Hank Thompson wasn’t taught to hate. He came to it naturally. As a teenager, most of his classmates looked like him, and this seemed right to him. At the time, he wouldn’t have been able to explain why it felt right, although later in life he would develop his own logic to explain it, one based on a patchwork of bad science and bad theology. He only knew that the few classmates who weren’t like him made him furious. He did everything he could to make their lives miserable. Others in his class weren’t as directly cruel, although they tolerated what he did, and this was its own cruelty.
