It was with pain and disappointment that I read Cheryl Lavin’s commentary “There are some people we just love to hate” (Tempo, July 15). This piece of gratuitous gossip is demeaning to the Tribune and its readership and is a sad example of the age-old mentality of “us-against-them.”
I find Lavin’s unkindness to be yet more evidence of the increasing climate of nastiness, which, as recently highlighted by Time magazine, is pervading much of our society. For her to write and for the Tribune to print such mean-spirited stuff is philosophically akin to the Northern Irish Orangemen’s recent inflammatory march through the Catholic sectors of Belfast. What consequence can it possibly have but to increase division and strife?
And surely the last thing that our intolerant society needs is the article’s conveniently provided list, which tells us exactly who it is that we are to hate. (Just FYI, Ms. Lavin: I, for one, do not hate Jane Fonda, the Duracell family, Tom Snyder or even everybody’s favorite target, Dennis Rodman. Have you perhaps heard the saying, “Live and let live. . . ?”)
After having nastily trashed a number of well-known figures, the article concludes by asking if we readers don’t now “feel so much better.” No, Ms. Lavin, now that you have further weakened our already tenuous grasp on civility, I most certainly do not.
