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Home  At Length Hate, Taxes and the Expectation of Change
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Hate, Taxes and the Expectation of Change |
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Written by James Preston Allen
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Thursday, 18 June 2009 |
The other day I attended a fundraiser honoring Steve Kleinjan for his work in “cleaning up” San Pedro and during the course of the meet and greet socializing a prominent local doctor of with a Jewish sir name whispered to me, “I can’t even imagine how things like this happen today.” He was referring to the recent shooting at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. by a white racist named James W. Von Brunn. “Well,” I said, “just reflect on the shooting of the doctor from the abortion clinic in Kansas or the amount of hate speech you find on the Internet.” This country is not as tolerant nor sophisticated or civilized as we like to believe and yet we criticize other countries for their extremists.
Even here in the “oh-so-liberal” state of California, where we like to pretend that things like this can’t happen, we often are shocked by reports of swastikas painted on Jewish synagogues or worse on some ones home or school. For all the good that is done by individuals or groups promoting a cause or a charity there are always a malicious few who spread fear and hate seeming to abhor peace and tolerance. The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented some of these American hate groups in a report on its website that lists some 926 nationally as of last year. Of that number almost ten percent are resident to California–everything from the Aryan Militia, a neo-Nazi group in Bakersfield, to the Brotherhood of Klans- Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in San Luis Obispo and a significant number of various persuasions of hate groups in the Counties of So Cal.
However what came as some surprise to even me was the listing for the Nationalist Forum here in San Pedro and if you google the name on your computer up pops a website in green, white and black with lots of swastikas. Yes, even here in river city we have our own neo-Nazis who have been laying low these many years since Joe Fields took control of the student newspaper at LA Harbor College back in the 1980’s and started publishing his racist screeds. The College Trustees eventually closed the paper and nearly killed their journalism program in the process.
I have become more aware over the years of the two sides of this community dating all the way back to the 1923 Wobbly strike. On the one hand, there have been and continue to be very progressive political sentiments in this town that supported labor, worked for social change and championed a certain level of tolerance and social justice. Then there is the other history of how the Ku Klux Klan marched down to the IWW union hall on 12th and Centre streets in their white robes with torches and ransacked their offices and threw the piano out of the second story window and spilled scalding coffee on a young girl who remains scared to this day.
Even unto the days of WWII with the local Japanese fishermen shipped off to Heart Mountain or Manzinar concentration camps, there was an element of fascist sympathizers who secretly supported Mussolini the Italian dictator here, just as there are of late those who have supported and defended certain Croatian war criminals. Right here the Nationalist Forum coexists with groups like San Pedro Neighbors for Peace and Justice. We do live in an interesting town, one that has shown its potential with great charity and tolerance even cooperation that resides next to one just the opposite.
It is self evident which side I take in this newspaper, one that perceives that the long arc of history leans towards the ideals of social justice, progressive reform and equality; and while I am tolerant of other’s rights to free speech and freedom of expression, I neither have to agree with them and seldom, except for our letters to the editor, allow for such intolerance or “hate speech” to appear in print. There are ample other opportunities provided by other publishers who allow such bigotry to go unchecked and unchallenged, but not here. For on my watch I am ever vigilant of such tendencies and am tolerant of such neo-fascist sentiments only to the extent that these right-wing extremists have the right to their own opinions. I am under no obligation ever to support or promote them as their rights end where yours and mine begin.
As taxing and annoying as this issue is, a more subtle form of the inherent politics of neo-conservative versus progressive plays out on the much larger scale in the California budget debate in Sacramento. Not that we have any neo-fascists in state government, that I know of, but there are those whose political tendencies lean away from continued arc of social reform, away from progressive governance and looking back towards the era of exclusion. There are those who backed the anti-gay marriage prop. 8, and those who support or condone Schwarzenegger’s slashing of education funding or raising college fees, and those who oppose the severance tax on oil companies. These are the much larger forces, who would cancel the future of the next generation or deprive some people of their equality for a misguided sense of their own insecurity.
If you have lived in this state for as long as I have you will note that we have been here before and that the expectation of change is not always for the benefit of all or even the many and that as we have been warned in the past, “ the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
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