Let's talk about Hate Speech

I don't run in circles where people spit out racist or homophobic statements. I sometimes hear sexist statements, but I am a 52-year-old white male and sometimes I'm around other, let's say, less enlightened, old white guys. (Or idiotic, young white guys.)

Most of my day passes by without any overt bigotry in my vicinity. I can't remember the last time I heard someone use the not-to-be used "n" word in a clearly racist manner. No other hate speech, either.

The closest I've come is when I walked down the street to get a look at the handful of Westboro Baptist Church freaks who came to Elizabeth Edwards funeral in December 2011.  Those holding the "God Hates Fags" signs were monumentally outnumbered by hundreds of people who showed up just to stand between haters and the mourners. I barely glimpsed the hate, but it was there.

But I don't mind the hate, really. If it's there, I'd rather know about it. Shadows and dark alleys allow hate to grow unseen. Light gives us all a glimpse, allowing us to fight it or feel shame from it or just to see its awful ugliness.

When we think of people imprisoned for speech, we think Ai Weiwei in China or Pussy Riot in Russia. People are jailed for what we consider "good" speech in bad places. Yet, such things happen here in the West. In a misplaced zeal to protect minorities from hearing that people hate them, even Great Britain has placed people in jail -- jail -- for on-line comments. That's a mistake.

I say let it all go. Let Germans march against Muslims yelling "Germany is for Germans." Let crazy racists in America yell about "Mexicans" gobbling up welfare and birthing babies in 'Merica. Let's hear from communists and fascists and Obama birthers -- silence no one. Because then -- then -- we all get to know what's going on. And, either we'll fight off the hate or at least understand the dark road ahead.

Greg 52

These are the things I think about: sex, money and god. These are the things filtered by those thoughts: Bank accounts, bills, flying far away, restaurants, health, fitness, diet, drinking, science, reading and writing. I think of other things, too. Sometimes I think of space travel or lions. My thoughts scatter themselves across my brain. I don't like to think about death but I do, so I use my thinking forces to banish it over into the corner.

I sometimes excuse my big thoughts and think little thoughts: Cooking, picking up crap around the house. I can get focused on little thoughts to avoid big thoughts. Big thoughts I avoid include: retirement funds, failures staring me in the face, uncomfortable truths about those I love.

I do like to think of things that aren't true: me younger, my wife younger, me a famous and retired baseball player turned novelist. (That's Jim Bouton, damn it.) 

My thinking and thoughts are really all I am, right? My body is a device for such things. I don't like when I read the new debates over free will -- that my thoughts are just another chemical mechanism that keeps me specifically and humans, generally, going. Evolving, all haphazardly but in hopeful pursuit of keeping the species here. If free will is a trick, it's a trick I'll take.

As for god, well, that's just seems silly when stacked against everything we know now. And religion is better understand as a crude remnant of humans trying desperately to keep themselves in order -- or more accurately, in line, with whatever some group or leader needed at the time. I'll say it's quite a thing, though. Human imagination is fascinating.

So, here's my imagination thinking my thoughts and hard at work: I've got a computer and an Internet and I write this word and that word and when I click a button or two, all of this flies out there and becomes available to anyone tethered to the electric world as I am. 

Finished for now. I'm going to think some more later.