It’s Black History Month, and it has an anthem too many people don’t know

It’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the just-over-a century-old poem set to music that first was intended to be a tribute to the memory of Abraham Lincoln but later became known as the “Negro National Anthem” – then later the black anthem after “negro” fell out of fashion.

The reporter-type person in me often hears the tune sung as part of the program at any type of black-oriented rally I cover, and it is a sweet little tune about people rising above the status in life that some in society would just as soon see them limited to.

BUT IT ALSO is so isolated within our culture. Way too often, non-black people don’t have a clue about the song.

I once recall an editor many years ago that there was “no such song” as the black anthem. He certainly had never heard of it.

Of course, I was equally as clueless. Although I remember as a kid hearing that there was some sort of song considered to be a “black anthem,” the first time I ever heard the song was an instance many years ago at the Cook County Jail.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson was at the jail to give an inspirational talk to the inmates in hopes he could motivate them to get their lives straightened out and make something of themselves.

IT WAS QUITE a sense to be in a gymnasium within the jail and hear inmates singing along to the old gospel-inspired tune, although I don’t know how many of those inmates got the civil rights leader’s message and rehabilitated themselves.

It would be nice to think they did. But we’ll never know.

I most recently heard the tune (or at least a verse of it) this week when the Common Council of Gary, Ind., chose to start off their twice-monthly meeting Wednesday by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance – then singing the anthem.

'Anthem' started as part of Lincoln tribute

Considering that Gary has an overwhelming share of its population (84 percent) as African-American individuals, it shouldn’t be shocking. The ‘black anthem’ certainly wouldn’t be out of place.

ALTHOUGH I ALSO wonder in today’s overly-partisan political times how many people would think it somehow subversive that anybody would think to sing such a tune.

For all I know, the people who go around wearing those chintzy, red “Make America Great Again” caps are probably amongst those who try to deny that a ‘black anthem’ exists and that we’d all be better off forgetting there was ever a need for such a tune.

Particularly when one considers that several of the local government officials chose to wear African-inspired garb as part of a Black History Month tribute, I’m sure the site would have offended the sensibilities of some.

Mostly those whose political leanings are such that the real way to make this nation “Great Again” is to eliminate their very existence.

BUT I’M REALISTIC enough to know that such erasure from our society isn’t going to happen – and that the real advancement for the better is accepting the cultural differences that add a sense of variety to our masses.

Besides, the idea that the poem that inspired the tune was meant to be a part of the program of a Lincoln tribute is something that ought to motivate those of us in the “Land of Lincoln” to take the tune seriously.

It is a pleasant-enough melody that no one ought to be thinking of as an example of political subversion.

That is, unless you’re of the type who seriously venerates the memory of Jefferson Davis. In which case, you really do have some issues to confront about life.

  -30-

What about that cop just standing around, watching while doing nothing?

The offending “incident” is nearly a month old, yet people are continuing to get p-o’ed about it for various reasons. I’m referring to that woman at a Chicago-area forest preserve who had to put up with a drunken jerk who took offense to her t-shirt depicting the Puerto Rican flag and its colors.

The idea that there’s a nitwit out there who felt compelled to start shouting and screaming because someone of Puerto Rican ethnic origins wouldn’t feel shame about her background isn’t the least bit surprising to me.

THERE LIKELY WILL always be nitwits out there who think they can shout down the existence of anything that isn’t exactly like themselves.

But this incident, which the woman used a video camera to capture for all of us to see, sticks out in my mind because of the presence in the background of that officer with the Cook County Forest Preserve District police.

He’s the guy in uniform (and body armor, in case a gun-wielding nutcase hiding out in the woods tries to attack him) who can be seen watching the incident and doing nothing about it.

Not even after the woman, who actually obtained the proper permit to use the picnic area at the Caldwell Woods forest preserve, pointed out to him that the drunken jerk was trying to harass her. Personally, I always thought more highly of the Forest Preserve cops (I have an uncle who is a retired officer) than that!

PRECKWINKLE: Pushing for investigation

I SUPPOSE SOME people will say this is evidence of how times have changed for the better. Because there probably would have been a time when the police officer would have seen the incident, heard the woman complain, and would have chosen to arrest HER on the grounds that she was offending the sensibilities of the man and had the nerve to claim offense for herself.

For what it’s worth, more Forest Preserve District police officers arrived at the scene later, and the man with the boorish behavior ultimately got arrested. He now has charges of assault and disorderly conduct pending against him – charges for which he likely will get hit with some sort of fine.

But it means that the split of our society seems to also exist within our law enforcement – and we have to hope that if confronted by such an incident, the cop who winds up coming to our “aid” is one with a proper sensibility.

GARCIA; Wants 'hate' crimes charges added

And not somebody who thinks he exists to protect the rights of the troublemakers.

WHICH IS WHY I’m pleased to learn that Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle herself has taken in interest in the on-the-job behavior of the law enforcement types on the county payroll.

Although I also don’t doubt that the officer in question (who submitted his resignation Wednesday before police disciplinary hearings could be held) probably thinks he’s being harassed and that if we had REAL government officials in charge, they’d be backing him up!

There may even be people out there in total agreement with that train of thought. Wondering why our society has gone so loony as to be backing this woman with her Puerto Rico-motif t-shirt. Even though I suspect many of those are also the types who think there’s some legitimacy to that “heritage” argument people make when defending Confederate battle flag wearers.

Personally, I’d say her “heritage” is a part of the United States (Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth) while the other pays tribute to a movement to split away from this nation’s ideals.

I AM INCLINED to think that focusing too much attention on this loud-mouthed guy misses the point. I’m not inclined to get worked up like Congressional candidate Jesus Garcia, currently a Cook County Board member, who says he wants the charges against him upgraded to include a “hate” crime.

ROSSELLO: Demanded an apology

Or Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello, who has been vocal in his disgust that someone would face harassment because of her ethnic origins.

The guy is a nitwit who probably has read too many Donald Trump-written Twitter tweets and ultimately will have to live with his contemptable self. Punishment enough. But that officer. He, and other officers like him, are the ones we’re going to have to rely on for protection.

Not all cops are alike – there are those who do act nobly with the best intentions of protecting society. We just have to hope they’re the ones who respond when called to our incidents; which amounts to a real crapshoot along the lines of a Las Vegas slot machine.

  -30-

Trumpsters can’t find any place to eat, other than Trump Hotel restaurants?

I don’t doubt this is a confusing time in the life of those people who are all supportive of this Age of Trump that our society now lives in.

TRUMP: Thinks the country loves him

These people want to believe they’re now in charge and that the whole rest of the world has to learn to “suck it” and take whatever abuse they feel like dishing out. Yet they keep getting reminders of just how repulsive the real majority of us find them to be.

FOR TWICE IN the past week, there were incidents where people aligned with Trump wound up getting chased out of restaurants they were trying to eat in.

Based on the Internet-based commentary (almost all of which is anonymous) I have stumbled across, it seems as though those people want to view these incidents as the equivalent of certain individuals being forbidden to eat at a Woolworth’s lunch counter of old.

Discrimination, they scream! Harassment! Bigots engaged in trash behavior, they want us to think.

Which is a batch of nonsense, of course. In fact, it reinforces the notion that the people who now scream about “reverse racism” are the exact same types of people who, a generation ago, complained about all those racial minorities being “uppity!”

NOW FOR THOSE who’ve been hiding away in a cave, there was an incident in Washington, D.C., at a Mexican restaurant where a group including Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen found themselves being taunted while they tried to eat.

NIELSEN: Harassed during her meal

Cries of “Shame!” and “End Family Separation!” were shouted at the group while they tried to eat. It also seems other customers at the restaurant while this incident occurred wound up applauding when the Nielsen party ultimately departed.

Now some might want to dismiss this as the type of trashy behavior we see from urban places. But then came another incident in a community some 70 miles away. Lexington, Va., to be exact, where presidential press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders herself showed up to eat.

It seems the restaurant staff, some of whom are gay, decided they were offended by Sanders’ presence. They didn’t want to serve her. Their boss wound up agreeing.

WHICH RESULTED IN Sanders being told to leave within minutes of being seated, and her party of guests deciding to accompany her.

SANDERS: Didn't even get appetizer

Now I’d feel some sense of support for Nielsen and/or Sanders, except for the fact that both of them decided to use Twitter accounts to make themselves out to be the victims. Someone dared to express the notion that they disagreed with the behavior of these two public officials!

Which the supporters of this Age of Trump probably think is repulsive – all people are supposed to be in agreement with them. Or else, they’re supposed to be silenced!

Instead, they got treated with the same kind of gross disrespect that they often advocate for other people. And that they openly support whenever their boss, himself, does it to the masses in our society.

IF ANYTHING, IT strikes me as the masses fighting back in whatever little way they could against the bully that these people want unleashed on our society.

Only place he's welcome?

Now I don’t doubt there will be consequences. I noticed the Washington Post account pointed out the fact that the city in which Sanders went to a restaurant is one that voted overwhelmingly in 2016 for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, while the surrounding county went for Trump.

Which truly is the trend everywhere in our nation. Citified people tend to be the critics, while those people who live in communities isolated from the populated masses are the ones who prefer the Trump ideology about life.

Odd only because I suspect Trump himself (a very urban, and also rather gauche, Manhattanite when he’s not spending time at his Mar del Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.) would never be caught dead living in any of the communities where he is beloved.

  -30-

“Alt-right” synonymous with “bigot?”

It is the new phrase that came out of the 2016 election cycle; “alt-right.” As in not the standard issue conservative who leans toward the Republican party, but an alternate version.
 

TRUMP: Election opened nasty can of worms

Of course, what makes them alternative is that their racial hang-ups are a little more intense. In fact, they are the base of these people having anything resembling a political philosophy.

IF WE WANTED to be purely honest, we’d simply say they’re bigots. But the “alt-right” term comes from those people who want to legitimize any sense that one’s racial sentiments ought to be permitted to be a basis for government policy.

And also don’t want anything resembling use of the term “cracker” to refer to themselves.

Now I know there are some people who are getting upset these days with the perception that the Republican Party has been overtaken by bigots. They want to think there’s some moralistic overtone to the conservative thought process by which they have become the political party for white people.

They want to argue that not every person who cast a vote for Donald Trump’s presidential bid did so for racial reasons. In short, they’re willing to talk a lot of smack to avoid the very real fact of modern-day politics.

PEOPLE WHO VOTED for Trump either really do have the ridiculous notion that white people are being discriminated against because they’re no longer permitted to discriminate against people not like themselves. Or, they’re more than willing to look the other way when it comes to being around the bigots of our society.

Perhaps to them the notion of being around non-white people with some authority is more offensive than being around white people who are willing to use physical force to maintain their sense of place in the world.

I have one person I knew back in college who, on Facebook recently, said we ought to refuse to use the term “alt-right” and replace it with “all white.” It would be more accurate, she says, if we didn’t try to make the term “alt-white” sound respectable.

How far will alt-right rewrite history?

Yet this is going to be the very focus of much of the rhetoric we’re going to hear in coming years. There are people who must take seriously notion expressed by author George Orwell (as in “1984”) that “history is written by the winners.”

THEY PROBABLY THINK this past election cycle was a “war” in which they’re trying to take back the country from all of society’s undesirables – as in the ones whom the deplorables think are truly disgusting because of their repulsive sensibilities about life!

In that context, “alt-right” is merely a part of rewriting history. And not seeing the incredibly obvious in that photograph playing big on the Internet these days with Vice President-elect Mike Pence in front and a whole slew of white people filling the room.

It is a way where we can go back to the old way of thinking of things, in which a “Martin Luther King, Jr.” was a borderline-Communist agitator for spouting out nonsense about equality and non-violence who tried falsely to portray himself as a Christian.

Let’s not forget that some people do have a twisted sense of their Christian religious faith – I still remember once covering a Ku Klux Klan rally outside the Statehouse in Springfield, Ill., where their “pastor” led everybody in a prayer for God to strike the Earth with a plague that would wipe out all the non-white people.

NOT EXACTLY IN line with any serious religious teachings I have ever heard.

Yet these are the individuals who are being given some credence. Who are being treated as though they have something essential for our society to hear. And whose hostile rhetoric somehow bears a legitimacy to what else is being said.

So how should we truly think of these people? What terms should we use to describe them with a sense of honesty?

There are times when I watch the old “All in the Family” reruns on television and think that actor Carroll O’Connor’s “Archie Bunker” character bears relevance to what is happening today. Which makes me wonder if actor Sherman Hemsley’s “George Jefferson” is who many of us will turn to for the proper retort!

  -30-

Societal tensions are going to linger amongst us long after Election Day

This year’s election cycle turned into an ugly display over the tensions we have in our society from people who can’t handle that everybody isn’t like themselves, and we don’t somehow grant them superiority status over the rest of us.
 

A place for those not enthralled by urban life

Take the latest rant of conservative commentator Ann Coulter, who suggested that Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations would have been a complete-shoo-in, IF ONLY we restricted the ability to vote to people who could document that all four of their grandparents had been born in this country.

ANN, OF COURSE, is often off-kilter. I don’t doubt she’s just trying to get a rise out of those more rational amongst us in society. But the sad thing is that she’s not alone – of that I have no doubt.

It’s an incident in my beloved home city, and in fact on my preferred Sout’ Side, that makes me see the kinds of hostilities that this year’s elections placed a magnifying glass to are going to linger on for awhile.

At the crux of it was yet another police shooting. A man from Indianapolis got into a fight with an off-duty police officer who wound up using his weapon, resulting in the man now being dead.

Yes, it was a black man, who was only in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood this weekend because he was attending a funeral. Anyone familiar with the neighborhood at the far southwest end of Chicago near suburbs such as Alsip and Evergreen Park knows there are a lot of cemeteries located nearby.

BUT THAT APPARENTLY wasn’t a good enough reason for a black man to be in a neighborhood that is overwhelmingly white, and also a cop enclave (for the record, I once had an uncle, now deceased himself, who lived there in large part because he was a Chicago cop).

It’s one of those places where people choose to live if they want to be isolated from the daily realities of Chicago, or want to be isolated from certain kinds of people they wish weren’t a part of Chicago’s daily reality.

In short, the kind of people whose votes Trump might very well have sought out – if he weren’t busy looking for each and every excuse he could to demonize Chicago to get himself the votes of people from elsewhere.

Socorro Salas, later Vargas, was the only one of my four grandparents to be born in the United States. I guess the ideologues think I shouldn't have a vote either.

This shooting incident predictably enough resulted in activists coming into the neighborhood, and local residents turning into counter-demonstrators wishing to show their outrage at what some referred to as “animals” who “ought to go back home.”

ANYBODY WHO KNOWS anything about Chicago and its past won’t find any of this surprising. If anything, it’s a wonder that the alleged counter-demonstrators controlled themselves to avoid bashing anyone’s skull in. Although a second round of protests that took place Tuesday got a little more physical, as police had to separate black protesters from local residents.

Yet then, we see the behavior of students at Marist High School, a Catholic school in the neighborhood that is a popular choice of many South Side and surrounding suburb kids whose parents don’t want them in public schools with “those kind” of people.

A text message being passed around the study body shows that some of these high school students are in full agreement with their parents’ behavior – and want to view the “problem” as one of a guy who didn’t have the sense to stay out of a neighborhood he should have known better than to set foot in.

Also, the few students who tried responding to the text in ways to show their disgust with bigotry wound up being laughed at. Administrators at the high school say they’re “devastated” and want to try to teach the young people about tolerance and brotherhood.

YET I CAN’T help but think that many of these young people are going to wind up yawning, paying a bit of lip service to the concepts, then wind up going about feeling the way they feel.

 

Certain attitudes passed down through generations?

Which may largely be the same as their parents who may have cast their ballots for Trump on Tuesday out of a belief that finally, there’s a guy who “gets it” and won’t try to put them on a guilt trip for feeling the way they do about those who are different.

Is it really any different than that incident earlier this year when students at Andrean High School, a Catholic institution in Merrillville, Ind., tried to turn “Build a Wall” into a taunt to be used against a rival high school with a significant Latino enrollment?

This election cycle forced us to see how ugly a certain segment of our society has become. Incidents like these amongst our young make me wonder how long it will be before the stain can truly be washed away?

  -30-

Trump too eager to win the “Who Do I Hate The Most” contest amongst voters

I don’t know if Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump really is a bigot.

 

Will real-life Trump recover from Election Day fall?

Personally, I’d be inclined to think that anybody with his kind of money would have moved out of New York City and given up any ties to the place years ago, because it exposes him to the kind of people his campaign is criticizing so often.

WHICH IS WHY I don’t find it ludicrous that there are gay rights activists from New York who say that Trump is actually one of the most reasonable business people they have dealt with.

We may well be getting a version of Trump best thought of as Candidate Don – the one who spews trash talk and blathers on incoherently at times if he thinks it will garner him votes come Nov. 8 – a.k.a., Election Day!

Family man Don may well be a completely compassionate human being whom we masses will never get to know.

Yet I have no problem with the rhetoric that Trump gets tagged with accusing him of being a small-minded bigot whose vision of “making America great” means going back to the early 19^th Century.

AN ERA IN which power and influence were put in the hands of certain white men (not all, in many ways poor people might as well have been black for all the influence they had back then).

But that aspect seems to have been forgotten by those in our society’s lower economic rungs who somehow envision that it is our interest in equality and justice for all that has somehow deprived them of the benefits they think they’re entitled to.

And it is those people to whom the Trump campaign is relying upon if they’re to have any chance of winning the Electoral College vote in November and Trump to take the oath of office in January, with Melania at his side while perverts the world over fantasize about what she’d look like if she took her top off.

This segment of society sees the political coming of Trump as the chance to take back what they view as wrongly being usurped by someone else, someone much less deserving than they are.

HONESTLY, I CAN’T help but feel that if the modern demographics of the 21^st Century really prevail on Election Day, it will be a Trump defeat. Someone is bound to ungraciously go out of his (or her) way to call him a “loser.” (Just like he did to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.).

But just as McCain’s 2008 presidential bid didn’t get any credit from Latinos for the efforts he had made previously to seriously revamp immigration policy, Trump will be ravaged by the Latino segment of the electorate.

That’s what he gets for kicking off his own campaign with an attack on Mexicans (who are, after all, a significant share of the U.S. Latino population). There are various polls showing that Trump will take even less Latino votes than did the Mitt Romney (a.k.a., Mr. Self-Deportation) of 2012.

And it’s not like just Latinos are inclined to look down on Trump. There may well be people who have been awaiting their chance for years to vote against Hillary Clinton. But Trump has the equal negatives because of whom he chose to rely upon for electoral support.

I CAN’T FEEL too much compassion for Trump. After all, he picked his own electoral strategy – and from all appearances is openly defying anyone who tries to offer him advice on how to conduct himself like a legitimate candidate for government office.

It’s just a shame that his idea of “Candidate Don” was one so brash and garish. Just think of what he might have been able to accomplish had he shown a little less arrogance in presuming that his real estate developer skills gave him a sense of how to run a country.

This is, after all, the election cycle where the predominant thought amongst voters is, “Who Do I Hate The Most?!?”

It’s a shame that Trump seems determined to get a majority of voters to, “pick me, that’s who!”

  -30-

What constitutes a “real” American? That’s the question we must answer

Does this bobblehead have more sense?

The latest controversy absorbing the attention of the Donald Trump campaign doesn’t surprise me in the least – the fact that he would rudely attack a Muslim couple and downplay the sacrifice their son made while serving in the U.S. military is way too predictable.

The fact that some Republican political officials are now feeling inclined to bad-mouth Trump and claim he ought to be apologetic is not only going to fail to warrant an apology, it is likely to offend the mentality of Trump backers.

IT MAY WIND up being used as further evidence by those people of how the Republican Party is out of touch with what they feel about this country.

And I don’t doubt that Trump himself is garnering some form of emotional strength from being criticized publicly on this issue. It may well be the perfect example of how differently from the masses the Trump-types are in viewing the world.

At stake is the activity of the past few days centering around Khizr Khan and his wife, whose son Humayun, was killed in action while serving in the Army.

The couple was used by Democrats during last week’s presidential nominating convention to show an example of an Islamic family making the same ultimate sacrifice of losing a family member to military service as many other families in this country have done.

 

How many bothered by front page photo?

IT WAS SUPPOSED to be an example of how nonsensical so much of Trump’s anti-Islamic rhetoric during his presidential campaign has been.

Trump, if he had any political sense, or compassion of any kind, would have let it go. The Khans would have had their convention moment on national television, and most likely would already have been forgotten.

But Trump is Trump. He felt compelled to respond with ridicule of the couple, which caused Khizr Khan to retort with comments about how lacking in humanity or a soul Trump truly is.

It seems that Khan has captured the sentiment of many people – as there are many Republican operatives who wish Trump would just shut up. After all, GOP candidates don’t usually go about criticizing military personnel or their families.

THIS IS EVEN an issue that has brought together Illinois’ two candidates for a U.S. Senate seat – both Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Democratic challenger Tammy Duckworth made a point on Monday of seeing who could come out and publicly bash Trump the hardest.

The long-time Naval Reserve officer in Kirk and one-time Army helicopter pilot in Duckworth both wanted it known they thought Trump would make a completely unfit Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military if he actually won the presidential election.

Did Mark Kirk repudiate Trump thoroughly,...

And not just because of the draft deferments he got some five decades ago that kept him from ever having to serve in the military during the Vietnam War – I’ll give Trump the benefit of the doubt and accept that he really had bone spurs in his heels that would have made him physically unfit for military service, even though he also has boasted that the Philadelphia Phillies expressed some interest in him playing baseball professionally when he was a teenager.

But I don’t think Trump will be swayed by any of this. Maybe not even the fact that his vice presidential running mate, Mike Pence, says he wishes Trump had kept quiet about this. Because I’m sure there are people who perceive individuals like the Khans as somehow not deserving of the ability to think of themselves as being part of this nation.

... or did Tammy Duckworth top him?

THEY PROBABLY VIEW the sacrifice of Humayun Khan as being less than significant. In fact, much of the “meat” of their political philosophy is a serious debate over who deserves to be able to think of themselves as belonging in this country to begin with! What with all their rhetoric about deportation and exclusion of certain individuals who aren't Anglo enough for their tastes!

It wouldn’t surprise me if they see that Chicago Tribune front page on Tuesday with a full-color photograph of Khan’s headstone, and are offended that a military headstone would bear the star and crescent symbol of Islam where they think the Christian cross ought to be.

A lot of things that reflect the reality of modern-day society offend them, and they perceive this presidential campaign as a conflict to restore the old order of things. That is something that the bulk of us ought to keep in mind when we ponder our own thoughts about whether we should have Hillary or Donald in the Oval Office.

Do we really “make America great” by returning to many of the nonsensical hang-ups we had in the 19^th Century; or come full around and accept the realities of where we are in the 21^st?

  -30-

You’d think Arabs pulling off takeover, rather than just sharing in Chicago

I have to admit that the big difference between the Chicago I knew as a kid some four to five decades ago and the one that exists now is the presence of Arabs and, in some cases, Islam.

It doesn’t phase me anymore to see a woman walking down the aisle of the supermarket while wearing a hijab, particularly if she has a slew of kids trailing her whom she’s trying to keep from running roughshod all over the store.

JUST ABOUT LIKE any other mother who happens to include grocery shopping among her day’s errands.

And I also know enough that not every single Arab is Muslim – there are those whose families at some point in time figured that assimilation to a new country included a religious conversion. Besides, most Arabs I have known had their families come to this country to get away from the very same religious fanatics many of us express fear about.

 

Considering that I always viewed the Chicago area’s great strength as being its multi-ethnic mix of people, I can’t help but think of Arabs as just another ethnic group – and one whose cuisine definitely enhances the style of edibles we are exposed to.

Unless you’re the type of person who thinks Chinese orange chicken or Taco Bell is the extent to which you wish to be exposed to anything "foreign?"

THE SAD THING is that probably is the mentality of some people whose criticism is shouted out so loud that we presume they’re a majority. They’re the ones most likely who keep giving Donald Trump poll leads in his multiple candidate presidential campaigns – even though all the other candidates put together dwarf him.

That’s the thought we ought to remind ourselves of when we consider the latest dispute in suburban Palos Park (the community that feels like it was built out in the middle of the forest preserves) that someone wants to develop a mosque there.

The Muslim American Society bought a property that once was a First Church of Christ Scientist, but had literally been sold off. As in that church didn’t want the property any longer. Nobody forced them out.

Yet there are those who want to think that this is somehow evidence that Muslims are desecrating a Christian church and using it for their own nefarious purposes.

THE SAD PART is that this issue isn’t new. It isn’t just the crackpots being inspired by Donald Trump’s “stupid talk” about Muslims and Arabs not belonging in this country.

I remember back nearly a couple decades ago when officials wanted to build a new structure in nearly Palos Heights to provide a mosque for the growing Arab population in the southwest suburbs – only to have the issue burst into a bigoted mess.

To his credit, then-Mayor Dean Koldenhaven thwarted an effort to use tax dollars to buy out the would-be mosque developers, believing it to be motivated purely by religious prejudice. Of course, he wound up losing his re-election bid, and there are those local residents who remain convinced they did the right thing by doing so.

Such sentiments continue to exist whenever someone brings up the concept of a mosque. Some sentiments just can’t wither away, no matter how stupid.

FROM A PERSONAL perspective, perhaps this is an evolution – since it would seem that Islam is now the exotic faith that scares people, not Catholicism. Although Trump’s willingness to smack about Pope Francis makes me wonder if he wouldn’t mind anti-Catholic sentiment raising its ugly head to bolster his presidential fantasies.

And as someone of Mexican ethnic origins who also has been included as subject matter for Trump tirades, it would seem that the nativists of our society are truly willing to extend their net of hostility towards anybody they can snag.

So as for the ongoing fight over developing a mosque in Palos Park, the details are all so similar that the entire battle seems so predictable. And boring to hear about.

You’d think the xenophobes of our society would come up with something new just to keep themselves intrigued. Although I suppose so long as spewing the same nativist nonsense works time and time again, they’ll keep spewing. Until we, the true majority of our society, come to our senses and stop giving such people any mind.

  -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.

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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.

Some things just never change

Personally, I took the word that Pope Benedict XVI would be stepping down from his post as Archbishop of Rome and spiritual leader of Catholics around the world as a positive.

BENEDICT: The first retired pope in centuries

The man’s 85. It’s not shocking that he’s not as spry as he once was. His admission that he’s not physically able to cope with the demands of the job struck me as such an honest one – something I wish more people in many walks of life were capable of doing.

HECK, I REMEMBER back to 1999 when I saw the previous pope, John Paul II, in St. Louis. The rituals were rigidly scripted – which was a good thing because the one-time Karol Wojtyla wasn’t physically capable of improvising anything.

Perhaps he’d have been better off cutting his papacy short a few years prior to his 2004 death – which was the last time we saw the process of the cardinals converging on the Vatican to pick a new pope.

But all of this is going to result in the speculation about whom the new pope will be. I’ve already stumbled across the reports based on guesswork and wishful thinking about the chances that the new pope will be someone born in an African nation, or perhaps somewhere in Asia.

After all, the Catholic Church is growing in those places. Perhaps the new pope shouldn’t be so blatantly European.

ALTHOUGH CONSIDERING THAT it took until the late 1970s to get over the idea that the Pope ought to be Italian, this isn’t exactly an institution that worries about change.

Already I have stumbled across reader commentary on the Internet calling the idea of a non-white pope an abomination and something that will scare off “’real” Catholics from the church.

I even saw one comment claiming sarcastically that a “black” pope would be appropriate because the modern-day Catholic church has already evolved into an institution with people singing and swaying in the pews just as much as any Baptist church.

Not that all the Internet bigotry is racial. I’ve also seen some people who try to criticize the current pope as “dirty Jews.”

CONSIDERING THAT THE Benedict life story includes superficial evidence that he came from a Nazi-sympathizing family (he was a boy during 1940s-era Germany, although it seems his Catholicism helped him cope with that era’s monstrosities), it seems like a particularly inappropriate way to try to defend his reputation.

It just seems that some people are determined to hold onto the vestiges of anti-Catholic bigotry that we’d like to think are long past. Then again, I have to admit there probably is an element of truth to the idea that even within the Catholic Church, there are strains of intolerance to the idea of change.

It actually reminds me of a report I once saw about the growth of the Catholic Church in this country being largely due to increased numbers of Latinos living here. I still remember the sight of a white woman in Missouri who said her parish had become two separate factions – the “Catholic” church and the “Spanish” church.

AS THOUGH IT is the white Catholics who are somehow legitimate! A part of me wants to think an African pope – if it becomes reality – would serve them right. Preaching morality while spewing immoral rhetoric.

I’m not about to predict a new pope. Anybody who says they know who’s going to get the title is lying. I’m just realistic enough to know that the nasty rhetoric I’m already reading is going to increase in coming weeks – which is truly despicable.

It’s probably not a religious thing at all. Some people just want to isolate everyone else away from themselves – which strikes me as being about as un-Christian a concept that exists.

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It gets creepier and creepier

I was shocked and appalled following a weekend incident involving a man from suburban Morton Grove whose contempt for the local mosque made him think he could pull out his high-powered air rifle and fire shots at the building.

But the more I learn about this incident, and another one that also occurred this weekend in west suburban Lombard, the more my shock becomes contempt.

CONTEMPT, THAT IS, for those elements of our society who think that their despicable actions are somehow justifiable. As though they think they’re fighting the good fight for our society by letting their mini-minds run amok.

Now before anyone starts sending me their rants telling me that this bigotry is nothing like the past, I will concede one point. It seems that officials are taking these incidents seriously.

In the old days, the authorities likely would have placed blame on the Muslims for even being here, and provoking the anger of others against them.

Take the incident in Morton Grove, where it turns out that the man who fired shots at the Muslim Education Center near his home is actually a village official.

HE’S NOT THE mayor or a village trustee or anything like that. He is someone who serves on one of the village committees and takes an interest in municipal issues – all for no pay.

Which is what caused his attorney to tell the Chicago Tribune, with a straight face, that the man was a, “pillar of the community.”

I shudder in disgust at the thought. Although what bothers me is some of the Internet commentary I have read about this issue that makes it clear some people are more than willing to accept this man as the “pillar” and the mosque as the “problem.”

That attitude is what is wrong with our society. Which is why I was pleased to see that a Cook County judge on Monday, while setting bond at a low-enough level that he was able to post it and remain free while his criminal case is pending, ordered him to undergo an anger management evaluation and to submit to electronic monitoring.

LET’S HOPE THIS same serious attitude remains throughout the legal proceedings in this particular case.

Yet this attitude isn’t even an isolated incident. For it seems that in Lombard (a town I’m familiar with because I had an uncle and aunt who lived there for many years), there was an incident Sunday at the College Preparatory School of America – an Islamic school.

Somebody threw a plastic bottle at the building, a bottle that had been filled with several potentially-volatile chemicals. Somebody envisioned an explosion that would have caused damage to the building – which had students inside at the moment of impact.

Fortunately, there was no explosion. The bottle didn’t even break. A part of me wants to remember the ineptitude of the “Pop Bottle Bomber” incident in the 1970’s Disco-era comedy ‘Car Wash,” and make a joke or two.

YET IT WOULD truly be crude to recall a cinematic moment that ended with a bottle of urine being smashed.

Although I’m sure the terror felt by the people in that facility when they heard a loud bang makes any gag inappropriate. For all I know, the person(s) who concocted the bottle probably are getting a thrill from learning they caused a scare.

It also seems that they’ve moved up a notch, since Lombard police told the Chicago Sun-Times that past incidents at the school have merely involved graffiti.

Which makes me wonder if we’re going to get another incident or two in coming days – we are in the period of Ramadan, after all, that runs through Saturday. I’m sure at least some of the crackpot types are offended that those “Muslims” have a sacred holiday that they know nothing about.

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