My post was addressed specifically to Frelga, as I have taken her to be representing the pro-punch ideology here, and to be most familiar with the underlying principles behind it.Lalaith wrote:And many of us already did, yourself included.Cerin wrote: I think these are questions that need answering.
That line is just a wedge.I'm not saying every Republican is racist. But this country put a man in charge on an agenda that has hate and fear at the center.
I would have been much more sympathetic to this before my kid was old enough to start learning about consequences. Then my nose had to harden. You have choices. Whether or not to pick up your toys. Whether or not to eat your dinner. Whether or not to share with your friends. Whether or not to pay attention to the news. Whether or not to vote in an election or caucus. And, if you've opted to vote, you have a choice in how you vote. D or R or some alternative. And those choices have consequences that you will have to deal with whether you like them or not. So deal with them and if you don't like it choose differently next time. And yeah, I know, some situations are impossible. And I also know that sometimes people make decisions they repent later. You still have to deal with the consequences. Trying to run and hide behind excuses is a way of doing that but if you don't want to be facing similar sets of consequences every time you're faced with the similar choices, pull yourself together and do it differently the next time an opportunity presents itself.Griffon64 wrote: You'll hear the "I didn't vote for Trump in the primaries, I have nothing to do with this" line. Or the "As a whole we didn't vote for him as our candidate" line. Or the "All Republicans are not like that, it is only a few" line.
On Saturday morning, I stood outside our synagogue with the armed security guard we hired after the police department refused to provide us with an officer during morning services. (Even the police department’s limited promise of an observer near our building was not kept — and note, we did not ask for protection of our property, only our people as they worshipped).
Forty congregants were inside. Here’s what I witnessed during that time.
For half an hour, three men dressed in fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles stood across the street from the temple. Had they tried to enter, I don’t know what I could have done to stop them, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them, either. Perhaps the presence of our armed guard deterred them. Perhaps their presence was just a coincidence, and I’m paranoid. I don’t know.
Several times, parades of Nazis passed our building, shouting, “There's the synagogue!” followed by chants of “Seig Heil” and other anti-Semitic language. Some carried flags with swastikas and other Nazi symbols.
A guy in a white polo shirt walked by the synagogue a few times, arousing suspicion. Was he casing the building, or trying to build up courage to commit a crime? We didn’t know. Later, I noticed that the man accused in the automobile terror attack wore the same polo shirt as the man who kept walking by our synagogue; apparently it’s the uniform of a white supremacist group. Even now, that gives me a chill.
When services ended, my heart broke as I advised congregants that it would be safer to leave the temple through the back entrance rather than through the front, and to please go in groups.
This is 2017 in the United States of America.
Soon, we learned that Nazi websites had posted a call to burn our synagogue. I sat with one of our rabbis and wondered whether we should go back to the temple to protect the building. What could I do if I were there? Fortunately, it was just talk – but we had already deemed such an attack within the realm of possibilities, taking the precautionary step of removing our Torahs, including a Holocaust scroll, from the premises.
Again: This is in America in 2017.
At the end of the day, we felt we had no choice but to cancel a Havdalah service at a congregant’s home. It had been announced on a public Facebook page, and we were fearful that Nazi elements might be aware of the event. Again, we sought police protection – not a battalion of police, just a single officer – but we were told simply to cancel the event.
I think (and hope) that the racists and anti-Semites have no idea how much the country has changed. Oh, they have plenty of company, but it's far from a "silent majority" even of white people.
This is a deeply flawed equivalence, unless we're only talking about posts by people who think it's okay to own slaves.Cerin wrote:Re the removal of monuments, I recall a spirited discussion back in the early days of b77, about the ethics of deleting posts. It strikes me that removing these monuments is like deleting posts; it disrespects the integrity of past conversation. It says, we, now, are all that matters.
I find this equation of Lee et al. with Hitler utterly idiotic, historically illiterate and morally reprehensible. Irrespective of the CSA's strong efforts to preserve chattel slavery, they were not Nazi Germany and their crimes pale in comparison to the crimes perpetrated on the Eastern Front - which, has to be noted, also happened eighty years later in a time where "human rights" as a global concept had significantly evolved on a theoretical level. And the reason why there are no prominent statues of Hitler in Germany (or Austria) now is because they were immediately torn down after the war had ended, by the allies and/or the local populations. They were rightfully torn down in a time of turmoil, in a time where the people which these statues honored, had just been killed, committed suicide, fled, or been captured.Frelga wrote:"Museums are for history. Statues are for those we honor. [...] There's a reason there's no statues of Hitler in Germany."
@MelissaHarperD
