Hipster Hate

The phrase hipster never really entered my vocabulary until my sophomore year of high school. That year in my, American History, I made a new friend. Derek was somebody who, at first glance, might be a little intimidating at first. He had long hair, his ears were pierced and he wore black band t-shirts regularly. To make a long story short, we bonded over our love for music, and we began a friendship that has lasted to this day.

One thing I learned early on about Derek was that he really hated "Hipsters." At first I pretended that I knew who he was talking about, but I honestly was completely oblivious to where this hate came from.

The thing that struck me as odd, was the constant use of the word "hate." Hate is such a strong word and I felt like it was really strange for someone to hate another person they didn't know for something that wasn't painfully obvious to everyone.

The more I hung out with Derek, the more of his story of disapproval I received and it started to make sense to me and I began to build this "hate" for these people just because it felt like they were an easy group of people to single out. This made me realize how easy it was to follow a trend of hate without actually holding any of those feelings.

Looking back on this time of unjustifiable anger made something quite terrifying very clear. Hate is a group activity. When we watch movies about how people committed disgusting acts of hate against African-Americans during our country's past, we think "I would never do something like that" but we do,  however, find it okay to write blogs, and use social media to criticize and ridicule these people.

Now I understand that these two situations are drastically different and one has a much larger cultural impact, but the emotion behind both are very similar. Hate is Hate no matter who you direct it on or how you go about promoting it. Even though I think some people may be a little annoying and fit the stereotype of a hipster perfectly, we have to step back and realize that we are hating a human-being. Regardless of who it is directed towards, it's not right and we should really look at how we treat people who are different from us.