot on the way up, and when I had my battalion, she was Command Sergeant Major in a sister battalion. I knew CW4 Smith. I remember when he lost the engine on his Huey with some general on board and auto-gyroed it into a wheat field from 1,300 feet and everyone walked away. Or so the story goes; I heard it a dozen times over beers at the Officer's Club. They both were killed in Iraq; ironically I have a memory of being at a Dining In with SGM Gabbard when we raised our glasses to fallen comrades, not long before she shipped out. I'm not so sure we weren't toasting Smitty, but it could have been any of a handful of other Iowa troops we all knew.

And I hate drugs. I hate the way they wreck lives; I hate the stupid things people do because of them. Maybe that's because of the man who traded his 16-year-old daughter for meth. Maybe it's the young lady who was stripping and hooking to pay for her habit -- her gimmick was using her uniform. Maybe it's the guy who took his M113 through a bivouac area without a ground guide during Wounded Warrior III at Fort Hunter-Ligget, California (they shot MASH there, did you know that?) and crushed a soldier in his sleeping bag. Maybe it's the cook I found in Holland, passed out in his own puke in the dumpster he'd hidden in to shoot up.

I hate what the world thinks about sex. I hate it when I'm packing up the personal effects of a suicide and find gay pornography, which by law I'm supposed to send back to his mother (I didn't). I hate it when I have to court-martial a combat vet who exposed himself to grade-school girls. I hate it when an officer degrades the uniform by coming home from Iraq, where there aren't a lot of blonde women to be had, with $10,000 she earned on her back.

None of those things were great personal tragedies; the people were colleagues, not friends, and the responsibilities were professional. But each of these events, and others like them, put another nick in the lens through which I look at life, so that now the world I see is significantly less beautiful than the one a lot of people live in.

What those events did was prove to me, one data point at a time, that while life where I live is mostly sunshine, there is darkness out there. This world has some negative energy too. The old word for it was evil; these days we call it dysfunction or sickness or an alternative lifestyle.

It's the evil that I hate. The question is, do I also hate people? Do I hate terrorists? Do I hate drug dealers? Do I hate pimps and pornographers? I hope not; I don't want to. I can honestly say I've never hated anyone I've met face-to-face. But I never met Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, so I guess I don't really know.

There's one being I know I hate: The Father of Lies. He's the one who did all of it. He's the one who makes people think these are good ideas. And he's the one who convinces people that there's nothing to hate.

All this hatred . . . does it mean I'm evil too? If I let the hatred dominate, it might. But everything I hate is because of something I love even more strongly. Ultimately, I'm a lover, not a hater. At least, that's what I want to be.

I read this morning that these three remain: Faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. The love will be there when the hatred is gone. That's as good a definition of heaven as I need today.

Writing

[Biographical note: I worked my way through college as a journalist, earned a BA in English, and assumed at that point I would always earn my living by writing. Somewhere along the way the need to feed a family pushed me onto another path, and I discovered skills that proved more valuable in the marketplace. But . . .]

Sometimes I hate being a writer. Often I deny that I am one.

But denying the truth doesn't make it go away, and the truth is, I can't not write. Even when I'm disgusted with it, even when no one reads it or even has a chance to read it, I write.

I write to think. Something can be a jumbled mess in my mind, but if I write it, thoughts flow, connections become apparent, logic asserts itself and, in the end, there is a conclusion. Sometimes I advance through the day in a kind of solo social media experience, wherein I'm constantly adding comments and updating my status as a way of clarifying these new ideas that keeping boiling out of my brain (picture the centipedes coming out of the old tree trunk in the movie version of Fellowship of the Ring).

And most days I churn out pages of business writing. That's the art at its most workmanlike, leading out words like draft animals to be put in harness in e-mails, memos and reports that attempt, as mundane as they may be, to be true to the capacity of the English language not just to communicate but to stimulate. It's like singing opera in a honky-tonk.

But in addition to those functional uses for writing, I have this need to sculpt words. I'm long past the days when I got paid to write -- in fact, my current career field values writing only if it is terse and unambiguous. But that doesn't stop me from sneaking away now and then to romp through the playground of language like a schoolboy playing hooky. Words have meaning. Years ago in my Infantry Officer Advanced Course one of my Tacs was fond of saying "Use precise terms precisely;" in that world, where decisions are made on the fly and sometimes under fire, the job of words is to transmit information efficiently and accurately. But words can do much more than that; in addition to their Webster definitions, they are nuanced, and they have shapes and sounds that combine to evoke for me colors and flavors and textures and tones. Writing can be like cooking and painting and singing all at the same time.

That's why I often return to authors whose stories I find ordinary (Neal Stephenson and James Lee Burke come to mind) but who regularly craft sentences and paragraphs that are so exceptional that reading becomes the mental equivalent of fine dining. 

And it's also why, without encouragement or affirmation, I continue to write. True, some of my writing escapes in the form of the occasional blog, and a few of those are well-received. However, most of what I write never matures enough to be released into the wild. That majority is, I think, what makes me truly a writer, because it exists only to give expression to the impulsive/compulsive something in my heart that demands a voice.

If I were a professional writer, some of that work would eventually be scrubbed and fashionably dressed and then sent out with a polished resume to look for a job. It is the curse of my success in other fields that there isn't enough time.

But I write anyway. I write, and I get frustrated because I start but don't finish. I write, and then file what I've written because it is poor work done with the dregs of my energy and creativity. I write and become depressed because this is what I love but there's so little time for it, and so little progress. It seems futile, my own rolling of the stone uphill. 

So, just like the day I stopped being paid for it, I decided again this summer to quit writing -- like a smoker, I've quit frequently over the years. But even so, last week I finished another chapter in The Great American Novel, and I also drafted the outline of another speech. And today there's this blog, more expository than beautiful but still, for all its unimportance, an outlet.

That's how, even though the world sees me as something else, I know I'm a writer.