There Are Not Many Sides, There Is Evil And Then There Is Heroism…

Amidst the hate and uncer­tain­ty grip­ping the United States of America, in the haze of the shock some feel at the rhetoric com­ing from places once looked to for moral lead­er­ship there is hope, there is a faint light at the end the tunnel.

Thiry two (32) year old Heather Heyer was mowed down by a white Supremacist ter­ror­ist using ISIS tactics.
Family and friends speak to the good­ness in the heart of this young lady. Friends say one of the last things she post­ed on her social media page were the words “If you’re not out­raged you’re not pay­ing atten­tion.”

Those words res­onate, rever­ber­at­ing through the tun­nels of America’s tor­tured racial past.
If we say noth­ing when evil rear its ugly head we are all com­plic­it in its expansion.
Today it’s our neigh­bor, tomor­row it may be us.

The Germans were not all evil racist Nazis dur­ing the rise of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich, but they all saw Hitler and his hench­men demo­nize an entire group of peo­ple and they remained silent, They saw an entire group of peo­ple blamed for the ills of Germany and they said nothing.
Just over two years ago we heard the very same rhetoric about Mexicans, Muslims, Blacks and every­one who dared to stand up and demand their humanity.

We saw a Federal judge demeaned, a brave and valiant phys­i­cal­ly-chal­lenged Journalist mocked, we saw women reduced to instru­ments of objec­ti­fi­ca­tion, we heard from a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date that in times gone by peo­ple of col­or who dared to speak out would be tak­en out on stretch­ers, we heard juiced up throngs of white men told to knock the hell out of those oth­er peo­ple, we heard that their legal fees would be paid.
We saw and heard much more yet despite it all America elect­ed Donald J Trump President.

In the end, so too did the German peo­ple elect Adolph Hitler Chancellor of Germany, a move which even­tu­al­ly guar­an­teed the extinc­tion of over six mil­lion Jewish lives and the loss of over 60 mil­lion more as it took the entire civ­i­lized world to come togeth­er to extin­guish the evil of Nazism.
Leading that march were Americans, many of whom lost their lives fight­ing against that malig­nant evil.
It’s time once more for America to take a stand against big­otry, hatred, and divisiveness.

For hun­dreds of years, African Americans have borne the brunt of the bit­ter pill of Slavery, Jim Crow, and the prison Industrial complex.
They com­plain about the dis­par­i­ties in polic­ing and the dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of blacks being killed and incar­cer­at­ed across the country.
They march and hold hands, they pray and preach about the dis­pro­por­tion­ate sen­tences being met­ed out in the courts based on race.
In Housing, traf­fic stops, in health care, and just about every sin­gle thread of nation­al life sys­temic racism lives.
Yet the vast major­i­ty of white America is untrou­bled by it.

Jobs do not end racism as Donald Trump main­tains, it sim­ply places it on the back burn­er until the next eco­nom­ic downturn.
The prac­tice of blam­ing immi­grants for America’s ills did not begin with Trump it has always been the default posi­tion of the American right.
For years the FBI has warned that neo Nazi’s were infil­trat­ing police depart­ments. We have seen the result of those infil­tra­tions despite the nation’s reluc­tance to address them.

Racism did­n’t start with Trump, let us not for­get that under the Nation’s first black pres­i­dent Barack Obama the num­ber of hate groups in the nation increased exponentially.
We should nev­er for­get that no pres­i­dent in his­to­ry received the num­ber of death threats Barack Obama received.
Let us not for­get the rise of the T‑Party move­ment, a move­ment Donald Trump and Sarah Palin gave life and legit­i­ma­cy to.
Let us remem­ber that Donald Trump was one of the archi­tects and Chief pur­vey­or of the birther move­ment against President Barack Obama.

America’s nation­al life is not char­ac­ter­ized by the sin­gu­lar issue of Jobs.
People need jobs, health-care, hous­ing, edu­ca­tion, food and clean drink­ing water, clean air to breathe, safe­ty and secu­ri­ty, and much more.
So when you hear that all we have to do is bring back jobs sim­ply tell them that Obama already laid the foun­da­tion for that.
Tell them that under Barack Hussein Obama America expe­ri­enced its longest peri­od of job’s growth in 75 years.

According to Politico, The econ­o­my added jobs for 75 straight months, the longest streak since 1939, and a grand total of 11.5 mil­lion jobs created.
The actu­al num­ber is clos­er to 15 mil­lion With Obama hav­ing inher­it­ed an econ­o­my which had tanked and was the worst econ­o­my since the great depression.
At this defin­ing moment, America can no longer look to the side out of dis­in­ter­est. There are no, “those peo­ple any­more”. It’s not hap­pen­ing to just those trou­ble­mak­ers as civ­il rights activists were labeled by George Wallace, Bull O’Connor and oth­ers in the 60’s.
“Trou­ble­mak­ers” a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion Donald Trump uses to describe moral­ly con­scious peo­ple who stood up to Nazism, white Supremacist, Alt-Right Nationalists, and Fascists.

In the same way, ISIS killers use vehi­cles to mow down and kill inno­cent peo­ple so too did James Alex Fields, Jr. kill Heather Heyer in an unques­tioned act of white suprema­cist domes­tic terrorism.
There is no equiv­a­lence between ide­o­logues who preach hate and take inno­cent lives and those who stand up to them.
If you fail to under­stand the moral dif­fer­ence between the two points you are on the side of the ideologues.There is no ambi­gu­i­ty, no gray area it’s as dis­tin­guish­able as black and white.

Americans gave their lives on the beach­es of Normandy to free the world from the scourge of Nazism dur­ing WW11, so too will it have to look inside in intro­spect­ing. “There are no those peo­ple any­more”, the peo­ple dying now look like you, they are you.