Has Chicago become an island of sanity in “red” sea of bigoted nonsense?

My initial reaction to the Election Night results across the nation were to feel fortunate that Illinois, with Chicago in particular, had proved to be a bastion of sanity.

There's a reason we now flip the "bird" at this building

While the bulk of the nation seems to have gone goofy over the notion of Donald J. Trump capable of being in charge, it would appear that we have maintained a bit of sense. Or we’re not caught up in the stupidity prevailing elsewhere.

THAT ATTITUDE GOT reinforced after I stumbled my way Wednesday through the nation’s news reports, what with the attitudes of bigotry being on the rise seeming somewhat scary. I feel fortunate that we don’t have things as blatant in Chicago as in elsewhere.

And before you snicker at my naivete, I know full well the history of Chicago (it was here that Martin Luther King, Jr., got hit in the head with a brick) and the attitudes that still prevail. I know full well there are those parts of the city where certain types of people ought not seriously think of entering – unless they’re looking to provoke an outburst!

The report that most intrigued me was a Washington Post report about the situation in Whitefish, Mont. It seems that the mother of a prominent white supremacist activist/writer has opened a business there, has white supremacist activists taking her up as their pet cause!

The activists are upset that many local residents of Whitefish don’t like having her around and would prefer she get lost! As in leave, sell her property, and donate a chunk of the proceeds from the sale to a civil rights organization of their choosing.

Wishing they could be spared nonsense

ALL OF WHICH has neo-Nazi activists inclined to want to go to Whitefish to engage in protests on behalf of the mother – whom it seems doesn’t really know much about her son’s activities and isn’t really the kind of person who’d naturally be connected to these Nutzis.

The situation has become so heated that Montana’s governor and attorney general, along with senators and representative, have all signed a letter expressing their support for the locals – and against any white supremacist activity deciding to use their state as the site of their efforts to assert their control over the situation.

I’m old enough to remember when would-be Nazis wanted to march in Skokie and know at heart that they really weren’t interested in expressing any view – it was about intimidation.

It was all about intimidation, not expression, back in '77 in Skokie

They wanted to wear their swastika armbands and get up close to those older residents who had come to this country in the years following the German Holocaust. As though implying that the day would come when they’d be back in a death camp – and this time, they wouldn’t come out alive!

NOT THAT THESE nitwits would have ever been capable of pulling this off. Just as I doubt that these crackpots wanting to visit Whitefish would really be capable of forcing themselves on the local residents – whom it seems don’t want their town to carry a racist taint.

Which is what some of these activists now carry considering that they feel emboldened by the presidential victory of Donald J. Trump – whom no matter how much he says otherwise got elected through their political support. For Trump to deny the fact comes across as ridiculous as those neo-Nazi types who try denying that Jewish people were harassed back in the Germany of the 1930s.

Then, there are the ongoing legal proceedings concerning Dylann Roof. He’s that South Carolina punk who thinks he showed how much of a man he really is by walking into a black-oriented church and opening fire – killing nine.

Roof has been found guilty and could face the death penalty. Prosecutors already have their list of witnesses they want to call to try to persuade jurors to grant a death sentence.

ROOF: Sees self as hero. Will anyone else?

BY COMPARISON, ROOF said in court Wednesday he’s not planning to call anybody to defend himself. Although he does want to make a statement in court.

Likely to be some self-righteous bit of nonsense he’ll spew about the propriety of his actions. In his own mind, he’s a revolutionary who was taking action to fight for the same cause that was advanced with Trump’s political victory.

For all we know, he’ll go to his death strapped to the gurney with the lethal injection going into his veins – thinking that history will remember him heroically.

Which may be the most tragic part of the Trump political victory – is that it reinforces the nonsense these kind of people like to spew about our society. And that while not every person who backed Trump with their vote can be classified as “racist,” it can be said that they’re willing to look the other way at the repulsiveness of the people whose side they’re now on!

  -30-

Will dumping the Confederate battle flag really change anybody’s attitude?

What should we think of the fact that many people are stepping up the rhetoric these days following the shooting deaths of nine black people at a Charleston, S.C., church to dump the old Confederate battle flag?

For only $59 (plus $6.95 shipping), you can pretend to honor the South

There long have been those who argue the Southern cross flag of the Confederate armies is merely about “heritage,” the notion of a flag that depicts pride amongst those who grew up in that part of the region that once tried to break itself away from the United States.

BUT IT WAS pointed out that when South Carolina state officials last week had the flags at the Statehouse lowered to half-mast out of respect for the dead, the battle flag flying over a nearby Confederate soldier memorial still flew high and proud!

I have heard the official explanation that the flag was incapable of being lowered without someone physically climbing to the top of the flag pole and removing it by hand.

But I really wouldn’t have cared if a battle flag had also been lowered to half-mast. Its very presence some 150 years after the attempt at creating a new nation based on using state’s rights to justify slavery and segregation is what is offensive.

Which is why there are those who are hoping that South Carolina state Rep. Norman “Doug” Brannon, R-Spartanburg, is successful with his rhetoric that he will push for changes in state law to remove the battle flag from having a presence in the state that thinks it’s a point of pride that it provoked the Civil War.

NOT THAT I think it matters much. The kind of people with the racial hang-ups so intense that they’re willing to take up arms are going to keep that symbol no matter what anyone else says.
 

Take Dylann Roof, the barely-a-man who last week went into that black-oriented church and decided to kill a few people – but not all because he wanted witnesses as to his act of what he thinks is manliness (even though I wonder if that girlish haircut of his will make him a prime target in prison).

His Internet-published manifesto that has since been deleted included the photographs of himself waving Confederate battle flags and wearing a jacket depicting emblems of the apartheid-era South Africa and its neighboring nation of Rhodesia  (both of which tried to exist as white-only nations with European roots in portions of the planet where native Africans ought to have been the majority).

Now known as Zimbabwe to those of us who live in the real world.

Do you really want to see someone wear this?

THEN AGAIN, PEOPLE like Roof don’t live in our world. They live in their own world, and think the rest of us ought to have to live there with them. In a legally-mandated subservient position, of course.

So it really doesn’t matter if the symbols get banned. The crackpots amongst us will still feel the same way. Their real punishment is that they’re forced to live in our world – where they amount to a batch of nobodies.

Heck, the swastika of Nazi-era Germany has been an illegal symbol in Deutschland since the end of World War II, yet those Germans who still fantasize about the resurrection of the “Third Reich” are able to get them symbols – usually made right here in the U.S.A.

Insofar as Confederate symbols, we have generations of southerners who were taught a take on the Civil War (the War for Southern Independence, the Second American Revolution, the War Against Northern Aggression, to name a few) that totally justifies the idea that continued use of the battle flag has nothing to do with showing hostility toward the idea of black people being people just like anybody else.

THAT’S NOT GOING to go away any time soon. Knuckleheads will be knuckleheads, no matter what!

If anything, we need a better education process so that people realize what the Southern Cross truly stands for. Because it will only be when people recognize for themselves how tacky a symbol it is that people will relegate it to the dustbin of history.

And how President Barack Obama’s suggestion of retiring the battle flag to a museum (just like the Smithsonian Institute has Ku Klux Klan robes on display as physical evidence of this nation’s racist past) could someday become a reality.

  -30-
 

EDITOR’S NOTE: My own experience with the Confederate battle flag was spending one year attending a high school where the sports teams were “the Rebels” and the flag flew over the school’s football field – along with being painted onto the basketball court. I remember thinking of it as being a silly symbol; one that has since been retired. Of course, I later transferred to a high school where the symbol was a generic Indian chief (think the University of Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek without the pretentious talk of it being an “honored symbol”). I wonder at times which symbol was more ridiculous.