We are numbed by Charleston; by its irrefutable proof of our still virulent racism and violent, gun-crazed culture, by being made to stare once again into the face of evil. Yet when the families of the slain stood up in court to voice forgiveness of Dylann Roof, we were startled and suddenly it was harder to divide us. Our politics is small to begin with; next to such staggering grief, it seems smaller still.
Like everyone on Facebook, Roof told us his life story in pictures. Absent the shots of him sporting the insignia of the Confederacy, apartheid and Nazi Germany, it’s hard to conceive of the Confederate flag being banished from Wal-Mart, let alone the ground of his state Capitol. Some may fly it out of mere nostalgia, but its core messages, now as always, are racism and sedition. It’s the flag of those who loved slavery more than their country; who sent hundreds of thousands to die rather than let one slave go free. A hundred and fifty years after Appomattox it is at last coming down. Long indeed is the arc of the moral universe.
The victory is more than symbolic. Fifty years ago as part of their post-Civil Rights Act national membership drive, Republicans began beaming coded racial messages to white voters. That code just got easier to crack. Fifteen years ago they began to amp up voter suppression under cover of absurdly inflated claims of voter fraud. If challenged on their motives or their facts they hurl furious denials. They can hurl all they want now. Debate has shifted. We’ve seen the pictures.
The slaughter of the Emanuel innocents was the most savage in a line of white-on-black slayings that pricked the nation’s conscience. The list of martyrs is long: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Walter Scott and countless others, known and unknown. Their deaths, though tragic, were not in vain. America is at last sifting through the evidence. A decade ago, most whites rejected every claim of racial disparity in our law enforcement and criminal justice systems. Now sentencing reform and cameras on cops are popular policies amongst all voters. We’ve a long ways to go, but there’s less doubt about where we’re headed.
President Obama has spoken eloquently of the millions of young black men in crisis in America. The chilling saga of Dylann Roof reminds us that millions of young white men are also in crisis. We can’t pretend to know its full nature or all its complex causes. We do know that, like young black men, young white men need better education and better jobs, better mental health services and better parenting. It’s probably time for someone to talk to them and their families as Obama spoke of and to young black men. For sure, it’s time we stop talking to them the way we do.
The right has long charged liberalism with fostering alienation, dependency, isolation and addiction among the poor — and leading minorities to reject traditional values and to see themselves as victims and whites as culprits. Now consider Dylann Roof: a jobless, stoned, opiate-abusing high school dropout who rejects such traditional values as law, order, hard work, sobriety and tolerance to vent his rage and blames his problems on a racially denominated ‘other.’
The GOP’s pathetic crybaby agenda: Trump, Scalia and the whiny, paranoid new face of the right - Salon.com
07-08-2015, 06:43 PM
The GOP’s pathetic crybaby agenda
But then I got to the title at the bottom only to find it was actually nothing more than a cheap hit piece on "the right". 
Clicking out it showed the same thing--about halfway through a fairly reasonable article it deviates off into nothing more than an anti-conservative screed propaganda piece. What a waste--it chose to foster more division rather than take the high road, in the end. 
Linear Mode
