Turn the page on hate

Everyone has words they love. I describe good-looking people as “beautiful.” I use “delicious” for all kinds of sensual pleasures. I say a concept is “contested” when I believe bringing it up in a pub chat would provoke raging debate.

And in 2011 I still thank people by saying “choice.”

I wonder just how much these fave words say about a person?

This isn’t a moment of self-reflection. Yesterday I opened the Sunday Star Times, saw Micael Laws was, once again, leading with the word “feral,” and turned the page.

Seriously, Micael, feral? It litters your columns, spat out with bile and venom. It’s true you use it liberally, not just to describe the brown underclass you appear to hate so much, but that’s the primary target.

Most recently, feral culture:

Ferals beget feral kids. No amount of state intervention – be it social worker, probation officer, child psychologist, police or health authority – can make a blind bit of difference.

For one very simple reason: ferals prefer being feral. It is a lifestyle that suits them and their outlook. It is their culture.

The week before, ferals go global, but apparently those riots in Britain have nothing to do with poverty and inequality:

In allowing the new feral underclass to not only breed, but to always be insulated from their bad decisions and worse attitudes. WE HAVE grown a culture of resentfuls in this country but not by giving them too little. By allowing them too much. Too much latitude at school, too much welfare, too much access to booze. The combination is toxic.

This isn’t a new shiny word for Micael. He’s been using “feral,” regularly from at least 2008, when his mourning for Nia Glassie took the form of calling for the death penalty and asserting:

Let’s admit that most of the underclass cannot be trusted with children. Ever. They may have the ability to procreate, but possess no sensibility to accept the responsibility. They are the underclass for a reason.

And his views about resolving the feral underclass, also from 2008?

As long as society insists upon allowing anti-social idiots to breed, and raise their children, then society will still be required to pick up the pieces.

Micael wants the feral underclass to “burn in hell.” Well, those that commit crimes at least, but it’s hard not to believe he thinks a good purge wouldn’t do NZ good when he says:

More than a year ago, when the Curtis siblings were first arraigned for the murder of the Rotorua toddler, I made the point that such persons existed as a feral underclass so removed from society and social sensibility that cruelty to small children was not perceived as either immoral or as a wrong.

Continually calling people words which dehumanise them, words which blame them for everything which happens in their lives, has only one outcome. It allows the rest of us to “other” these people. And in a New Zealand becoming progressively more divided, this means for those of us not part of the “underclass,” divorcing ourselves from how poverty, inequality, racism and colonialism operate and impact on all of our lives, right now.

Micael, I don’t have the bile and venom for you that you aim at others. But I wish you had no platform for your hate. At least I can turn the page.