The events of this weekend are a disgrace to this country! How did the alt-right even get a permit to hold the rally?! I don't need to hear about free speech, and freedom of assembly. First of all, these people are extremists. And second, the thing they are extreme at is hate! Sure...in this country we have freedom of speech. That simply means that you can say what you want, even if it is is in disdain for our current government, and not get arrested. It is what protects these posts. We also have freedom of PEACEFUL assembly...notice that word PEACEFUL. Anyone in their right mind would know that things were going to turn bad with these folks!
Okay, so they did manage to get a permit, and they held their "rally". The night before, they come out with torches (okay, really they were tiki lamps from Home Depot). What image does that put into your head? Me? All I see when I see a group of people holding "torches" and yelling is an old school lynch mob! That scene alone screams "strike fear into all around"...but these people were going to have a PEACEFUL rally the following day...showing up a night early in full lynch mob form!
And then, we have our "illustrious leader"...you know, the one that only says he condemns the violence, but says nothing about the hate that fueled it! The man who should be partly to blame for these events with his travel bans that target Muslims, his military bans that target the trans community, the many hateful remarks he has made to various groups that were not "white male" during the elections! With this person the "leader" of our country, it is no wonder that there is such hate surfacing right now!! They have a role model in the "leader" of our country...a "leader" who stands for the very hate they are spewing! As the "leader" of this country, he should have IMMEDIATELY come out and condemned the hate that fueled the violence, but I guess it really is hard to condemn something you believe in.
I have never before been ashamed of my country or the color of my skin, but I am today. I watched in my adult years how we were finally making advancements against hate and racism, only to see two decades of work wiped out in just the last year! What disturbs me even more is knowing that hate is not natural...taught! These young people on these college campuses are the products of people who grew up in my generation...the first one to grow up in a country that did not segregate whites and people of color. It is sad that we didn't overcome the hate of our parents and grandparents. We Gen Xers were such an independent generation. You would have thought we would be able to think past the hate of our parents and grandparents, and see the world completely differently. For the most part, we were....at least I thought we were. But then I see all of these 20-somethings spewing this white supremacist bullshit, and I wonder what the hell happened!! These are the kids of the Gen Xers spewing this hate, and it disturbs me that so many from my generation taught this way of thinking to their kids...behind closed doors...while I was explaining to my mixed-race children why racism and hate were bad things!
We need to stop with all this hate, people! When will we learn to accept each other's differences with compassion and understanding?!