Beech Tree News Network

Dislike and hate are two different things.  In my 82 years I have known people whom I have disliked, but I desire to think dislike is where it ended.  It was not hate I think.  However, I have known some people I have either hated, or have come pretty close.  In my child-like mind I hated my fifth-grade history teacher.  She treated me shabbily…. Simply because I was from a county school.  I transferred to town school when my daddy bought a business in town and we moved from the county.  Miss Johnson was two-faced and nasty.  She automatically took a dislike to any student who didn’t live in town- we had several students were bussed in from close to town.  They caught heck too.  It is always disgusting enough for any kid to come into a new school.  Someone said we seldom look down a new road with the same comfort an old road brings.  Miss Johnson bit my head off when I asked a question on wanted something explained.  I finally learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut.  In retrospect, I suppose rather than hate Miss Johnson I only dislike her strongly- very strongly. Maybe it wasn’t pure hate.
    I do know this; I felt no remorse when I hear she had died. It did not diminished me any.  A line Hemingway’s FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL says, “Any man’s death diminishes me, for I am a part of mankind.”  Baloney!  You tell me I don’t hate Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and Paul Pot of Cambodian, on Edi Amin, Amin and Paul Pot, murdered millions of their own people.  Between Hitler and Stalin, these two “gutter snipes”, as Winston Churchill called them, murdered 53 million innocent people.  Mostly Jews, and other, “no-accounts”, they thought were worthless, and didn’t need to live.  Stalin was planning another purge of Jews from Russia.  It never came off.  Two weeks before it was to happen, Stalin suddenly died of a massive stroke.  GOOD!  On a personal note, I fear I have come close to hating a man all these years since I’ve known him.  Had he threatened me, I probably could have forgiven him.  But he threated my family, not with physical force, but with power.  That’s a no –no.  a man protects his family.  Because of this man’s position, he ruled with an iron hand.  He treated other people, he didn’t like for some reason.  If one ever questioned him on anything, real or perceived by him, he would set-out to get you…  any way he could, even with threats against your family.
I leave him to God.  I fear I would judge him too harshly.  On a lighter note, a college history student was asked on a test to describe Adolph Hitler’s last days at the end of World War II.  She wrote:  Hitler hid under the streets of Berlin, and shot himself in the bonkers.  Ouch!
                        Kindest regards…..