Bob Schwartz

Tag: hate

March 2, 2016

Unleashing the Dogs of Hate

Birmingham

You will be forgiven for mistakenly thinking that this post about Trump was written today. IT WAS WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED IN MARCH 2016, TWO-AND-A-HALF YEARS AGO. At the time, many public people—including responsible politicians of both parties and the media—treated Trump’s pathology as a joke or a temporary symptom that would quickly pass. They should have been shouting in protest and we should have been scared. Are we scared yet?

“Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war”
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1

This time it is the dogs of hate. Enabled and emboldened by Donald Trump. He is so arrogant and ignorant of history that he probably believes he can control them. That with one word from him they will attack. That with another word from him they will stop.

Of course, that isn’t how it works.

There has long been an undercurrent of hate and intolerance in this country, no different than anywhere else at any other time. It has its outcroppings in repressive laws and unembarrassed public behavior. We have taken measures as a majority to dull its practical effect and, hopefully, to change hearts and minds.

Donald Trump is the latest—but not the last—to try to harness that dark energy for his own ambition.

But that is always playing with fire or dynamite. Haters gonna hate. And when allowed or encouraged, haters gonna take that hate out on others. Others, for example, at political rallies. Others who they blame for whatever is wrong in the country or in their lives.

No one knows where this all goes. When the dogs of hate, under the banner of legitimate politics, have been set loose.

Leave a comment
January 9, 2016

A Message to Americans Descended from Once Hated or Feared Groups: Stand Up and Speak Up

The majority of Americans are descended from national, ethnic or religious groups that once were—and may still be—hated and feared by other Americans. Italian-Americans. Irish-Americans. African-Americans. Chinese-Americans. Japanese-Americans. Mexican-Americans. Jewish-Americans. On and on. This means you, too, Mayflower-Americans. Your Pilgrim ancestors were refugees from religious persecution.

This is the message: Stand up and speak up in the face of a growing tide of “Americanism” that translates to hate and fear of “the other.” You and your ancestors were that “other” (ancestors may even mean your parents). Don’t do it because it is the right thing or the American thing to do, though it is. Do it because if you and your family are lucky enough to have transcended that pernicious nonsense, there but for grace go you.

There is a special part of this message for my Jewish-American brothers and sisters. If I say “how dare you!” that may sound too shrill. So let me instead say “you of all people should know better.” Those who want the Holocaust to be eternally remembered don’t seem to completely understand what “Never Again” means. It isn’t that we should never allow mass extermination of much of Jewry. It isn’t even that we should never allow the mass extermination of any group.

“Never Again” means never allowing anyone, including ourselves, to express our baser selves in ways that diminish the humanity of anyone. Because if you believe in divinity then you believe in the divinity of humanity. And if you diminish anyone with shouts and protests and politics and prohibitions, based on no more than identity, you have denied their humanity and their divinity.

And your own.

Leave a comment