Hater | Heart

I’ve just returned from five days in Puerto Rico, and thoughts about the place… the island, the territory, the climate and terrain…brought me to another, broader train of thought.

By now we’re all familiar with the concept of the Valentine heart as a symbol of love. First it came to represent St. Valentine’s Day, Then it passed as the romantic equivalent of a page full of words of undying love by those with the vocabulary of an orangutan. And more recently, while it still did all those other things, it also stands in graphically for the word “love” in phrases on t-shirts, placards and bumper stickers.

Now, interestingly, the symbol itself is sometimes replaced by a word that describes it instead of the word it stands for: “I Heart New York.” “Honk if you heart bean burritos!”

(Though, honestly, whenever I see the heart graphic, my brain “reads” it as “love.” Why anyone would say “I heart” anything is beyond me.)

So, suffice it to say, the Valentine heart is effectively the international symbol of love, romantic or affectionate.

But is there an equal and opposite symbol for hate? What would one choose to graphically indicate hatred for something? Perhaps the most significant and ready representation of hatred in the United States is the Ku Klux Klan, so I thought perhaps the image of the pointed white hood with eye-holes could pass as the symbol for hate. But then I realized two things: 1) the pointy white hood couldn’t pass as an international symbol because other cultures use the pointy hood of various other colors in other ways, and to use that shape to represent “hate” might cause confusion and upset in those cultures; 2) in the United States, the symbol is so racially charged as to cause upset and outrage (and rightly so) among the African-American and Jewish communities, as well as among most civilly aware Americans in general.

Then I thought of a more internationally recognized symbol, which the world came to equate with hatred, the Nazi swastika. But that comes with as much negative baggage as the KKK hood would.

Of course, there’s the overly simplistic and effortless red-circle-with-diagonal-slash symbol placed over the heart symbol, but that’s overly simplistic and effortless. Did I have to say it twice?

So what would it be? What symbol could innocuously, and without offense, symbolize harmless hatred for unimportant things like lima beans, or Fords, or the Chicago White Sox…or even Puerto Rico? Because I really hate that place. I don’t hate Puerto Ricans. On the contrary…I really like them…especially some of the women. WOW! I just can’t stand the place they come from, and where quite a lot of them still live. The climate is like taking the state of Florida on an August day and sticking it in a steam bath. The road signs are as though placed by a third-grader. The people — and I can’t sugar-coat this in any way — the people drive like idiots: 40 mph in the left lane on a highway with a speed limit of 55; merging into traffic without regard for anything hurtling down the highway at them; turning left from the right lane at a busy intersection. Out of their cars, they’re very nice, friendly people — who I can’t help but think are trying to figure out a way to get off the island. There were a couple of them — the girl at the hotel check-out desk who I couldn’t take my eyes off of, and the absolutely most gorgeous housekeeping maid I’ve ever seen in my life who instilled porn movie cliché scenarios in my brain — who I wanted to take home with me! Did I say “WOW!” yet?

But I digress.

No, actually, I don’t. I truly intended to write a post about how much I don’t “heart” Puerto Rico, but that other thing came up.

So, if you have any ideas, dear reader, for a harmless symbol to represent innocent hate, shoot it to me in my comments. I know it doesn’t have international appeal, but for now, I think I’ll go with “I ‘Chicago White Sox’ Puerto Rico.”