Don’t be a ‘hater’?
I wrote this from a burrito bar. This in itself is significant as until recently I wouldn’t have been able to sit on my own in a burrito bar and have a beer and a burrito without thinking I must be guilty of some heinous social failing, but so far no-one has turned up and called me a friendless croissant, or indeed any sort of croissant, so I’m safe.
This is relevant because my recently-found ability to sit in burrito bars on my own has also revealed space and time to think about things in a way that one doesn’t do when not sitting alone in a restaurant: winding-down, not really consequential, but exploratory sort of thoughts that there doesn’t seem to be time for elsewhere.
This particular burrito bar is Leeds’ best answer to fast food: not really corporate (they only have 5 restaurants in the north of England) and without excess fat, salt, sugar. All in all, it looks like good food despite having at times only tenuous connections with Mexico. As such this burrito bar plays a mixture of latinised pop songs and not-latinised pop songs. And two of the not-latinised pop songs played have contained the word ‘haters’.
What are ‘haters’? I don’t even need to see it written down to know that the word is probably more correctly spelled ‘h8rs’. A quick survey (google search): reveals this: haters are people who spoil the fun, who won’t go along with and support what you’re doing no matter what you’re doing. This message is masquerading under a theme of respect.
This is a disappointing theme which seems to recur in numerous aspects of life. It seems to me that all sorts of hate are going on around me all the time: mainly people who hate other people because of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability…and unfortunately are given too loud a voice or too high a platform with which to express this hate, under the banner of ‘religion’, ‘morality’, or something else equally dubiously conceived. It appears to me that the government really does hate the jobless, people with disabilities, women, people from other countries, and is seeking to demonise these people in order to support a group of very wealthy people who are making money at the expense of everyone else. It seems that the government hates these people because they might just have figured them out.
But: governments, bigots, they’re not the haters! The haters are those who are stepping in and spoiling the fun, and asking them to keep this hate to themselves. This is the subtext I hear in every interview with every government minister asked to justify another unpopular social policy, and every time I hear it questioned whether minority religious beliefs should be applied to everyone. “Don’t be a hater! Don’t spoil the fun!”
It’s a curious aspect of the current postmodern approach to politics and society that discourse has become about “you can believe whatever you want! No-one can take that from you! If you think it, that’s your truth!” and if anyone wants to dispute that, that’s their truth. Tell them not to be a hater!
Thus far from promoting a discourse of respect this word promotes the “rights” of the individual to do whatever she/he wants, without recourse to anyone who might disagree or question her/his position.
These are my burrito thoughts: I’d rather be a ‘hater’.
