Hatred of Hate?

Santideva remarks on Line 41 of "The Perfection of Patience":

  "Disregarding the principal cause, such as a stick and the like, if I become angry with the one who impels it, then it is better if I hate hatred, because that person is also impelled by hatred" (p.66)

This line made me wonder: can we ever say that there is even such a thing as hatred? What I am talking about is that, according to this writing, all phenomena are conditioned. If I try to take any of these dependent conditions and assign a label to it, I should be aware that the label is already one abstraction above the actual phenomena. As such, it is liable to get distorted in some way, or to distort what is actually happening in the moment.
    Let me give you an example of what I mean. When I was crammed on the shuttle bus today on the way back home from the evening walk, I could very well have made the statement in my mind: "I hate this!" And that statement would seem true, but it is actually only a blanket label for what is otherwise a complex unfolding. If I hate something, do I hate all of it or just some of it? Is it so unbearable to stand on the bus that it is like standing on hot coals, or is it not so bad? By inquiring into the origins of this statement, I start to realize that hatred is not necessarily a state of mind as it is a label which exaggerates one's intolerance for certain environments or situations.
     What I notice, in fact, is that most of the things I state are only interjections, and not true descriptions of an unfolding experience.  Anyone who listens to conversations in public places will probably know this by heart: "Damn these French fries are terrible!" "This is unbearable!" "It sucks to be a student!" And so on. The words "terrible", "damn", "unbearable" and "sucks" are not necessarily descriptive at all but seem to be expressions of an emotional state that can't even be labelled or described, other than as vexation or frustration. So it seems that the more extreme the emotion is, the more I begin to wonder whether it can be described or not. Is 'hatred', after all, really an emotion or even a quality of experience, or is it nothing more than a very extreme form of anger or agitation? One thing I can be clear about is that hatred is not always what a person truly means when they say "I hate". A lot of times, what they are really saying is that in that moment, anger is arising of a very extreme kind.
       Conversely, if I don't connect the word 'hatred' to an experience, it begins to unfold much more naturally. This is because the word 'hatred' creates an emotional distance of disgust or rejection around an object: saying "I hate--" can simply be a way of putting up a screen word to dissociate from one's real feelings, which often include feelings of unhappiness, vulnerability and fear.
     To go back to Santideva: I don't think he is even necessarily urging his audience to 'hate hatred' so much as he is pointing out the relativity of all phenomena. No single phenomena can be said to be the sole cause of others, so in a sense there is no object of hatred out there whatsoever. Even when someone seems to get on our nerves, that person never exists in her or his own right, but is always in part the result of interactive conditions. So, if one gets this idea, one does not need to root out hatred and (ironically), "hate hatred". Rather, it could be a matter of just realizing the empty nature of language, seeing in particular that our words never determine situations at all. At best, words point to determinants in an outcome, but they can never assign full blame to one single cause.