The Rules of Hate.

Please Note: This is a brief post about hate. The language is strong, the chance of being offended great, and if you feel like I am speaking about you I cannot help you, nor will I offer you an apology. But, I will welcome any course corrections you make in your world. 

Hate is among us.

Emboldened by silence, like a cancer it grows.

It’s easy enough to see evidence of the festering of hate in real life, or, maybe it’s not. Sometimes you have to see it spelled out.

…and then you have to speak up.

There is a very sad, shameful, racist and hateful corner of Twitter, and within that horrible little place exists a very small minded, small in numbers population of people who call agriculture home. It is such a small place but I cannot get the noise they make out of my head. They are not bad people, but they are a roadblock to a better world.

I am tired of roadblocks and I am tired of hate and I am exhausted by the fact that discourse and debate is dead in favour of hate.

If you want to claim that you are not a hate filled, small minded, shameful roadblock then you need to adhere to the rules of hate.

1) You don’t get to call someone the “brown guy” and then say you’re unfairly accused of being a racist.

You’re not talking about a crayon, you’re speaking about a human being.

2) You don’t get to condone and promote violence and abuse of people and say you’re not sexist and deny that there is an issue.

There is no defending this. There is no possible or acceptable excuse for condoning this type of Tweet. It literally refers to violence against another human being as pleasurable

3) You don’t get to claim that inequities and discrimination are a “non-issue”.

Failure to acknowledge the existence of problems such as discrimination, inequities, and inequality is to practice the evils.

4) You don’t get to perpetuate negative stereotypes and act offended when others react.

If the type of person who shares this type of racist, stereotypical crap is someone you call friend or someone you relate to then you are part of the problem

5) You don’t get to condone racist and hateful behaviour and provide it a platform and claim it is sharing in a “positive & honest way”.

Most importantly:

You don’t get to darken a sad, shameful, hate filled corner of Twitter and agriculture by claiming innocence, or ‘it’s just a joke’, or by tacit complicity and cooperation without someone noticing.

If you can’t follow the rules then you cannot claim that you are not complicit in the spread of hate and small mindedness. You cannot claim that inequalities and inequities are a non issue. You cannot continue to think that you and those like you are not a roadblock. And you cannot say that you are “right”.

This is what hate looks like when it is all spelled out in snippets less than 280 characters. Hopefully, you recognize it for what it is whether you see it or you hear it. You don’t have to bang your head against a wall of racism and discrimination, you just have to recognize it, acknowledge its existence and remind the rest of the world that the corners don’t define us. Feel free to report. Feel free to block. Feel free to let folks brighten up their dark corners by changing the words they say and forgiving them their trespasses. Feel free to hold people accountable to the rules.

This is a word cloud created by the words that make up the tweets of a dark, hate filled corner or Twitter. This is what their words look like. This is what hate looks like. This is the language of a small, shameful corner of Twitter. Of all the words out there, these are the ones most used by some. Just let that sink in.