Good people will fight bigotry - and win

We don’t want to believe it. We ignore it. We avert our eyes when we witness the brutal, unyielding evidence of it. And we should have seen this coming. While we spent eight years witnessing the glorious improbability that was the Barack Obama presidency, seeing black Americans come as close as possible to superficial parity in the affairs of this nation, white people, not all of them, but much, much more than a few, got mad. The anger had many delivery systems.

There was a rise in the militia movement. Then the Tea Party movement. Then the birther movement. These things had their genesis in the same premise: that a black man as president is an affront to the natural order of political things, that it, by definition, is evidence of the moral and social decay and impureness of America.

Charlottesville is the pure, unfiltered version of it. It's the part of the story where a sitting American president, in a press conference, elevates white supremacy, nationalism and racial hatred to the level of equality, virtue and racial reconciliation.

It’s when Robert E. Lee is tangentially connected to George Washington, even though a more apt comparison is one with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.

If we are going down the rabbit hole, we need to go all the way to understand what is truly underway in this country right now. The Confederacy was much more like Nazi Germany than a collection of mint julep sipping Southern revolutionaries. They both believed in racial superiority of whites over other races. They believed in conquest of foreign lands to meet those ends. Millions died as a result of both. They both had to be destroyed militarily.

Seventy and 150 years later, respectively, we have to decide what we are. Are we a nation that recoils backward in violence and adolescent anger every time a white person feels uncomfortable at being revealed as a bigot? Are we a country that has relegated empathy; fairness; truth; logic; harmony; hard work; suffering for a higher purpose; love; faith; and charity to the dust bin of history because white people have to settle for most instead of all?

Will we actually look with similitude at organizations that fight for the exaltation of mankind with those who debased the very same human beings? And how long are we gonna have to put up with those whose spiritual and ethical flirtation with Nazis and Confederates cause us pain? Because at some point the good people, sick of piety, sick of waiting for the political smelling salts of good sense to kick in, will fight back with the most righteous of anger. And we have never lost a war.

This story was originally published September 24, 2017 at 5:03 PM with the headline "Good people will fight bigotry - and win."