To the editor:

Have you driven through the tony neighborhoods of Barrington lately? Who are these people behind the "Hate Has No Home Here" yard signs infesting the the landscape like vestigial pock marks on the face of a poor post-adolescent? Members of some sort of secret society, like the Knights Templar, or Skull and Bones, with secret hand shakes and coded language?

What do these signs mean? That they collectively subscribe to some sort of boutique dogma that renders themselves morally pure, as they pay flashing neon homage to a virtuous orthodoxy known only to themselves? That their moral indignation confers upon them the right to carnival bark at you and your neighbors, metaphorically speaking, at the top of their lungs? That someone in their house is better than you are?

Perhaps they imagine that this will convince a single passer-by of whatever bumper sticker philosophy it is that they are proselytizing to convert, or have an epiphany! Have they convinced themselves that their vain opinions really matter to anyone, I mean anyone?

In psychological parlance, such behavior is known as projection — confirmation, if you will, that hate indeed has a home (t)here. This is patently obvious to anyone who is not a member of their Order. But this is a special brand of hate — much more venomous in nature than that which they ostensibly shun: it is contempt. 

They are filled with contempt (because after all, they couldn't possible hate anything). They have contempt for whomever it is they think you are. They have contempt for your ideas, contempt for your politics, contempt for your "provincial" thinking. They are better than you. Would they say that to your face, or finally be content to have you prostrate yourselves before them in their temple of almighty political correctness?

Is it too much to ask these paragons of purity and polluters of landscape, who sashay about in a cloud of hubris and self-aggrandizement, to put their haughty sentiments back in a box with the rest of their playthings: to find the inner couth their mothers tried to instill; to ditch these vulgar and divisive signs, go to safe spaces, find some pearls to clutch and move on? 

Robert Pease

Bristol