We The People need to develop a scorched earth policy toward
groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and their ilk. Yesterday (March 2) some misbegotten slug of
a man decided to express his First Amendment rights by donning his KKK cloak
and waving the Confederate Battle flag in the middle of Colonial Heights. Tsk,
tsk, I thought we had outgrown this kind of behavior, but apparently not.
The KKK in all its glory is an anathema. Its ideas and ideals are so far out there
that the very speaking of those letters is tantamount to calling in the boogey
man. And yet, the likes of this kind of
attention grabbing creep seems to continue.
There is no question that hate mongering societies, for lack of a better
term, exist. Witness the fliers that have at time mysteriously popped up in
driveways throughout Colonial Heights and other local areas in Chesterfield and
outlying counties.
I suppose those rolled up pieces of scrap paper were
intended to promote hate and try to gin up supporters. But really, how can
anyone support anything that promotes that kind of hate and prejudice? It doesn’t work for me, and it doesn’t work
for most of the people I know. Well, at least, most of the people I know who
are willing to discuss such behavior.
And yet it persists. I suspect there is no ridding one’s
self or one’s community of hate. It exists everywhere; we can only hope not to
promote it in our own lives. But then, there are those who fall in the other
side of that statement, the few, hopefully.
It’s alarming to see someone dolled up in their KKK garb
waving the Confederate Battle flag in broad daylight. Perhaps it was some kind
of initiation, you know, “You want to be a member of the Klan, then go out in
the middle of Colonial Heights, en ragalia, and wave the Confederate Battle
flag.”
It would be nice to think of this action simply as some kind
of hazing, like that associated with college fraternities or sororities. But
the sad truth is that it is much scarier than that. And perhaps it’s a bit of
my own naiveté brimming that I recall all too well the November 1979 incident
in Greensboro, NC, when about 40 members of the KKK and American Nazi Party
gunned down five people protesting in the “Death to the Klan” march meant to
organize industrial workers in the area.
Five Klansmen were charged with murder, but all were
acquitted in two criminal trials with all white jurors-a jury of the peers. A 1985 civil lawsuit against those five and
two Greensboro police officers fared better, winning a $350,000 judgment.
One would like to think that things have changed in 30-plus
years. But the kind of behavior exposed yesterday is a hint that perhaps they
have not.
Back in the days when I was local newspaper reporter, I
interviewed a former Grand Dragon of the KKK from Chesterfield. Yes, from
Chesterfield. During our conversation,
he said that he had retired from that lifestyle although he still held to the
belief that white people had rights, too. To him, at the time, living the Klan
life only bred hate. That leads to
getting bricks thrown through your front window, he told me.
It’s scary to me to think that someone would have the nerve
to appear in public like that.
Underneath it all, we know that such groups don’t really go away, but
they do diminish. They do become less prominent as We The People express our
own intolerance for such hatred.
I suppose it’s impossible to eradicate such beliefs. It
continues to live in many varied forms. Even such clamor about the Confederate
Battle flag seems to support this type of behavior. Heritage and not Hate… it’s getting hard to
separate the two anymore.
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