Letters to the Editor (Aug. 22): Charlottesville

Don’t sit idly by as hate walks past

Marchers in Charlottesville baring Nazi tattoos and waving Nazi flags admire the history of the Nazi party. A neo-Nazi news website has already called the rally in Charlottesville “our Beer Hall Putsch,” referring to Adolf Hitler’s first attempt to seize power in Munich.

Since the 2016 election, a rallying cry for human-rights advocates has been, “This is not normal.” Yet for people of color and the LGBTQ community, these “abnormal” fears are nothing new. How must a Black mother panic every single time her son walks out the front door? I have not experienced that type of fear for my own children, but that doesn’t mean I can ignore it. Empathy is the gift that slaps you awake and keeps on slapping. The only way to turn it off is to die inside.

If I look away from the oppression, violence, and death affecting real people now, in 2017, then I would have looked away from mothers and babies getting shoved onto train cars in the 1930s. Resisting makes me uncomfortable and sweaty and increasingly afraid, and so I say, “This isn’t normal.” But it is absolutely normal for others, and that needs to change.

Quiet solidarity a better answer

Of course the white supremacists, KKK and neo-Nazis were totally responsible for the fiasco in Charlottesville, Va. The sight of these misguided groups carrying the torches, guns and clubs and reciting ugly slogans was chilling. However, they wanted an angry reaction. Tit-for-tat responses they understand.

These sad examples of humanity would have looked less macho and more ridiculous if huge lines of Americans had stood in quiet solidarity along the streets holding their anti-hate signs as the haters filed by.

Don’t engage with a rattlesnake

I detest and fear alt-right, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. I also fear rattlesnakes, and don’t believe we should let any of them do the damage to people they have the potential to do.

There are ways to deal with all of them without getting hurt needlessly. I would not purposely tease a rattlesnake just because I had a right to do it. Common sense tells me I might get bit. I would not confront or tease a Nazi in the street just because I had a right to do so. I would be getting down on his level, and just might get hurt.

There are more rational and legal ways to deal with these supremacists than confronting them in the streets. The nation is losing its common sense and civility. It seems every issue is being polarized and we are becoming more and more divided and violent. Are we going to keep it going until it leads to civil war?

What kind of country do we want to be?

A short comment in the Sunday Opinion Line sums up our national dilemma neatly by stating that white supremacists want to take their country back, and the writer didn’t realize it was their country — characterizing that there are two quite different concepts of “who we are.”

One is that we are a unique nation founded on, benefiting from and long adhering to fundamental principles of equal opportunity and justice for all, under God — with no special privileges or allowances as long as those principles are adhered to. The other is that we are, like all people, really citizens of the world and accept that any ideology, set of principles, way of life, or religion (or lack of one) is as good as another and can be incorporated within our boundaries and external relationships with no ill effects or outcomes, but to the benefit of the greater world.

Both sides are so sure of their righteousness that they will engage in violence in order to promote it.

This story was originally published August 22, 2017 at 4:48 AM with the headline "Letters to the Editor (Aug. 22): Charlottesville."