Eric Shaw Quinn

To love people is to hate them.  It would seem impossible to feel strongly without those feelings running from the positive to the negative.  If I didn’t much care one way or the other, I could probably regard people with a healthy indifference.  But, by opening my heart to the possibility of loving, the possibility of hating cannot help but seep in.  There is no sweet without sour, day without night, love without hate.

I think hate is a natural part of the human condition.  I try not to let hate or any negative emotion overpopulate scarce territory in my head, but I am only human.

I used to work with this guy at an ad agency.  I was the better writer but he’d been there longer.  I guess he must have felt threatened.  Rather than trying to do a better job, he decided to tell people that I’d made a pass at him.  I hadn’t.  He, on the other hand, had slept with a sizable number of the women on the staff — married and single, college girls and grown women.  He broke up at least one marriage.  He married one of the women and continued to cheat on her afterward with other women from the office where they both worked and elsewhere.  But since I was gay, I was run out of town.

I hated him.

I came to Los Angeles, got my first book deal, got to live in West Hollywood with my own tribe, got my first movie deal, got the hell out of South Carolina and got a great new life.  Do I still hate him? I probably wouldn’t brake if he walked in front of my car and if I could cause him to be run out of town and lose everything as he did me, I think I would.  That’s hate.  That’s life.  That’s human.  But really, I don’t think about him much at all.  In a way, I’m kind of thankful for him.

What if I decided that I hated all the people who believed as he did? Or that I hated everyone who went to the same church? Or that I hated all those who had  immigrated from the same country or voted for the same candidates or bought the same brand of toothpaste? That would not be hatred, it would be insanity.

It seems to me that the irrational hatred of people you’ve never met is a form of mental illness.  If you wake up and decide that you hate people who have a different religion or skin color or sexual preference than you, you should seek the care of a mental health professional.  Instead, it seems that you’re likely to get a radio program and a book deal.

I think that’s how Adolf Hitler got started.

I’m a big believer in free speech.  I’ll fight for the right to be different and think differently, but I’m not sure when it became my right to go around preaching hatred of and violence toward people who are different than me.  That doesn’t sound like free speech, it’s sounds like a job for thorazine.

Preaching hatred is the same as screaming fire in that crowded theatre, just as Nazi propaganda directed the rage of people in dire circumstances at Jews and other racial groups.  It goes beyond the right of the individual when it begins to tread on the rights of others.  I think that free speech and a free press are the single most important components of a healthy democracy.  But I think it’s time to stop regarding the ravings of lunatics as free speech.

I know what you’re going to say.  “But Eric, who is to say? Who will decide what’s mental illness and what’s free speech?”

I will.

I honestly don’t think it’s that tricky, but if it’s so confusing to others, I will be happy to volunteer.