Caught in a Cycle of Competing Hatreds : Discrimination: It corrodes the victim as well as the instigator, turning community into separation and paranoia.

When I was 13, a newcomer joined my seventh-grade class at Rio Tierra Junior High School in Sacramento. Paul was French-Canadian, a slight boy whose wispy accent, carefully pressed clothes and formal manners set him apart from the rest of us ragtag working-class kids. In short order, he was re-christened “Frenchy” and made the target of merciless mimicry and taunting. He was utterly friendless.

One afternoon, seeing him walking home ahead of me, I felt sorry for him and called to him to wait for me. Had it been someone else, he might have kept walking, fearful of new humiliations, but because it was me, a fat, brainy kid, he probably assumed was a fellow pariah, he waited and we walked home together. I had only to ask him how he was to launch him on a furious diatribe against our classmates, our teachers and, eventually, the entire country. His mild face was scrunched with rage as he spat out his grievances. By the time we parted, I disliked him myself and never spoke to him again.

I’ve thought about Paul a lot in the last couple of months as I’ve followed the reaction to President Clinton’s proposal to lift the ban on gays in the military. The debates have been characterized by the kind of rage that not only obliterates reason but holds it in contempt. We are becoming a nation of haters. Some of the hate, like that of the boys who taunted Paul, is rooted in fear of those who are different. Some, like Paul’s, is a reaction to being hated. This cycle of competing hatreds threatens to destroy the American sense of community and set up in its place warring ideological factions.

The hatred of those who are different reflects the dread of people who are so uncertain of themselves that they cannot feel secure unless the rest of the world mirrors them. They see in the unconventional lives of others a challenge to the legitimacy of their own. This combination of fear, insecurity and anger fuels the vile campaign that the religious right wages against gay and lesbian Americans, accusing them of every kind of sexual excess and immorality. An example: An Oregon fundamentalist group that supported the state’s anti-gay initiative asserted in its literature that “homosexual men, on average, ingest the fecal material of 23 different men per year.” This is not much different in spirit than the taunts that my 13-year-old classmates directed at Paul and it says the same thing: We’re normal, they’re not.

When you categorize differences that way, you can justify any kind of discrimination against those who are different as simple self-defense. Jim Crow laws and miscegenation statutes in the South made the same point to blacks that Colorado’s anti-gay statutes makes to homosexuals, isolating and rendering powerless those who are feared and hated for being different. The hatred of the majority toward the minority leads, ultimately, to authoritarianism and the subversion of everyone’s freedom.

The majority is not alone in its hate. As I learned from Paul, when a minority is hated, it learns to hate back. Novelist Christopher Isherwood described the dynamics of this hatred best: “Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t. Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate.”

This kind of hatred is as morally corrupting as the hatred of the majority for the minority. A minority’s argument for equality rests on the premise that, apparent differences notwithstanding, all human beings are equal in their right to, as the Declaration of Independence says, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This moral claim is undercut when a minority’s hatred of the majority leads it to assert that no common ground exists between them.

Blinded by hatred, one not only loses sight of one’s goals, but also the ability to distinguish between friend and foe, creating the kind of psychological isolation that breeds paranoia and violence. Look at sectarian violence around the world, not to mention the uneasy state of race and ethnic relations in this city.

In a speech delivered here in 1990, the Dalai Lama observed that hatred is energizing, but its energy is a negative one. This negative energy threatens to consume our society unless we, each of us, acknowledge and shed our hates.