Sam Salazar reviews In Defense of Hatred, and includes a personal story about how hatred clarified and motivated her in a direction of true and actionable love:
…and this is a part of the book where I had stop last night and I probably sat there for an hour. And I thought about something that I really loved, something that probably forged the person I became today. When I was 11 years old — I can remember the exact time and date: June 11, 3:08 AM — my brother was born. My brother, the first thing that I truly, truly cared for. And he passed away. When I was about 14, he was almost three years old. And I started growing this hate, this hate towards the OBGYN who didn’t really look at my mom’s sonogram, I hated the pediatrician who freaking conducted medical malpractice. And I was told by everybody that I wasn’t allowed to hate that. Why wasn’t I allowed to hate those things?
But you know what? It was a misdirected hate. Because I was not allowed to understand that hate. See, what I was truly hating, and what I have understood now, so many years later, is that I hated ignorance. I hated people that view patients as just another number […] A lot of people in my teenage years said ‘yeah, you know, that pediatrician’s probably because you guys were Hispanics and that’s why he didn’t give it to you…’ You know, it wasn’t that. That pediatrician was a disgusting urbanite, you know, like a lot of the nurses and doctors that live in these disgusting big cities. They don’t view people as people, but another ability to prescribe big pharma. But from that hate rooted something that I love very, very much. It is my child, it is my family. From that hate, I became devoted to one day becoming a medical professional. A lot of people ask me, ‘why do you want to become a nurse? there are so many other things you do.’ Because I don’t want to be put in that position that my parents were put in. I don’t want to not have the ability to care for my own children. I really think if you can take any advice from me, it’s that every single person that’s going to have children, you should have some basic medical knowledge…
Most of the review is her quoting passages from the book that were particularly memorable and meaningful to her. As the author, it is always interesting to see which parts stick out to which people. But it truly gladdens me that at least some people are reading the book as I had intended it to be read: not specifically as a motivation to hate, but for the reader to observe their own hatred honestly, and through this observation, to know themselves better and to love more fully and more powerfully… such as pursuing a love of family and family care, a love which was clarified by the hatred for carelessness in that most important of vocations.
If you like mixing cooking with your political rants, I definitely recommend Sam’s enjoyable content. In the meantime, you can find In Defense of Hatred and Letter to Anwei on Amazon (in my own opinion, the latter is the better book).
Stay tuned for book #3, which will be coming out in August.
