Hatin'

Last night I was drinking hatorade with some haters who, like me, exercise haternomics on those non-haters who disdain our haterology, rendering them merely the haters they were hating…ahem…hatin’.

Fine! I would genuinely "hate" to listen to this conversation.

Actually, I was just watching game 4 of the NBA Finals, ground zero for haters and non-haters alike. Or maybe our entire world is broken into these two extremes, and America is ground zero, and aesthetics are on trial, and I’m behind the times, hatin’.

You’re hatin’ on the times, Brometheus.

I’ll make this brief because I’ve a houseguest and don’t wanna start hatin’ on houseguestin’, nahhh mean?

The use of the word was valid in its inception as a way to describe someone who exhibited a wholesale dislike for every facet of another person/thing, even if those characteristics one “hated on” were unrelated. It was shorthand—“It’s not that you necessarily dislike all of these things, but you dislike them on the basis that I perform them. You, hater, are hatin’.” Now the word, as well as any derivation, has become a crutch—sign of a clear refusal to accept any dissenting opinion or analysis, a cloak that masks an inability to offer any comprehensive, coherent, orconstructive criticism of an opposition’s point. It halts any sort of dialogue, and relegates human communication to the playground, whereby one kid asks, with genuine interest, what you believe eating a bowl full of mud will accomplish, and you respond by crying, shitting yourself, and sticking your tongue out.

If you disagree with me it doesn’t mean you’re “hating” and if you do claim that you “hate” me, well then, fuck you. Know what else? If I do not offer a coherent argument in opposition to your opinion, but rather, I berate you, refuse to listen, and act like an asshat, you can tell me to fuck myself! How would that be? Things can get real nasty!

Appreciatin'

But they don’t have to. Why? Because what we’re talking about when we say—hating, hater, hatorade, hatertude—is taste, which is often simply a matter of opinion. Sometimes we can be really passionate about our opinions, and it can be a blast because we’re buzzed off of an argument and giving as good as we’re getting and, in the process, maybe discovering flaws within our own argument or completely valid, mind-altering aspects of someone else’s argument in the process. Or we could just never get to that point because we’re yelling “hater” back and forth, dismissing one another without cause, and setting the gift of language back thousands of years.

It’s called “communication”, I think. But fuck if I know. Could be that I’m just hatin’.