Friday, December 27, 2013

A suburban Christmas w/ the Klan?

White supremacist stuff is almost laughable. On the face of it, the materials they peddle come across as pathetic.

If not for canes, this Klan would be forgetable
One really has to have a depraved sensibility to find anything appealing about it.

WHICH IS WHY I have a hard time taking seriously the incident that occurred earlier this week in suburban Tinley Park, where the local police are investigating the distribution of a few fliers touting a group calling itself the Traditionalist American Knights.

As in a group that uses the imagery of the white robes and hoods of the Ku Klux Klan and tries to appeal to people who have their own irrational hang-ups about our society based on race.

It seems that five people living on a block in the southwestern Cook municipality reported having found fliers placed on their driveways in plastic bags – along with a candy cane.

How sweet. These racist nitwits who want to stir up fear kept in mind that it was the Week of Christmas. They gave a gift.

ON THE SURFACE, these people weren’t making a threat to the individuals who found the flier and candy. It seemed more to reassure people who live in the predominantly white (but also very ethnic) community that someone would sympathize if they’re the types who believe that all these Muslims who are moving into the southwest suburbs are somehow a threat.

The police may well be handling this incident properly. The candy canes have been collected as evidence, in the event that some sort of serious racial supremacist activity does develop in the suburb.

For now, it’s someone with a depraved sensibility leaving a candy cane. In and of itself, it’s not a crime.
Would these people have used candy canes?

But it’s the kind of thing that ought to have authorities concerned that criminal activity can develop. Although it seems that in Tinley Park, officials are less concerned with the Klan than the “16 and Pregnant” program of M-TV setting foot in town.

BECAUSE I’LL BE the first to admit the Klan, or the groups that use its imagery, aren’t anywhere near as organized as they’d like us to believe. The Klan of old that was fully-worthy of the label of “terrorist organization” is dead.

Instead, we have half-wits who try to reinforce their hang-ups by using the old imagery – as though they think everyone will cower in fear at their hooded presence. Instead of merely causing us to snicker at how pathetic they truly are.

I doubt this group, whatever its membership actually consists of, even bothers to wear the hoods and robes of old. They’re probably like a group of people I once encountered at a hot dog stand on the Northwest Side who were talking amongst each other about how to properly erect a cross so as to try to intimidate someone.

As far as I know, that cross was never erected in the neighborhood. It likely was a few meatheads blowing off some verbal steam.

NOW THAT WE have a candy cane chapter of the Klan (how else can we think of this latest group), it seems even more lame and laughable.

There always will be a few people who turn to the image of the hood or the swastika to try to reinforce their thoughts that it’s everybody else’s fault that they’re at the bottom of our society.

And that if things were just, someone else would rank below them. Which never will occur.

If anything, I have always sided with those civil rights activists who say that in the modern era, the bigots we ought to be concerned about are those who don’t wear sheets.

AS IN THOSE people who actually work their way into legitimate positions of power and authority – then use them to reinforce their racist thoughts.

I fear a government official or police officer with a racial attitude more than I ever will fear some clown in a hood who wants to idealize the nitwits who resorted to terrorist tactics to try to keep black people “in their place.”

  -30-

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