View from Apartment over Citgo station, Middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania
My friend Viggie reminds me that the lives of those wannabe assassins might be grim—on the job, at home, within their own minds, which are at war with themselves. So I get a few yards down Judge Not road.
But when I see the beauty of most sport—or backyard birds and owls that wink, or, yesterday, the sweating man with a badly injured right arm and leg hobbling down the sidewalk at a workout pace, a man not giving up, a man with more guts than I’d likely have in his situation . . . I become, yes, angry and sanctimonious about mean-spirited, thimble-brained organisms that seem literally to desire the crippling or death of everything that is not their notion of themselves.
In about 1970, in a Southern university, a middle-aged, middle-class white man on the verge of a Ph.D. in English shared an office with a young, middle-class white man (yes, Me).
One day the older man said, in his gentle, churchy way, “You rail against bigotry. Doesn’t that make you a bigot against bigots?”
“No,” I said. “Bigotry is an irrational hatred. A bigot hates with no factual, reasoned basis for hating. Hating ignorant hatred is perfectly rational.”
Fact is, I wasn’t sure that a dictionary would back me on that; there I was, sounding not only self-righteous, but also playing riverboat gambler, fast and loose with linguistics and logic, a skydiver for social justice.
So that night he and I both looked up “bigotry," and to his credit, he volunteered the next day that I was right. He was such an almost-decent guy, but his burning need to hate everything unfamiliar, everything that made him uncomfortable, that challenged his Tribe . . . it got the best of him. And it would violate his self-concept to say what he was really thinking, feeling: if it's new, I fear it; if I fear it, I must hate it, for I hate fear. I am not a fearful guy; to prove that, I'm willing to be a hateful guy.
Am I ready to argue that sports is a microcosm and metaphor for such important human tendencies? Why not? In football, do they still say, "Run to daylight?" But I'll take a breather now and let people catch up.
The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.
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