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How To Avoid A Harvest Of Hatred
oo many disheartening
things have happened in the past 30 days in America and throughout the world.
Hate groups have marched, attacked and killed people marching against hate in America and the display of Confederate statues and other symbols of hate.
Unlike the protests and marches of the 1960s, protes- tors are not “turning the other cheek,” but instead are recip- rocating attacks with “an eye for an eye” attitude, which ren- ders everybody blind and hopeless.
However, that there are so many whites marching against hate and the Confederate sym- bols (which represent slavery, hate, rape, murder, mutilation for Black Americans) gives hope that America is changing, indeed.
The murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Vir- ginia, during the protest against hate on August 12th by a white nationalist who plowed his car into a group of counter-protestors shook many of us to the core.
Forme,Ihadasenseof deja vu and thought about the death of Viola Liuzzo in March, 1965 during the Civil Rights era. Liuzzo was a Uni- tarian Universalist Civil Rights activist, mother of 5 children, and housewife who traveled from Detroit, Michigan to
Selma, Alabama to participate in the Selma to Montgomery marches.
She was murdered by a gunshot from a car that was filled with Ku Klux Klansmen, as well as a Federal Bureau of Investigation undercover agent on March 25th. Her life of growing up in abject poverty and friendship with a Black woman led to Liuzzo’s in- volvement in the Civil Rights movement.
Suddenly, it was 1960 for me and a gripping sadness overshadowed President (Donald) Trump’s weak statements against hate groups and the “beauty” of Confederate symbols in Amer- ica. Citing an attack on South- ern culture, Trump said that it was “sad to see the history and culture of our great coun- try being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful stat- ues and monuments.”
Listening to the words of an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated white hate groups explain that the words “South- ern Culture” is code for “white European culture,” I could not help but remember the words of President Trump.
If Confederate history and culture represents the United States, then we must also em- brace the symbols represent- ing that history and culture – symbols that Confederate General Robert E. Lee
himself rebuked.
He was quoted as saying “I
think it wiser not to keep opening the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Indeed, Jonathan Horn, the author of General Robert E. Lee’s biography, stated that “Lee believed countries that erased visible signs of civil war recovered from conflicts quicker . . . he was worried that by keeping these symbols alive, it would keep the division alive.”
When considering the Nazi symbols in Germany, one Southern Poverty Law Center expert called attention to the power of symbols. “It’s impor- tant to not to underestimate the use in a single image to convey a world of informa- tion.”
The director of the Ameri- can Jewish Committee, Dei- dre Berger, said it best when she responded to an interview about Nazi hate symbols and slavery hate symbols. She stated, “The symbols of the Holocaust and of slavery both represent intense hatred. They’re symbols of a way of life that is completely unaccept- able ...Germans realized the only way to again become a valid nation was to eliminate the symbols. Banning them was appropriate. Americans made a different choice with the symbols of Confederacy . . . the symbols serve as a rally- ing point for all hate groups.”
Thus, it is time to eliminate all symbols of hatred and divi- sion from this planet. If not, our generation of children liv- ing in the year 2217 will be confronted by those same symbols.
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C. Blythe Andrews 1901-1977 (1945)
C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. 1930-2010 (1977)
America: Love Is Labors’ Lost
merica: Love Is Labors’ Lost . . . Are we referring
to an Americanized rendition of a Shakespearean comedy? No, not this time.
This reality show began in Jamestown, Virginia dur- ing the year 1619 when a Dutch slave ship dropped an- chor because it was low on supplies and even lower on monies to buy what it needed.
The one thing it had was indentured servants, white as well as Black, and 20 Black slaves. So, a deal was struck. A certain amount of indentured servants, as well as, West African slaves were traded for goods.
Which led to the torturous opening act, where pre- dominately American-English landowners used the idea of indentured servitude as a promise to impover- ished whites immigrant, that they one day would over- come their poverty off the backs of the Black people enslaved-for-life.
America would grow . . . bending the backs and shedding the blood of Native Americans as well as the co-opting land of Latin-Hispanics to the West, South- west, and Midwest. One-by-one, what was once a free- dom of forests, mountains, and plains with wide rivers snaking southward would evolve into a behemoth na- tion that to the North, hummed like a billion iron-clad bee hives, and to the South, cotton fields resembled the aftermath of a thousand acre snow storm.
A savage civil war would follow, and all for the glory of the great fever called American Labor.
Yes, the Church is our religion. But Labor is our god. So, as this country celebrates the 17th year of a 21st Cen- tury Labor Day, we pause to pay homage to our ances- tors, who labored and built this land with their shackled blood and sweat.
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