hate- the other white meat

do you remember the first time you ever felt the emotion of hate? the reason i ask is because i was thinking about how everyone remembers the first time they fell in love, but you don't ever hear anyone talk about the first time they hated someone.

sure, i can remember saying stuff like "i hate that xxxxx.(fill in the blank- person, book, movie, teacher, class, whatever) and i can even remember one of my besties chastising me saying "hate is a bad word, you shouldn't say it EVer" in that moralizing tone that only 9 year olds can pull off really well. (she did tell me however it was ok to hate hitler.) anyway- but even while i remember saying it in those instances, i didn't actually feel it. it was just something i said. and i HONESTLY don't remember actually an occasion of feeling hate for the first time.

but there must have been a first time surely- because it's not now an unfamiliar emotion to me.

that is to say that i hate some certain things and some certain people. and i can say that i hate these things and people with all my heart. quite as viscerally as i love, i can hate equally. perhaps even more so.

people such as my childhood girlfriend say you shouldn't hate because hate consumes a person or it causes them warts or crossed eyes or some such awful thing. but i'm not sure i believe that it's bad for you.

hate is something that you feel. it's neutral. just something that happens. like weather. it's not morally bad or good. it just is.

and i would really think that the suppression of it, the inability to own it or just say it might just make you crazy and turn you into a hateful person.

now, am i saying you should ever act on it? no, no, no. unless you hate cancer so much that you find the cure. or you hate child abuse so much, that you work to stop it or you hate the situation you are in so much that you seek to make it better.

they just sentenced a man in the area to life plus 36 years for killing a little girl. and the tv interviewed several people who you could tell would have been quite willing to bash his brains in with the brick that he used on the little girl's head. or slice him to ribbons with the knife or whatever he used to dismember her afterwards. that's some pretty serious hate and you do hope they let the justice system mete out the punishment rather than take it on themselves, but the emotion? well, it kind of seems a rather natural reaction.

so back to my question, do you remember the first time you hated? because i'm wracking my brain here and i just can't. i hate that.