One would think writing about hate an easy task, given the abundance of hate on display online, in newspaper articles, in parades, and flowing from the pens of state supreme courts. But it is not easy, because to write about it is to feel it course through my veins. It’s one thing to use emotions to inform writing. It’s another thing, entirely, to watch emotions shred the flimsy fabric of civility into a combustible gauze, subject to explosive conflagration at any second.
Watching and reading about the hatred, though, can generate more of it, inside, turning one’s own body into a fulminant vehicle of rage.
Better, far better, to reduce the heat and let the rage settle, then write—with reason—about the mechanisms for starting, and putting out, a fire.