READERS WRITE: Election and race

We all must deal with consequences of racial hatred

I just returned from participating in the state fair in Perry. Pulling the horses back home, I had to spend a few moments in a truck stop restroom. The walls were covered with graffiti reading “Obama must die.” I am compelled by a sense of obligation to community to write a public response.

Continuing home, I listened over the radio to pundits dissect and spin the words of U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Atlanta:

“What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse. George Wallace never threw a bomb, he never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights.”

I share Lewis’ fear that our modern Pandora, in the person of a naive and ambitious Gov. Sarah Palin, has already opened the box, released and legitimized the restless, envious, angry bile that has lurked for so long in a subset of the American electorate and has for so long been a stereotype of the old South.

Who can predict where this leads? No matter who wins next month, the gates of racial hatred have been flung wide in the name of political expediency, and all of us will have to deal with the consequences.

Dr. ROBERT WALLACE MALONE

Jasper

Civil rights icon destroying legacy by advocating politics of hate

U.S. Rep. John Lewis is slowly but surely destroying his pioneer civil rights legacy with his blatant racist attacks on political candidates. His equating John McCain to Gov. Wallace (“Lewis likens GOP rhetoric to hostility of Wallace,” News, Oct. 12) is no better than his attack on a Republican candidate for Fulton County Commission when he said: “If you think fighting off dogs and water hoses in the ’60s was bad, imagine if we sit idly by and let the right-wing Republicans take control of the Fulton County Commission.”

Lewis continues to use the same tactics that he has decried for many years. While both the McCain and Barack Obama campaigns need to tone down their rhetoric, whether one is Republican or Democrat, black or white, it is sad to see a civil rights icon turn to the politics of hate when it is politically expedient.

BOB MEYERS

Milton

Shame on Lewis’ racist remarks about McCain

I am appalled at the racist remarks made by John Lewis. When all else fails he resorts to “racism.” You may not be a fan of John McCain but there is no way that he can be classified as a racist.

Lewis’s idol, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., once said he longed for the day that a man was not judged by the color of his skin. Lewis must have been asleep during that part of the speech. He speaks racist dialogue each time nothing else seems to be working.

Racism will live forever as long as there are John Lewises around. Shame on him. The Rev. King would be embarrassed of him and his “George Wallace” comment.

RICH ZOLECKI

Lawrenceville