They were there, had we only looked: bigotry, prejudice, and
racism, the monsters of our psyche, writhing and slobbering like a den of 1950s
science fiction monsters.
They were not dead, as we had hoped and dreamed. They were not
even moribund. They were simply submerged, like Godzilla, or a giant spider,
just waiting to be freed by a shock of super-seismic proportions. What would it
take to release them upon an unsuspecting public?
It would take nothing more than the election of a president of the United
States born of a white mother and African father, the very model of a modern
African-American.
That’s all it took. The “monsters from the id,” as they
called them in the 1956 film, The
Forbidden Planet, took control of the minds of otherwise decent people.
Things changed overnight. Old friends began to greet you with, “How do you like
our n****r president?” Hatemongers on the internet devised the acronym “SOS” to
describe the elected leader of the United States of America. Photoshopped
images of watermelon patches on the White House lawn appeared on social media.
The man’s family members drew descriptions as “gorillas” or worse. Sentiments
and language that had been shoved to the bottom of our cultural sea and buried
were fashionable again. Hate groups flourished and became more emboldened, as
did hate media. A sense of shame settled over us.
Campaigning against candidates of the Democratic Party in
our state became simple. All one had to do was request it from East Coast PACs
and they would deliver boatloads of brochures, simple ones with just a photo of
their opponent facing a photo of President Obama. The stated message would be,
“he/she is with him.” The hidden message would be “the n****rs are coming for
your women and he/she is going to help them.” Mike Huckabee gloated publicly that the election of Barack Obama had handed the American South over completely to the Republican Party.
It worked like magic, even among citizens of our state who
are alive today, or whose family member is alive today, because of the President Obama’s efforts toward universal health
care. The illogic of that could make a well-person nauseated.
Our state will
suffer for decades, not because one politcal party is all bad or all good. The fact remains that bad politicians will be elected, and good ones defeated, because of the lingering effects of racism. Shame on us for that.
Now don’t get me wrong. I strongly support the rights of
Americans to vote for the candidates of their choice. I spent four years of my life under an oath to protect such rights. My only wish is that we
would all vote for candidates on the basis of the principles of good government,
as we see it, and not the principles of the KKK.
Meanwhile, can’t we work toward eliminating the monster born
of bigotry and racism? Unchallenged, it will destroy us as a unified nation as
surely as a giant lizard could destroy a city. The Galilean’s admonition for us
to “love one another” might be that best hope for us. As they used to say in the
aforementioned films of the 1950s: “It just might work!”
It becomes more obvious every day that such healing will not
come from the highest offices of government. It must begin at the citizen
level.
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| And let the people say, "Never again." |
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