Hate: It Breaks My Heart

Annamaria on Monday

Six years ago today, almost exactly - eight months into President Obama's second term, I wrote a blog about hope.  It said that racism was not dead, but at that time it looked to me as if it had been dealt a heavy blow.  I would like to think that is still the case. But recently hate-mongering - in my own country and around the world - has taken on an ugliness, an intransigence that freezes my blood.

So many of the people whose hearts and souls are now gripped by hate are otherwise like me: white and working class.  But they seem to have forgotten the hardships and threats their own grandparents and great grandparents suffered.  As a reminder to them, and to people at large, I offer my own family's story.

I am not the coal miner's daughter.  But I am the coal miner's granddaughter.  Andrea Puglisi, my father's father, immigrated to the United States in the beginning of the Twentieth Century, from the hill town of Solarino, in the province of Siracusa, Sicily.

EXACTLY like many if not most of the immigrants who come to the United States today, Andrea came for economic reasons.  Also like today's immigrants, he came willing to do a difficult, thankless, and his case dangerous job for an opportunity to support his family.  The US then, as it certainly does today, NEEDED immigrant laborers to do those jobs that not enough Americans were willing to do.  

Also EXACTLY like today, there were people (read: bigots) who hated the immigrants because they were the wrong religion, ethnicity, or spoke the wrong languages. My father described for me the welcoming committee Andrea and his family found in Western Pennsylvania.

My American-born father was about three, just tall enough to stand and see out of the window.  The family lived in two rooms of housing that belonged to the mining company.  On the night in question, his father was in the front room, sitting in a chair in front of the closed bedroom door, with his hunting weapons - a rifle and shotgun across his lap.  My grandmother and the children were hiding in the bedroom.

The little boy, who I am grateful to say grew up to be my father, looked out the bedroom  window and saw crosses burning on the mountain.  Men in white wearing masks and hoods circled the house on horseback.  They carried ropes and guns and shouted epithets - anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-Italian hate speech.  Red-blooded American terrorists out to cleanse their country of the vermin who were my grandparents, my father, my aunts and uncles.  And also of my grandfather's fellow immigrant coal miners from various countries.

Many blood descendants of those targets of hate still live in Western Pennsylvania and through no fault of their own, by 2016 had become long unemployed former coal miners.  In the latest Presidential election, out of desperation, they believed Donald Trump's false promises about reopening the mines and giving them back their jobs.  They voted for Trump and by doing so, tipped their state in his favor.  By winning Pennsylvania, Trump won  the election.  Those grandchildren of despised immigrants had put themselves in league with the hate-soaked moral descendants of the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacists exactly like the ones who had spewed venom upon their grandfathers and grandmothers, their infant fathers and mothers and their aunts and uncles.

They have helped to elect a person who uses hate as a tool for his own personal political gain.  This is an American story, but it is not exclusively an American phenomenon.

Hate.  I can't seem to feel it toward any person.  That hated, vilified, terrified little boy who grew up to be my father taught me never to hate another person. Despite his own early experiences, he chose tolerance over hate in all its manifestations.  He made sure I would too. 

Here is what I can and do hate:  The ease with which human hearts can fill with hate against our fellow human beings.  How strong the roots of hate become once they imbed themselves in the minds of people.  How easy it is for morally bankrupt politicians to use hate to manipulate some sectors of the electorate.  The fearsome thought that hate will decide yet another United States election.

Hate.  It breaks my heart.