silence

Our prompt this week is from 10th century Japanese essayist Sei Shonagon’s Hateful Things, where she lists things that are hateful to her. Large and small. She writes with conviction. She lists what’s hateful, without saying, “I believe it might be hateful, if you look at it this way perhaps…” None of that. IT IS HATEFUL. Period. That’s what writing is about, isn’t it? On the page, we get to make up the rules. I’ve been writing an essay about what is hateful to me. These are some paragraphs from my essay:

You have almost fallen asleep and someone sends you a text message of a smiley face. In fact, receiving a smiley face message with no context is hateful at any time of day. It is hateful when the man you have decided not to date invites you to a show you wish to see and you have to say no so as not to become hateful to yourself. To hear anyone’s inhalations or exhalations is hateful.

When you live in a country where the infant mortality rate of children of poor women is nearly twice that of the wealthy; that is very hateful indeed. When the poverty rates of Blacks and Hispanics is at least twice that of whites in every state, and someone insists that racism is dead, you may wish they would join this version of hypothetical racism and die too, perhaps once every 28 hours.

Some of it comes from the sources linked below. These are facts, we have some real problems, and they are made even more embarrassing and scary by all the people pretending we don’t have them, by all the people unwilling to discuss them.

Washington Post, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement