Hate is a Four Letter Word

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of my biggest frustrations in an elementary school is the amount of daily tattling. “He’s not allowed to have Pokémon cards out—he should lose thirty seconds of recess for each one!” “She didn’t cut in the order you told us to go to make the square!”  It’s what makes me want to roll my eyes more than anything else.

A few weeks ago down in first grade, one little boy reported to the teacher that a girl had, “said a bad word.” Her classmate reported “hate” as what she had said. My first instinct was to roll my eyes at this and to see it as yet another example of how I need to get out of the elementary school and back into a high school where no one tells on a person for saying the word “hate.” 

With the exception of my mother, I don’t actually know any adults who view hate as a “bad word” the same way that other kinds of profanity are bad.  (On a side note, there was an instance where, in my twenties, I was scolded by my mother for saying I hated Billy Packer.  To be truthful, I don’t actually hate him, but it is hard to feel any kind of affection for a man who seems to get a great deal of enjoyment out of pointing out faults in the Heels.)  But the more I thought about the idea of hate as a bad word, the more I got behind the idea. 

Contrary to what is likely a popular belief among my students, I don’t actually like playing the language police.  Honestly, if high school students could understand that profane words can be powerful when used sparingly and in appropriate circumstances, I wouldn’t object to them using them in school.  It’s just that it’s not really up to me, and I haven’t met many sixteen year olds who fit that description.  Really, when people use a word like retard to describe someone, I find that far more offensive than someone using a word like shit to describe a terrible day.   Words are incredibly powerful,  and I’m not certain that we realize that seemingly common, everyday words—words like hate—have a great ability to harm others and ourselves.  

At what age does hate stop being a bad word? When do we allow students to hate things—and each other—with impunity?  Is it just that we have bigger problems and bigger fish to fry when they get older that we think it doesn’t really matter?  Is there any truth to the idea that I’ve been turning over in my mind that if we let kids say they hate that they will in turn be able to hate?  Or is all of this really more worthy of my original eye roll feeling than anything else?