It has been said, and I apologize for not knowing exactly by whom-and
I'm paraphrasing here-that no American has more freedom than the least
free among us. The concept is clearly that if rights and freedom
can be
denied to any, they can clearly be denied to all with no greater effort.
This is why us "libruls" complain so loudly about "terrasts" being confined
without counsel, or any other right that has, until recently, defined our
most
basic freedoms. But "swarthy people," as Ann Coulter might define
them,
are certainly not the first in America to become the weather vane for what
purely may happen to the rest of us. Us good white folk have continually
attempted to limit our freedoms by denying them to everyone else.
Black, brown, yellow, and red have never been good enough colors for our
beige rainbow. Frequently beige isn't good enough either. We've
disenfranchised
Irish, Catholics, and Jews in our attempts at equal opportunity bigotry.
And to
recognize this simple fact is to be labeled a "blame America firster."
Who exactly should one blame for this failing? It's certainly not
Osama's doing.
The flaw is removed by eliminating it, and doing what is right. It
is not done by
ignoring the issue, or attempting to "color" it, if you will, in gentler
terms. Racism
and other forms of bigotry are wrong, they are always wrong, and they can
never
be made right. This is the one unqualified truth of which I am quite
certain. There
are absolutely no shades of gray in the moral principle, only in the understanding.
When we choose national representatives with racist views, who speak racist
words,
we must recognize those "leaders" as being incompetent governors of America's
particular melting pot.
Strom Thurmond's fifty odd years of government service is never to be celebrated,
but forever questioned. That is not to say that Thurmond never performed
a laudable
task, but whatever positives there are must always be balanced against
the destruction
that he most certainly caused. And even more certainly, the racism
must never be
excused nor minimized.
Trent Lott is a Bigot with a capital "B." He has always been thus,
and thus he will
always be. When he told us that America should have followed the
lead of Mississippi,
and voted for a racist man, representing a racist party, on top of a racist
platform, so
that we could have avoided "all of these problems over all of these years,"
he screamed
out upon the mountain top that he (Lott) was not qualified to serve in
a position of national
leadership. When Tom Daschle takes occasion to apologize for this
national disgrace,
he minimizes the valiant struggles of countless civil rights leaders in
his own party for the
sake of courting the racist vote. I would encourage Mr. Daschle to
resign his national
post, because he is simply not principled enough to lead the Democratic
party.
As for the rest of us, we cannot afford to edit Strom Thurmond's language.
As August
Strindberg once wrote, "There are poisons that close the eyes, and poisons
that open them;
I must have been born with the latter kind in my veins, because I cannot
see what is evil
as good, and I cannot see what is ugly as beautiful."
Many have reported that Strom Thurmond said this fifty-four years ago:
"All the laws of
Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into
our homes,
our schools, our churches." This, my friends, is another pretty lie.
Strom Thurmond
vocalized the Dixiecrat platform in this manner: "Ladies and gentlemen,
there's not enough
troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation
and admit the
nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes
and into our churches."
When Strom Thurmond spoke of a vision for America, that is what he said.
Revere
Thurmond's career if you are so inclined, but do not make excuses for it,
because there
simply are none. For my money, Strom Thurmond retired fifty-four
years late,
and Trent Lott's retirement is long overdue.