Don't You Hate This?

“Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list.” - Doctor Denis LearyI thought a lot about what the good doctor said while I pored over the comments I found below the Yahoo article about the President's speech at the Tucson memorial for the shooting victims there. While Doctor Leary is by no means free of bile and vitriol, his comes with his name and face attached. The thoughts expressed at the bottom of the story I read were almost exclusively anonymous, with very little care about the way they were presented. You know the kind: All caps, loads of misspellings, and enough hate to make me feel bad about all those years that I called George W. Bush "Pinhead." All done from the relative comfort and safety of their home office or public library or handheld Internet connection.Now here's the scary part: It's not just on the political front. You can find the same scary words all over the sports pages. Or the entertainment section. Anyone who has an axe to grind will pop up at the bottom of any article that rubs them the wrong way. Not considered or impassioned pleas to reconsider a particular position or suggestions for how a problem could be solved, but snarled scribblings of very unhappy people.I confess that I too have an axe to grind, about this and that. Some of it is political. Some of it is petty. A small percentage even borders on the profound, but it all comes with my name and e-mail attached. This has, on a few occasions, created an angry response from a reader or two. Those comments continue to sit there, right next to the notes of praise, as a reminder of our freedoms, and our relative typing skills.Has the rhetoric of our country become more violent? Is that why we shoot at each other? Maybe. But I do know that our national anthem, written in in 1814 and sung to the tune of an old British drinking song, is all about the bombardment of a fort during a war. We sing it before we watch the teams we love play against the teams we hate. But after the fight was over, the flag was still there. Will the hate that swirls around our country these days be the thing that finally brings it down? I sure hope not. Leave your comments below.