If there be life on other planets, may it construct complex vessels and span the vasty depths of cold space to land in your back yard and sneer at you through your windows. If there is an afterlife, may all the departed, be they gazing down from Heaven, glaring up from Hell, or peering sideways from Purgatory, hate you. May every generation till the end of time hate you. And, if mankind becomes extinct, may the last learned men, before they, too, fade away, devise a self-perpetuating automaton to carry on hating you through the long, long eons till the very heat death of the universe. Then, I suppose, we can, wherever our spirits find final rest, stop hating you and just resent you.
I feel comfortable promoting hatred of those who want to criminalize speech. They deserve hatred and hatred isn’t always a bad thing. Hatred of evil can motivate us to defend that which is good. Besides, hatred is an interior phenomenon that has no arms or legs to injure anyone. Hatred vocalized may anger, it may spoil someone’s day, it may put a frown on your face, but it has no physical impact. Threats of violence, such as a shouting mob armed with rocks and sticks demanding entry into a hall reserved for an opponent’s speech, and actual physical violence, such as that mob toppling tables and setting off blaring fire alarms to make the speech impossible, are hurtful and should be criminalized. No respected voice on Coulter’s side of public debate advocates the kind of violence her opponents employed. Coulter and those who assembled to listen to her were only trying to exercise a little free expression, something once thought a blessing of liberty. In the topsy-turvey world of Houle, however, the speaker and her audience are the criminals and the mob the victim.
You and yours, Provost Houle, have imposed your tyrannical policies under the cover of niceness, smarmily invoking respect and polite concern for the feelings of others. As the baying protestors at your university proved, this is a lie. That you have been raised high in academe, an institution once dedicated to education, inquisitive thinking, and free speech, is ghastly. It has taken centuries of struggle to establish the right of free speech. That you and yours, citizens of a free nation who should damn well know better, have decided to destroy it is abominable.
Yours with the most sincere hatred,
Ed Morrow
PS: Now, I doubt if my little jibes have punctured your hide, Provost Houle. And that is the point. In keeping with the old adage that your mother probably taught you shortly after you hatched, sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you. If you find someone’s words hateful, respond with your own words, not threats of criminal prosecution or thuggish mobs shouting for the silencing of those they oppose.
Ed Morrow is an author and illustrator who lives in Vermont. Morrow’s books include “The Halloween Handbook,” “599 Things You Should Never Do,” and “The Grim Reaper’s Book of Days.”
