Things I hate

I hate litterbugs. I think they should be shot on sight, and I would include cigarette butt litterbugs. I can sympathize with an occasional murderer but there’s no excuse for littering.

I hate people who talk loudly and/or in public places on their cellphones. In fact, I hate cellphones. I just want to take them out of people’s hands and stomp on them.

I hate people who smoke in public, especially if they’re walking in front of me on the sidewalk. They’re killing themselves anyway, so why not euthanize them now—with a flamethrower?

I hate my country because we’re forever bombing the hell out of other countries and then pretending that we did it for their own good.

I hate it when people are so fat they waddle. It’s one thing to be a little overweight; it’s another to have a feedbag full of doughnuts hanging around your neck all day. I think we should send 300-pounders to Third World countries so that starving people will have something to eat.

I hate political correctness, which I define as legal or occupational coercion on the part of some people to force other people to conform to their definition of niceness.

I hate predictable—and often silly and redundant—phrases such as “at this point in time,” “he broke down in tears,” and “the merciless flood waters.”

I hate stores that don’t carry bulbs and batteries for the products they sell. I also hate stores that play loud music or try to sell me stuff over their PA.

I hate it that every fitted sheet now comes in a range of sizes—say 12” to 18”—because the only people whose beds look properly made up are people who have the largest size mattresses that the sheets will fit.

I hate it that every weakness has become a psychiatric disorder. No one is shy anymore; he has a social anxiety disorder. No one is a glutton; she has an eating disorder. No one is sexually impotent; he has an erectile dysfunction disorder. Clearly, the whole damn society is in immediate and desperate need of pharmaceuticals. I think we should follow the money if we want to understand such things.

I hate it when desperate people believe silly things in order to feel comforted, but instead of admitting to their desperation, they say they have “faith.”

I hate it that I can’t trust corporations, ever, about anything. For example, when Dawn Dishwashing Detergent made its bottles smaller, they wrote on the side that it was a “NEW AND IMPROVED SIZE,” so consumers would be fooled into thinking they were getting more for their money.

I hate legalese that is written in small print so people won’t know what they’re signing even if they’re able to read it.

I hate the word folks. When I grew up, folks was used by hillbillies to refer to their relatives. Then, George W. Bush (no surprise there) referred to Al Qaeda as folks, and now everyone uses it all the time.

I hate upspeak (the practice of unintentionally making declarative statements into questions by finishing them several notes higher than they started). A woman (and it IS always a woman) might have eleven hundred doctorates, but when she uses upspeak, I know she doesn’t have confidence in what she’s saying, so I don’t either.

I hate the word “survivor,” as in, “I’m a sexual abuse survivor,” because it’s invariably an excuse for being a perpetually angry twit.

I hate it when people let some “holy” book or person do their thinking for them. If the next pope declares that it’s god’s will that Catholics support stem cell research, then that’s what they’ll do. Or if a long lost chapter of Genesis is found in which “God” says that life came about as the result of evolution, then fundamentalist Christians will jump on that bandwagon. In the final analysis, “people of faith” value compassion, justice, reason, and evidence less than they value having someone tell them what to think.

I hate the word like when it’s used as a substitute for uh. “Like, me and him, like, we, like, got wasted, like, you know?”

I hate style changes in clothing. Speaking for men, at least, tie widths and shirt collars don’t change constantly because guys can’t make up their minds, but because people who sell clothes make more money that way.

I hate Texas because we’ve had three presidents from Texas during my lifetime (Johnson, Bush, and Bush), and they were all warmongers. What’s wrong with those people down there in the most Christian state in the Union?

I hate commercial television. What kind of a dimwit do you have to be to sit through one minute of intelligence insulting commercials for every two minutes of intelligence insulting programming? Even on those rare occasions when it’s a good program, doesn’t it have a desensitizing effect on your psyche to be suddenly and repeatedly yanked from scenes of rapes, murders, and autopsies only to be thrust into deodorant commercials?

I hate rich people because they either: (a) inherited their money from people who cheated others; or (b) cut out the middleman and cheated others themselves.

I hate college athletics because they’ve become more important than education. For every one person who knows how a university ranks scholastically, ten thousand know how its football team did.

I hate it when people join the military during one or another of our many wars without giving a lot of study and thought to whether they believe in the war. I’m truly sorry when they get killed, but I’m not going to pretend that they died “fighting for freedom,” because the truth is that they probably died for no better reason than that they were young and stupid.

I hate it that our planet is doomed because my species is too asinine to plan for the long-term. We’re like three year olds in that we have enough brains to get ourselves into deep shit, but we don’t have enough brains to see it coming or get ourselves out of it.