Confessions of a Hateful Leftist

Photo by Gwendal Cottin on Unsplash

Yesterday, a Trump supporter told me I was hateful.

He was surprised when I agreed with him.

For a long time, when confronted on social media or in person by a stranger or a family member with similar allegations, I passionately refuted them. I immediately mounted a fierce defense of my position, offering inarguable evidence proving that they'd mislabeled, misrepresented, or misunderstood me.

I don't do that any longer.

Now, I simply admit that they are right because they are.

I am a hateful human being.

I hate waking up every morning and seeing that we're in another unnecessary and preventable Constitutional crisis.
I hate channeling the adrenaline to confront a new onslaught of real and manufactured emergencies each day.
I hate appealing to public servants to do the decent and humane thing and seeing them flatly refuse.
I hate trying to convince professed followers of Jesus that they're supposed to care about other people.
I hate dancing through minefields at family gatherings, doing verbal gymnastics to sidestep relational explosions, and working so hard to keep loving people I've recently learned unsettling things about.
I hate scrolling through racist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic hate speech filling my social media mentions and neighborhood online message boards.
I hate being reminded daily of the white supremacy that my former church friends are so terribly afflicted with.

I hate seeing stories of newly-emboldened bigots showing up as neighbors, elementary school teachers, local politicians, and coffee shop patrons—because they feel they once again have a kindred embittered spirit in the White House.
I hate boastful, nonsensical, intentionally provocative social media posts littered with Democrat slander, wall-building taunts, and abject lies.
I hate that sick people have to choose between getting well and paying their mortgages.
I hate that we have a bloated Military and a starving citizenry.
I hate that LGBTQ teenagers can't simply live in peace because of their peers, their pastors, and their politicians.
I hate that we have a felon-rapist president and an unelected, unstable billionaire deciding our fates.

And I hate the Right’s mockery of empathy,
their open contempt for immigrants,
their embracing of fascism,
their perversion of Christianity,
their violent resistance to diversity,
their strident, anti-science ignorance,
their death cult of a sociopath,
their never-ending grievances.

Yes, I love disparate humanity and this nation and the planet so much that seeing them all under such constant and needless duress at the hands of my neighbors, my former church friends, and my government boils my blood and turns my stomach and breaks my heart.

And yes, I fully, completely, and unrepentantly hate all of it.

I wish more people did.

I wish hundreds of millions were as disgusted by the seemingly bottomless inhumanity America is immersed in as I am.

I believe good and loving people should despise bigotry and discrimination.
They should be sickened by the denial of people's inherent humanity.
They should be disgusted at perversions of truth and distortions of facts.
They should be wholly pissed off watching our Republic being rapidly dismantled.
They should rage against the poverty of empathy we are living in.
They should have a ferocity for humanity that will not let them rest.

And if all of this leads me to be labeled divisive, confrontational, and hateful by a few, I'm going to rest in the knowledge that this is their problem, not mine.

Good people should hate the hatred this nation is poisoned by.

I proudly do.