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Someone I Used to Hate
Though I was only 16 when he resigned the presidency, and only 10 the first time he got elected (in ’68), I hated Richard Nixon. And I believed he hated people like me: young longhaired boys who took drugs and questioned authority.
He was my enemy. It was Nixon’s DEA that classified pot as a Schedule 1 drug, which basically meant: completely useless and highly dangerous. Laws were passed accordingly. (And only in the last month or so has it been reported that the DEA is finally planning to reclassify marijuana to the more benign Schedule 3, after more than 50 years.)
John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s most senior advisors, admitted some thirty years ago that they had criminalized marijuana in order to have something “legitimate” to arrest hippies for, since it was blatantly unconstitutional to arrest them for protesting the Vietnam War (which was what was really pissing off Nixon). Here is precisely what Ehrlichman told Harper’s magazine in the 1990s:
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
John Ehrlichman
So Nixon was pretty much the original culture warrior, and I suffered a chunk of the collateral damage in that war when, at age 14, I was placed in an “experimental” federally funded “drug rehabilitation center” called The Seed that was actually a highly abusive coercive thought reform (i.e. brainwashing) program for teens with “attitude.” Before rescinding funding for The Seed in 1974, a U.S. Senate committee headed by Sam Ervin of North Carolina likened its methods to North Korean POW camps. Without going into detail, suffice to say my research has confirmed what I intuitively suspected back then: that the phenomenon of The Seed and its successor programs like Straight, Inc. (which was even worse) flowed directly from the ruthless agenda set by Nixon through his DEA and Justice Department.
I took it all quite personally and I loathed Richard Nixon for years in a very personal, bone-deep, adolescently passionate way.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much I once hated Nixon in this era of the unparalleled grotesquerie of Donald Trump. Especially since, unlike Trump, Nixon often spoke intelligently and he may have even held a belief or two.
For example, after resigning from the presidency on national television, he bid his assembled staff a tearful goodbye and he told them: “Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don’t win — unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”
At the time I didn’t know what to make of this. Was he still trying to con the public in some roundabout way?
I think, in my heart, I knew somehow that he meant it, and his tears were genuine, and as far as the content of his words, well … he ought to know. He was speaking from experience, not from some lofty height.
(BTW, just for fun, I quizzed an old friend on Facebook about that quote, asking him what famous figure from the 20th century had uttered those words. My friend – a college professor, a handful of years older than me – guessed Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Meanwhile, in Our Current Century …
Listening to the pro-Palestinian protesters, following the images and stories from Gaza, I’m beginning to actually really wonder: Are my people, the Jews, destined for another great diaspora, cast out from the land of our birth?
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” chant young adults all over the United States.
One even said to me, “I will not sit next to someone who believes Israel has a right to exist.”
Well now. That would be me.
I am the son of a Holocaust survivor. I’ve grown up in a generation of Jews in a free country where we could express ourselves in all sorts of ways without fear of violent repression. I also know what my forebears suffered for generations before me, in other parts of the world. And as my mom used to say, “Don’t think it can’t happen here.” So though I’ve never been to Israel, and I’m not particularly religious, I am nonetheless deeply invested in the dream of a Jewish homeland that we always know is there for us. A safe place for Jews. Though, of course, Israel will never feel the same after October 7, 2023.
And perhaps even more profoundly, I don’t think Israel will ever be the same after this Gaza War.
I perceive (from afar) that the right-wing Israeli government, headed for far too long by Netanyahu, has been brutal and unjust to the Palestinians for decades now (as is detailed in yesterday’s New York Times magazine). But the sheer shocking mercilessness of this war is on a different plane altogether. And the images are now seared indelibly into the world’s collective consciousness so the world will never see Israel in the same light as before, at least certainly not in my lifetime. I fear that this alone may ultimately lead to catastrophic consequences – for Israel, and by extension, for anyone of Jewish descent.
But let’s even set aside for a moment what’s happening to Israel in the eyes of the world. I fear how this war is poisoning the soul of the nation itself. I fear that Netanyahu’s callous, cynical policies have been corroding the soul of Israel for quite some time, and that this war may represent a horrific culmination of that process.
The same “activist” who stated that she would not even deign to sit near a Zionist like me declared zealously, “You are on the wrong side of history!”
I fear she may be correct, not because history decides who’s right or wrong, but because history does reveal (at least in a limited, temporal sense) who the winners and losers are.
I believe Benjamin Netanyahu has done more to destroy the state of Israel than any other person living or dead. Due to how he has steered the country, those who want to wipe out Israel entirely (and have always wanted to) may indeed “win” after all.
Who’s to Blame First?
“Wait a minute!” I want to say, in my mind, to an imaginary Israel-hating antagonist. “You know that Hamas created Netanyahu, right? If not for their suicide bus bombings in Tel Aviv weeks prior to the 1996 Israeli election, Netanyahu would have lost to Shimon Peres, who was committed to the framework of the Oslo Peace Accords, which included a roadmap to Palestinian autonomy! Hamas wanted Netanyahu to win because they wanted to sabotage the peace!”
My imaginary antagonist retorts that the brutality of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza is what created Hamas. I respond that the intractability of Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization and its suicide bombings are what empowered Israel’s right-wing Likud Party in the 1980s and led to more settlements in the West Bank and far greater oppression than previously. My antagonist counters that the occupation was always oppressive and hence the birth of the PLO. I point out that Israel only gained control of the West Bank and Gaza during the Six-Day War of 1967, and that if the Arabs had simply conceded the integrity of the Israeli state behind the “green line,” there need not have been any such occupation in the first place. My antagonist replies that the partitioning of Palestine in ’48 was a massive injustice in the first place. I respond that if the Palestinian Arabs had been more tolerant of (or even welcomed) the first Zionists in the earlier part of the 20th Century, there need not have been any war and there might have been peaceful coexistence …
And on and on. Who struck the first blow? Who has inflicted more suffering? Whose injustice came first?
Maybe, with sufficient research, we could work our way all the way back to the ancient Canaanites.
It occurs to me that trying to assign original historical culpability in this way is like trying to trace the origins of hate itself.
If there exists even a remote possibility that we could locate the origin of hate, I suspect we’d find it somewhere in our hearts, not in history’s record.
But perhaps a more useful question than “Where did it start?” is “How and where can it end?”
Can We Say No to Hatred?
I saw it in his eyes. I really did.
When the Palestinian guy asked me if I was Jewish, from across the room, I saw it. He was ready to hate me, immediately.
I even perceived some weird anticipatory delight in his expression. An offering of hate at first glance.
How dare he hate me? He doesn’t even know me! Who the fuck is he to look at me like that?
Something in me wanted to hate him back, just for the presumption of pegging me as someone he could happily hate! Oh yeah, asshole?
And … that’s how hate wins. Right there.
I’m an old man now. (I looked it up on Google. I’m 66. Google assures me that that’s old.) And if I’ve learned one thing in all my years it’s this: It’s pathetically easy to hate someone who hates you. Have you ever noticed? To me, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
So maybe just try not to hate back. It’s a small thing but maybe it’s helpful in the big picture, in a drop-in-the-bucket kind of way. (To be clear, this doesn’t mean we can’t set boundaries with those who would hurt or harm (or even simply just annoy) us.)
Despite what mystics of all the great traditions prescribe, I don’t feel genuinely capable of loving everyone (unless the drugs are really good). Unconditional indiscriminate love might be too big an ask. Therefore, maybe just not hating is enough. Maybe that’s my growing edge right now, at age 66, in which case it must be all that the universe is asking of me.
My (Silent) Position
Yes I want Israel to exist.
No, this does not make me “complicit with genocide.” I am not “on the side of” what is happening in Gaza. You may cast me in that role in your mind and I cannot stop you. But I’m not going to fulfill your fantasy by hating you back, or imagining that I’m your enemy. I refuse to be your enemy.
I do not love you, but I don’t hate you either. Hating hurts my heart, and I refuse to make a harbor for hatred in my heart.
My prayer for you is that you wake up and realize that hating hurts your heart too.
Nixon, Reconsidered
Many years ago I read a sci-fi novel in which the protagonist was hundreds of years old, and at one point he reflected that if you live long enough, all your friends become your enemies eventually and your enemies become your friends.
Strange thought.
“Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don’t win — unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”
People talk about their first loves. Nixon was my first hate, at least with respect to famous people. But after all this time, I have to admit that his words have been a touchstone and an important guiding light in my life.
So at long last, I will say sincerely to whatever bit of Nixonian ectoplasm can yet hear me through the space/time ethers: “Thank you, Dick. Wiser words were never spoken. And by the way, I no longer hate you. Rest in peace, old guy. No doubt you suffered your traumas too.”
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