Wednesday, August 16, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Charlottesville
This week I had planned
to write about our garden.
After a few years of heart-
ache and disaster, I wanted
to share a tale of success —
the 18 pounds of peas we’ve
harvested so far, the bucket-
loads of green beans, the
beautiful squash, and the lus-
cious ears of corn that have
sweetened up just right and
taste exactly like a Central
Oregon summer.
But then Charlottesville
happened, and a young
woman named Heather
Heyer was murdered by a
serial loser named James
Fields, a basement Nazi
from Ohio. Fields managed
to severely injure a lot of
other people too, by plow-
ing his car into a crowd of
people rightfully, and thank-
fully, protesting the presence
of Nazi sympathizers, white
nationalist and supremacist
jackwagons.
Charlottesville, if you
haven’t been there, is a won-
derful place. Which is why
so many fine people — and
some not-so-fine — came
out to counter-protest the
presence of greasy jackboots
marching around with tiki-
torches, Nazi flags, and SS
headgear. The not-so-fine
element of counter-protestors
included equally repugnant
— and intellectually bank-
rupt — superstars of the radi-
cal left — BLM and Antifas
goons in their apparently
mandatory Che Guevara
shirts, Soviet flags, and bicy-
cle helmets.
One side was pure fringe,
and the other had just
enough fringe that the result-
ing violence was probably
inevitable.
We’ve seen this before.
Coverage of the event
followed the typical pat-
tern. CNN instantly jumped
the shark with their entirely
droll “What We Know” and
“What You Should Know”
mastheads. Internet trolls
and waxen network figurines
almost immediately assailed
President Trump — then
assailed his condemnation of
the violence, parsing it end-
lessly for hints of dog-whis-
tling to the invisible army
of white nationalists plot-
ting a nationwide American
kristallnacht.
Even David Duke, for-
mer imperial wizard of the
Not just a voice on the phone...
Weʼre right here when you need us...
idiotic Klan, was trotted out
and given airtime, as if any-
thing he has to say, on any
topic whatsoever, deserves
to be heard. You can assess
for yourself why any self-
respecting journalist would
even bother.
Predictably, it didn’t take
long for participants and
observers alike to blame the
cops for the outbreak of vio-
lence, even as two Virginia
state troopers were killed in a
related helicopter crash.
What often gets lost
in these events, and very
quickly, is perspective.
The
tragedy
in
Charlottesville, painfully
real, is not representative of
some alternative American
reality, in which strictly
white Americans have all just
become very good at hid-
ing their inherit racism and
national socialist sympathies.
Watching the network and
cable news coverage, cynical
people with a vested inter-
est in pumping the story for
every last advertisement dol-
lar no matter how distasteful
the angle, it would be hard to
know that.
The city’s decision to
remove a statue of Robert E.
Lee —the wisdom of which
is something honest people
can peacefully debate — was
exploited by a small group
of actual racist nitwits, most
of them out-of-towners, to
advance their vile ideology.
But it was a very small group
of nitwits, after all, and there
were just enough nitwits
amongst the counter-protes-
tors to turn friction into an
actual fire.
Horrifically, this colli-
sion of stupidity cost Heather
Heyer—who by all accounts
was led by the same kind
of sincere bias for liberty
that saw thousands of men
die storming the beaches of
Normandy — her life.
America has individual
racists. Every country has
them. Every country will
probably always have them.
But America is not institu-
tionally racist. Not anymore.
While still imperfect, and to
a degree that can and should
be debated, America contin-
ues a historically remarkable
record of self-correction in
matters of race, and the real
tragedy of Charlottesville
will come if it is further
exploited to suggest other-
wise. That road leads only to
more division and distrust.
No country with almost
400 million people is going
to be without its radical
fringe groups, whether it’s
StormFront types from some
rusting Ohio backwater, La
Raza militants in Southern
California, ISIS sympathiz-
ers in Minneapolis, or New
Black Panthers intimidating
voters in Philadelphia.
And in America, even
when we don’t like it, even
when their ideology is thor-
oughly and demonstrably
stupid, they have as much
right to assemble and make
noise as anyone else.
But thankfully, that isn’t
most of us, and not by a
long shot. Many of us have
relatives who fought against
actual Nazis in North Africa,
or Italy, or France, or against
Japanese fascists and their
brand of virulent racism
across the Pacific. Some of
you, reading this, are the
people who actually did that
hard work for the rest of us.
Most of us are repulsed by
swastikas and by the nema-
todes who harbor the weak
flame of that ideology in
their hearts. Most Americans
reject racism in all of its
forms and understand the
damage it does to real people,
and therefore to the country
we love. Most Americans, I
strongly believe, reject fringe
thinking no matter which end
of the political spectrum it
springs from.
I hope that I’m right about
that.
Maybe no one has ever
really loved America for
what it is. It is a big, diffi-
cult, and sometimes violent
and ugly place. But we had
better not stop loving it for
what it can be, for its limit-
less potential, and for what
the overwhelming majority
of us, quietly toiling away in
our little gardens, taking care
of our neighbors, and work-
ing for peace in our commu-
nities, still want it to be.
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