It’s the ones who don’t wear the sheets whom we ought to be fearful of

It doesn’t surprise me to learn that many political people being “outed,” so to speak, as members of Ku Klux Klan-like white supremacist groups are quick to deny such involvement.

Back in the 1920s when the klan was (almost) politically respectable

The reality is that the klan of old is no more. There are many knuckleheads who go about donning the white robes and hoods and using the imagery of the klan – including the lit crosses that technically are a symbol of Christianity – while expressing their racial hang-ups about anybody who isn’t exactly like themselves. Modern-day public klan spectacles (such as a prayer for God to hit the Earth with a plague to wipe out all non-white people) are too buffoonish to take seriously.

SO TO LEARN that a group calling itself Anonymous is using the Internet to anonymously identify political people who are affiliated with the klan is something we ought to be fearful of.

Largely because I’d question the validity of any information they actually have.

In theory, I get the idea that we ought to know which government officials (the people whom we the voters were stupid enough to elect) are tied to white supremacist groups.

I just don’t trust the ability of those anonymous types to accurately be able to say who has ties to such groups, or even to identify which groups deserve to be thought of as klan – and which ones are just a batch of drunken meatheads.

WE PROBABLY WILL wind up getting at least a few people wrongly identified as being “klan,” which has the potential to be a devastating label to tag onto someone.

More fearful, there probably will be people with political ties who are white supremacist at heart who will get overlooked by this list.

Will they then think they have been cleared, or absolved, of any hang-ups they may have that do influence the way they go about dictating public policy? That would be the real shame.

They would probably think the fact that they’re not on the list means that everything is hunky-dory about their ignorance, and that the rest of us have to put up with it.

NOW I KNOW my history enough to accept that there have been political people who were part of that terrorist organization whose purpose was to ensure that black people remained in a position of subservience within our society.

They probably did wear the robes and hoods while partaking in the cross-lighting rituals that the group thinks adds a credence to their hateful rhetoric.

So I’m not interested in hearing of lists of decades old politicos who had their klan ties.

I’m interested in the here and now. And quite frankly, I don’t care about anyone who is interested in being anonymous – in part because I’m a writer who always puts my name on any copy I create.

ANONYMITY IS THE ruse of those people interested in merely stirring up trouble without wanting to put in the work to back up their rants. I consider this particular group’s efforts to be as credible as the anonymous railings of the conservative ideologues who spout out trash talk that isn’t all that far removed from official klan-speak.

Besides, I have no doubt that many of those people who try to pass themselves off as respectable people in our society don’t go about wearing the klan robes and hoods – even if their attitudes border on being equally despicable.

There are even people who go about in fairly expensive suits whose hang-ups ought to qualify them for the klan robe that perhaps their grandparents might have considered wearing.

Those people are the ones who really scare me because of the fact that they think the passage of time has somehow made their views respectable.

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