Apparently, someone down in Plains, Georgia who doesn’t like Barack Obama as president thought the best way to handle that dislike was to hang him in effigy from a building on Main Street. Such activities are despicable and wrong and display the very kind of primitive thinking that continues to haunt our national discourse.
Equally as wrong is the fact that it has become a standard that, in order to prove that I find such actions deplorable, I have to openly state that they are wrong every time they happen, or some elements of that same national discourse will assume that I tacitly approve of them because I happen to be Christian, white, conservative and disagree with the point of view espoused by Obama and the Democrats.
The first case reveals hatred based on ignorance brought about by a long history of racial divisiveness that is very hard to overcome. The second case reveals a hatred based based on ignorance brought about by a long history of elitism that assumes that anyone who does not agree with the elite must be part of the group espousing the first view.
What should happen now is that people of any intelligent line of thinking can look at what happened in Plains, Georgia and know that it is wrong and that any other intelligent person who looks at the same event also knows that it is wrong. Unfortunately, until that kind of thinking does happen, we will never be able to move forward as a nation toward establishing the kind of discourse necessary to put such events to an end altogether.
DLH
