Preaching Division in South Carolina
Published:
January 17, 2012
“By mixing falsehoods with racial condescension, Newt Gingrich
brought a raucous presidential debate crowd
to its feet on Monday night in South Carolina, further
cheapening his reputation and that of the state Republican Party…”
Cassi
Creek: I recall all too well the murders
of young people in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Two of them were summer volunteers, willing
to help with voters’ registration of black citizens of Mississippi. They were immediately classified as “outside
agitators” and incurred the instant hatred of local residents. The third was a native Mississippian, guilty
of hoping to elevate his self and other black citizens above the nearly feudal,
disenfranchised status imposed upon them by the white power structure. His attempt to better his lives, and that of
others to help him carried a death sentence as certainly, as if they had been
tried and convicted in open court.
http://www.core-online.org/History/freedom_summer.htm will provide some background
information. Please read it if you are
too young to recall the actual events of that summer.
This is the
history that has fueled the hatred of Obama since his election as POTUS. This is the anger caused by the refusal of
whites to regard African – American men and women as equal under the law, as
deserving of equal opportunity in jobs, education, housing, and healthcare. This is the separation of our citizens from
each other fueled by Nixon’s southern strategy, by Reagan’s fictitious “welfare
queen” campaign lies. This is the
animosity underlying the campaign lies spread by Palin and others about young
women having children outside of marriage in order to obtain more “welfare”
money. This is the history that causes
whites to view liberation theology in black churches as anti-American communism
while listening to hate mongers lie about plans by Muslim Americans to destroy
the nation. These are the things men and
women of honor and integrity, citizens with functional intellects have tried to
remove from our society, our culture, and our legal system. These are the old hatreds and ingrained bigotries
that most of us know to be lies and stupidity.
This is the history
that Gingrich is trying to bring back to the surface as he and Santorum trade
bigotry for dogma in South Carolina.
This is the hatefulness Gingrich hopes to reignite with his “food stamp
President” label. This is the prejudice
he wants to stir up about birth rates, marriage rates, and the fear that
someone else might get a penny of tax money paid to the federal
government. This is the hatred that
drives the phrase and dogma of “states rights.”
This is the
hatred sponsored and spread by Reagan, Palin, Santorum, Perry, Gingrich,
Robertson, and countless politicians at every level who have nothing but fear
and hatred to peddle to uneducated, out of work, fearful, impoverished citizens
who think backward to when they believed they were better off than black
citizens because they had drinking fountains with their race on them.
I recall too
well that brutal summer of 1964 and I am horrified, not at what happened then,
but at how little progress we’ve actually made since then.
