America’s current, crazed embrace of “us” versus “to hell with ‘them’ ” is, predictably, getting people killed. The homicide last weekend in Charlottesville being the latest example.
We should long ago have had enough of a corrosive mindset that too-often flashes over into bigotry, violence and destruction. Alas, the intoxicating rush from fanning nascent wrong — if not evil — into flame seems as addictive and deadly as today’s opioid abuse.
The body count from our current uncivil upheavals will never cease its rise until people of goodwill open their eyes and act. The first step is the hardest — looking critically at this injured society and then into our own mirrors. Then should come questions: How are we each culpable? What vast hole swallowed empathy, or our ability to actively listen to each other?
At least as much should be expected of our leaders. Some have stepped up, more or less, in condemning the Charlottesville ruckus and the prejudices that ignited it. Such sentiment is not universal.
Others wearing large or small mantles of leadership have offered only the weakness of their silence. Or, worse, further sown seeds of discord, distraction and confusion.
The dying state of civic discourse in this nation should shame us all. And we should resolve to do better.
Only then we can scuttle a rusty and dangerous national juggernaut of venom and division. If we don’t, it will sink of its own deadweight, drowning the best hopes of our Republic along with it.
The shores we should instead seek are the ones America’s founders envisioned on the far horizon. It’s the landfall befitting a nation dedicated, however imperfectly, to the proposition that all people are created equal. An America courageous enough to squarely face its flaws or systemic wrongs, and move to address them.
We’re a long way from there now.
That is the shabby backdrop against which motley teams of white supremacists and leftist fascists traded blows, curses and threats last weekend.
It should have appalled freedom-cherishing Americans to see Nazi flags paraded belligerently in a quiet college town as Third Reich slogans and prejudiced slurs rang out.
Rioting is not the free expression enshrined in our hearts and the Constitution. The First Amendment does, however, protect the parading about of the Confederate Battle flag, however repugnant that is to many.
The controversial emblem is part of our history, like it or not. That said, it should not fly over government buildings more than 150 years after the vanquishing of a rebellious South. It is equally unacceptable that it should be entirely swept from public view.
Those who do not factually know and understand history are on track to repeat it. So, leave the Confederacy’s totems in accessible places where they can be interpreted and debated across time.
The unalterable fact is that the Confederacy and its embrace of human bondage for profit was battered rightly down to decisive defeat. It will not rise again, no matter how often white supremacists wave antiquated banners.
Last weekend’s uproar showed the dangers of mythologizing, sanitizing and whitewashing history.
It is equally perilous for America’s leaders to appease or, worse, slyly appeal to a dark, shrinking underbelly of American culture. In 1981, only a few months after a black man was lynched in Alabama by KKK members, President Ronald Reagan had the courage to address the NAACP convention.
He said, “I would like to address a few remarks to those groups who still adhere to senseless racism and religious prejudice. … I would say to them you are the ones who are out of step with our society … and this country, because of what it stands for, will not stand for your conduct.”
The Great Communicator was on point that day; his words can teach us still today. Post-Charlottesville, even some conservative leaders were strong in their condemnation of the prejudice that bared its fangs there.
By comparison, President Donald Trump’s wink-and-nod, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t criticism of the racism and anti-semitism seen at Charlottesville fell far short of an acceptable mark.
Unlike campaign hyperbole, or the scripted hair-pulling that is reality TV-style entertainment, real life carries flesh-and-blood consequences. Heather Heyer’s senseless death at Charlottesville proves that.
Leadership is about serving all, not just those in a single cheering corner of the American chorus.
We earnestly believe that law-abiding Americans have more in common than not – and that virtue and good are not confined to any single party, ethnicity, religion or creed.
A functional democracy demands that we re-learn that.
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