There is a character in the film The Secret Life of Bees called May. May couldn’t stand all the bad in the world and she’d write the bad things down on pieces of paper and stick them into crevices in a brick wall at her house in an attempt to let them go. She ends up killing herself. The story was that she took on all that evil; she felt it. She couldn’t not feel it. And it killed her.
I get May.
I hate people and the awful things they do. Some people might like to say that hate is a strong word. But all it really means is “a passionate dislike” for something. I dislike people…passionately. I like individuals, many of them quite a lot. But as a group, as a whole, I can’t stand people. Perhaps it’s best to say I hate humanity.
Here are my top ten reasons why.
10. Trash
What kind of person throws trash out of her car? I have seen it in parking lots and at stoplights and on the highway. People hang their hands out of their windows and drop their trash. Like the world is their trash can.
I can’t take a walk in a park or on the beach without having to look at people’s cigarette butts, their dirty diapers, their empty soda cans and beer bottles. I’ve found used condoms in the park. I’ve climbed mountains and seen the view tarnished by some stupid cretin’s tossed granola bar wrapper. I’ve hiked forests and been forced to pass your juice box straws on the trail.
How gross do you have to be to just toss your trash in the bushes? What’s wrong with you? Litterers are creeps for two reasons. One, they clearly think their trash is someone else’s problem. And two, they don’t care about nature—they don’t see its beauty. So, they’re creeps and I hate them. Every time I go for a walk out in nature, I am reminded of how much I hate people. Don’t even get me started on major community and corporate pollution.
9. Stupidity
There is no limit, apparently, to human stupidity. People believe all kinds of the stupidest stuff. They don’t bother to learn about the scientific method. Hell, what am I saying? Most people are too stupid to even understand the scientific method. They don’t understand what makes a proper scientific test. So, they believe it when someone says they did a study and proved that if you say bad or good words to jars of water, the water will react chemically to the words. That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. But people believe it. If you believe something that stupid, you’ll believe anything. And if you believe anything, you’re dangerous, frankly.
Here is a short and incomplete list of things that are stupid. If you believe these things are true or “work,” you’re stupid.
Homeopathy
Healing crystals
Feng shui
Vaccines causing autism
Foot pads that absorb toxicity from your body
ESP
Astrology
Alien abduction
Ghosts
Bigfoot
These things are not real; they do not work. They’re fictions. Why do you believe in them?
And yes, I know that smart people can also believe in stupid things; I probably believe in stupid things. That only makes me hate people more.
People take stupidity to a whole new level with religion. If you want to believe there is a god and he cares about you, fine. But that’s not enough for most people, apparently. They have to have a holy book and claim it was at least inspired by, and at most written by their god. And then they go on to claim some weird moral code based on it.
They have to get other people to believe in it, too; so they’re out there proselytizing. Or forcing laws on people based on their religions. There are people in the Middle East still beheading women for adultery based on their insane religious moral code. What is wrong with people?
There are people in the United States right now who can’t figure out what’s wrong with having Christian prayers in public schools. They’ve got some kind of mental block that causes them to have absolutely no understanding, no idea, that it is not a teacher’s place to pray with other people’s children. It never occurs to them that Jews or Muslims or atheists or Wiccans or people of other religious persuasions might not want their children taught Christianity. They are so certain that their religion is true that they can’t fathom the possibility that they could be wrong.
Religion does that to people. I hate them for it.
There is so much wrong with religion, and so little right. But people cling to it. They cling to it for hope, I get that. But they also cling to it to feel superior to other people; they use it to rationalize their hatred of other people. And they use it to control other people.
8. Fanaticism
Put stupidity and religion together in the human animal and what have you got? Fanaticism. Fanaticism gets you people carrying signs around town with pictures of supposedly aborted fetuses on them. It gets weirdos kneeling on the steps of the Supreme Court building praying that the phrase Under God won’t be ruled unconstitutional. Fanaticism gets people shooting abortion doctors. Fanaticism gets people flying planes into buildings, blowing trucks up in front of child care centers, beheading people on camera, shooting at children playing in the street. Fanaticism turns people into bombs. Fanaticism is insane. I hate it. And I hate people because they are prone to it.
Fanaticism can start with something really simple, something that you think is innocent. Like flying the flag after our country has been attacked. Everybody standing up and singing the national anthem for no real reason because it “promotes unity.” What it does is lead to fanaticism. You start flying the flag and singing praises to your country and you can bet you’re going to war. I hate fanaticism.
7. Control
Humans can’t stand freedom. They want everybody else to live like they do, to think like they do, believe like they do, dress like they do, vote like they do. It’s not enough for a person to be against something and so refrain from it in his own life. No, he’s got to go out and make sure no one else does it or uses it or buys it.
People look around and see problems and think they can fix them by controlling other people. Everyone’s getting fat? Well, we have to make it so a person can’t buy too much soda at one time. Or we should force restaurants to cook a certain way. We should tax cigarettes and alcohol so much that people can’t afford them. We can’t legalize drugs because then everyone will just get high. We can’t let people park their boats in their yards or paint their houses a non-approved color or plant the wrong plants!
Everywhere we’ve got councils of stupid, petty fanatics trying to run our lives from the puffed up politicians in Washington to the neighborhood associations. People trying to control other people. I hate it. Government, even when begun with the best of intentions regarding freedom, always devolves into corruption and excessive control. Always. That tells me that people are inherently corrupt. Some want control so they can enrich themselves. Others feel enriched by controlling others. Either way, it’s ugly.
6. Cruelty
People are cruel. On purpose. There are people who tell other people they should just kill themselves, just because they don’t like what that person has to say. There are people who criticize and harangue children to tears. Those people are usually their parents. Women and girls gather in groups to torment other women and girls, make fun of them, ostracize them, spread ugly rumors about them. Men treat their wives like trash, berate them, humiliate them. Boys attack weaker or nicer boys in locker rooms. There are people who actually go onto news stories about children dying of cancer and post awful comments, hoping to cause more pain to the parents. What is wrong with people?
People act like packs of hungry dogs when they can find a weaker “other” to torment. That’s not accurate, really. Dogs aren’t happy to attack another dog. But people are happy when they attack. They get positively giddy when they get to gang up on someone. It’s like the group bonds and grows stronger because it has a common “enemy” to harass. I hate people.
5. Prejudice
People are afraid of other people—the ones who don’t look like them and talk like them, the ones who don’t worship the same god, or worship him in the same way. Fearful people are cruel, violent, fanatical. They’re crazy. The worst prejudice is racism. And let’s just get it out there—it is a lie that oppressed people cannot be racist. Oppressed groups are not in a position to exert authority over and oppress their oppressors, but they can and often are just as racist. It’s the same for feminism and misogyny. Feminists can absolutely be misandrist—they can hate men with just as much fervor as misogynists hate women.
The idea that people are lesser than you because of the color of their skin, the genitals they have, their sexual preferences, their religion, or whatever other bizarre thing you can come up with to make yourself feel like you’re better than they are, is disgusting. But it’s very human. And I hate it. Bigots of every sort are vile.
4. Animal abuse
I hate people because so many of them are capable of harming animals. I get that we are omnivores—we eat just about everything and that includes meat. I get that it’s more efficient at this point in our society to slaughter and process our meat on a large scale instead of every family trying to hunt its own meat. I’m not talking about being carnivorous so, vegetarians, don’t get all excited. In fact, I’m not even talking about hunting deer and other animals that are intended to be eaten. I don’t like hunting. I don’t understand how a person can, when there’s plenty of meat at the grocery store, look at a beautiful buck out in the forest minding its own business and then kill it. In fact, I think there’s something very wrong with people who can do that. But if you’re going to eat it, go ahead.
But I will never understand the disgusting, vile practice of killing elephants, or rhinos, or any other animal just for the “sport” of it. That’s not sport. It’s sick. So is killing an elephant just for its ivory tusks. That means owning ivory is sick. I hate people who own ivory.
Worse are people who abuse dogs and cats—creatures they’re supposed to be responsible for. The person who beats his dog, or leaves it changed to a tree and starves it to death. I can’t even fathom what kind of monstrous person does that. People are awful.
3. Child abuse
I’d like to say that anyone who beats a child, kicks a child, starves a child, molests or has sex with a child, or kills a child is inhuman, but that would be a lie. They’re human all right. And that’s why I hate humans.
2. Murder
Humans kill each other. How sick and twisted is that? People actually plan the murders of people they know. They’re stupid enough, or arrogant enough, or both, to think they’ll get away with it. Other times, it’s not planned; people get angry and snap—lash out and end up killing someone. Sometimes we do it because it’s so easy. Guns make murdering each other easy. Americans love their guns. But we don’t need guns, do we? No. People strangle other people, knife them to death, poison them, beat them to death, or capture them and torture them to death. There are people (sorry, guys, but it’s mostly men) who actually prey on other people (mostly women). They stalk them and murder them. I hate reading the news. I hate people.
Worse? People murder children. They go into their schools and gun them down. They blow them up. They drown them. They beat them to death in their own homes. They kidnap, rape, and murder them. I hate people.
Worse than that? You think it could get worse? It does. People walk around with smiles on their faces while all of this is going on. I don’t get people at all.
1. War
I can’t fathom war. Large scale slaughter of the “other” over land, power, money, religion, stupidity. What’s worse is that fat, white, old men sit in locked rooms figuring out how they can, for their personal gain, send other people’s sons and daughters off to some “other” place to kill and be killed. People do that. And the weirdest, sickest thing about it is that these rich, powerful creeps have the full support of the mindless lunatics they control. They’ve convinced us we’re fighting for our freedom. We wave the flag and cheer the soldiers (we call them “warriors” without flinching) and demonize the enemy. I can’t love people as long as they love war.
Humanity is sick. The answer is not more religion, more control, more cruelty, more government, more war. The answer to our sickness is not more sickness. If you want to know the truth, there is no answer to our sickness. There is no cure for humanity. The best we can do is find some good close to home—find a reason to smile each day without forgetting the horror being visited upon those less fortunate. Muddle through. And try not to be human.