By Mickey Friedman
November 18, 2018
These last few weeks have brought it all back. The President’s mockery of low-I.Q. Maxine Waters, his constant lies about the “evil” and “bad’ Democrats, his and FOX-not-really-the-news demonization of the poor men, women and children of Latin America trekking sixteen hundred miles to the U.S. border. The caravan. The non-existent Muslim terrorists, MS-13 gang members, bringing cynically manufactured leprosy and smallpox not seen in the world for decades to every American community. Say caravan a thousand times and it will never really threaten you. Now punishing up to 15,000 servicemen and women who could celebrating the holidays with families by sending them south to a manufactured crisis. Telling them to fire live rounds at potential rock-throwers.
Trumpian attacks on “globalists” (the latest code-word for Jews like George Soros) and his proud embrace of “nationalist.” While FOX misperceived his affection for this toxic ideology, David Duke, the Klansman, knew exactly what it signaled, tweeting: “Trump Embraces Nationalism in a Massive JamPacked 99.8% White Venue in Houston! Zio Journalists asked him if this is White Nationalism! Of course fundamentally it is as, there is no ehnic or racial group in America more Nationalist than White Americans … So What’s the Problem?”
Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy echoed his President with his own anti-Semitic tweet: “We cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to BUY this election. Get out and vote Republican November 6th. #MAGA.” Some staff member must have alerted McCarthy that his tweet was ill-timed considering Soros had just received a pipe bomb. So the tweet evaporated. But his despicable resort to hate remains part of the permanent record. Hopefully someone will devote his or her life to defeating him next election.
Hate festers and burns. A cancer, it destroys the impulse to trust, obliterates the benefit of the doubt. Replacing empathy with suspicion, sympathy with cynicism. How did Buffalo Springfield put it: “Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid.” Afraid of the black man who’s creating a community garden down the block. Afraid of the Mexicans whose hard work keeps America’s dairy farms alive and many of America’s restaurants running.
Pipe bomber’s list as long as President Trump’s rally targets. His white van a portable gallery of madness. With the Synagogue mass murderer, both men a monument to the Second Amendment gone bonkers for all to see, so many targets in the crosshairs. Did you think they were kidding? Was Donald Trump kidding when he encouraged his adoring supporters to beat up protestors? Praising that punk-ass Colorado Congressman for body slamming an unsuspecting reporter?
In Kentucky, unable to get into a black church, a white racist murdered two random black Americans: Maurice Stallard, a 69-yr-old military veteran and retired GE employee, and Vickie Lee Jones, 67, who retired from working at a VA hospital.
Don’t blame the President, Sarah Hunckabee Sanders tells us. Because his son-in-law’s a Jew; and his daughter converted. He’s never met these lunatics. But the bully or bigot with power has always accommodated the occasional offending son-in-law or black associate.
Not surprisingly, I’ve found myself reliving the hatred of my younger years. I remember Birmingham, Alabama.
The men in power never place the bombs; they empower the bombers. Faced with a black voter registration drive Governor George Wallace declared that to prevent integration Alabama needed “a few first class funerals.” A week later, on Sunday, September 15, 1963, the Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The bomb killed Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14) who were attending Sunday school classes at the church and wounded twenty-three others people.
Most people remember Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” from the 1963 March on Washington but I was a member of SNCC and remember what John Lewis, one the founders said on that day: “We will not stop … We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.
“By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of God and democracy.”
And so black and white, despite the beatings, deaths, and police dogs, fought to overcome. And we drove hatred and racism from the halls of power down below the surface. And the bigots learned to whisper their hatreds; and when they slipped, men and women of good will were quick to condemn and censure. And hate for a while at least was banished from the public square.
But the beast has risen. It’s time to march with the spirit of love.
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“The Beast Has Risen” was first published in The Berkshire Record on November 8, 2018.
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