I decided to work on love when I realized that hate was too much for me, Martin Luther King  said he gave up hate because it was too much for him to bear. I understand what he meant.

I was intrigued to learn a few years ago – it was mostly after I put Orson down after he bit his third person –  that entire websites and blogs were devoted to hating me. “I hate Jon Katz too,” one eager late comer proclaimed in one hurriedly constructed site, she was anxious to get aboard. “I hate Jon Katz with a passion!,” headlined another blog, pointing out with pride that she didn’t just hate me in the ordinary way, but with much more feeling.

Only last year, someone I have never met and know nothing about launched a global campaign to ban me on Facebook from writing about animals. Her site vanished one day.

But more than forty people had signed up in days.  She seemed to think it was a lot.

Today, something I saw on the news made me think about hate, and I Googled “Hating Jon Katz” and I saw there were about 340,000 hits. Wow, I thought, that is not quite the big league, but it is substantial for a mid-list author. I started to get a big head about it, I mean after all, John Updike wrote that the only true Hell for a writer is to be ignored. If you are not hated, he said, you are most likely dead.

Then I started nosing around.

Justin Bieber has more than 8 million hits for “Hating Justin Bieber,” and the I Hate Justin Bieber Facebook Page has nearly 400,000 likes all by itself. I am a wart on the ass of life. Perspective is important.

I decided to Google “loving Jon Katz” and there were not as many – about 357,000 hits. I’ll be honest with you, most of them were nice reviews and comments about my books and quite a few were comments posted on my own pages on the blog and on Facebook. Google’s search engines are not nearly as focused on love as hate. And these days, you can get a quarter of a million hits on line by posting photos of your new kitten.

The Internet is an amazing place, we will never escape our own lives or be able to hide from them, those Jon Katz pages will be up there forever, archived in the genes of the universe.  I think of future generations of people – writers, bloggers, dog lovers, donkey lovers, misfits – who will puzzle over these sites and try and figure out what to make of me. I wish I could help them, but they will have to make up their own minds.

I wonder what my beloved grandmother Minnie would have made of these sites, I think she would have thrown up her hands in horror, convinced that the police would be here shortly to drag me off to prison or worse.

In case my head swells, I went and Googled “Hating Donald Trump,” I was reminded again of what I small fry I really am in the hating universe. Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who shot Cecil the lion, has 550,000 hatred hits on Google.

There are 44 million hits for “hating Donald Trump.” I can hardly get my head around that. It seems we have gotten very good at hating people in America, especially online, where it is easy and free. Lots of people do it. If you don’t do it, you are on the fringe.   I spent a few minutes thinking about who I hate, and I will be truthful, I really couldn’t think of anyone that I hate, with or without passion. Now, when it comes to disliking people, that is different.

Lots of people annoy me, and I dislike lots of people. Including Donald Trump and Justin Bieber, both high up on my list, but I would not go so far as to say I hate either one of them. I briefly hated my fourth grade math teacher, Mr. Hauser, but then my mother told he broke down and cried when told I was repeating his class, and I felt sorry for him.

Where does this go? I think often about what it means to give a good life to dogs, and why it is that it gives so much pleasure to some people – me included. I think that is because it is hard to give good lives to people, even our children. But it is possible to give good lives to dogs. Watching the photo above in my computer, I was startled by it, it showed so much drama and life. Red and Fate have very good lives, I think. They love to work together, and have figured out how to do it.

I think giving good lives to dogs is the opposite of hating or being hated.

Red, raised in a barn in Northern Ireland, has a sweet life. He keeps an eye on things, he helps keep the sheep in place while Fate circles them, challenges one at a time, builds her confidence, tests her eye.  He is with me almost every minute of every day. Fate hangs out with Maria all day, they are seen everywhere together, making quilts, flirting with guys in town. They both ride in cars almost everywhere, and each has friends (Red has countless girlfriends) tucked all over town, at the cafe, the dentist, even the Post Office.

Red is a therapy dog, something I doubt Fate will ever be, she is way too active and curious, I can see her pouncing on the bed of some unsuspecting hospice patient and scaring the wits out of him. These two have acres of woods to run in every day, sometimes two or three times, and beds in several rooms of the farmhouse.

I am happy to give these dogs such good lives, because they return the favor and help give a good life to me, along with Maria and others. I know hatred well, as well as those people who put up those websites. Surely, that could have been me.

Hatred and anger have often been a part of life for me, sometimes from my side, sometimes from others. Hatred is a part of our world, a symptom of disconnection and broken spirits, it corrupts and corrodes every soul that it touches, I think sometimes it is a virus that spreads, that embeds itself in the spirit like a tick.

It digs in, sucks life out.

Some people say hatred is a gift, but I wouldn’t go that far. Hatred begets hatred, I know that. Hatred of me does make me pause and ask myself, who do I want to be? What is it that I can bear? Hatred may not help me to know who I want to be, but it has taught me what I do not want to be. I am filled with passion for so many things, including my own good life, I was happy to talk to myself today and say I have never hated anyone with passion. Or even without it.

There is hope for me yet.