Buffalo calls itself the “City of Good Neighbors” for good reason. (click here) This sprawling, blue-collar city is more like a collection of distinct neighborhoods, built by successive waves of immigrants and strivers seeking work and a better life. Syracuse can relate.
Today, we feel a neighborly sense of solidarity, along with anger, grief and resolve, in the aftermath of a hate-inspired mass shooting Saturday targeting Black people at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood on Buffalo’s East Side.
Ten people died, including two with ties to Central New York. Three more were injured. The shooter, an 18-year-old white man, had an elaborate plan to kill more Black people but surrendered to police first.
The gunman traveled 200 miles from his home near Binghamton to execute his racist plan. It could have been our city. It could have been any city. That is the point of terrorism: to make people everywhere feel that nowhere is safe from murderous hate.
Not a synagogue. Not a mosque. Not a church. Not a nightclub. Not a supermarket on a sunny Saturday afternoon....
Come on, everyone. This is the truth and we haven't ended the nightmare. Decades of time. Decades and we haven't ended the extremist views that carry danger within their ideology.
White Supremacy/Nationalism is a source of fear. The ideology is a predator to the young minds and hearts of boys. There is no looking the other way. This is a poison in our country and it has to end. It has no legitimate place. For far too long, Americans have tolerated the idea that such extremism as allowed to be expressed in public demonstrations and parades. It was all to uphold the First Amendment. That lost it's permission with the death of Heather Heyer (click here).
Peaceful protests have always been the way to let those in power know there is something wrong and it needs to be addressed. The White Supremacists of Charlottesville, Virginia proved they are capable of a great deal of damage along with their protests (click here).
There is no basis for benevolence within the White Supremacist/Nationalist belief system. It places a majority ethnicity as superior to all other races in the USA and that is proven over and over to be a lie. Allowing the conjuring of old, bad habits of political dogma is unacceptable in the face of modern day society.
Make no mistake, this is a political movement to change the face of the USA (click here).
Today, being identified as a KKK member is accepted as if they are nothing more than a member of a club with "certain beliefs" not identified in other areas of life and government. This belief system espouses hate and that is simply Un-American. This is a belief system that needs to be reduced to a bad time in USA history before Martin Luther King, Jr. worked so diligently to pass legislation to free the USA of this burden of hate.
Today, (click here) two granite monuments stand on either side of the Potomac River. These are memorials to Lyndon B. Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr. Little seems to connect them. One is filled with remarkable calls to justice. The other is a landscape of pine trees.
But for two years they strategized together—behind closed doors and during secretly recorded phone calls. They came together in the days after President Kennedy’s assassination. From 1963 to 1965, their coordination helped to push forward the landmark civil rights laws of the 20th century.
During Johnson’s time as president, he signed into law the most significant Civil Rights legislations in over a century: The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which ended legal segregation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited laws meant to suppress Black voters, and the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which focused on Fair Housing policy. Johnson referred to these civil rights laws as “the greatest achievement of my administration.”...
There is no room in the USA for hate anymore. There is much work to be done to recover this country from a deadly pandemic and the disruption it caused. Hate is a waste of time. We should have no patience with any of it.
President Lyndon Johnson and the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. were not minor figures in history, they moved mountains. Where is that legacy today? It is missing among high powered and expensive political ads that promote the very essence that is destroying our national fabric of unity. There is no room in the USA for extremism as it continues to kill Americans through insidious ways mired in ignorance and hate (click here). It is believed a full one third of the one millions USA deaths from the pandemic were preventable. Then there was the impact on minority communities and families. They will never be whole again.
What Buffalo, New York proves is that social media has become a platform of hate in a way no one could initially understand. The underground of hate finds it convenient to harness the power of media and make it serve an illegitimate purpose.
One gunman (click here) turned loose hate within him that was transformed by others that espouse hate online and seek to take the hate and turn it into power. That is what is at the essence of White Supremacy. It isn't just about the idea of racial superiority, it is about taking hate and turning it into power to cause widespread carnage. That is the goal of White Supremacy. It is not simply a neighbor with distasteful leanings. White Supremacy's ugliness is seen when those in power turn toward these leanings and encourage voting with the idea it will win out in a way that will finally bring about the final outcome for the manifesto of hate.
There are many layers of power within White Supremacy. They have to be defeated. The politics of hate in the USA is disgraceful. There is absolutely a political dogma that accompanies these acts of violence. There absolutely is and we cannot turn from it.
Great men and women have provided a proud legacy of diversity in this country and it is up to each one of us to revel in it and bring about a country that no longer values such hate or the violence that accompanies it.
