Trivializing Bigotry

The American Thinker ^ | April 25, 2009 | Jan LaRue

[Scanian]

Vacuous bullies on college campuses, who couldn't score in a debate with a Teletubbie, proclaim their feigned concern about "racism" and "bigotry" as an excuse to attack people expressing opposing beliefs. Likewise, Janeane Garafalo maligned Americans as "racists" for attending "Tax Day Tea Parties," and homosexual activist Perez Hilton attacked Carrie Prejean, "Miss California," as a "dumb b**** for speaking in support of traditional marriage.

If any of these self-anointed "bigot" busters ever confronted real racism or unjust discrimination of any kind, they wouldn't trivialize it by using it so carelessly.

Holocaust images were entrenched in my memory as a young child as a result of seeing Movietone News clips in theaters at the end of WWII. Those images remain.

They were there the day my aunt took my cousins and me to a public swimming pool when I was about 7-years-old. There was a long, slow-moving line of kids anxious to jump into the water on a hot summer day. A mean-looking woman with a clipboard stood between us and the pool asking each kid a question. I was getting irritated by the delay, and asked my aunt what the woman was doing:

"She's trying to keep out Jews from Chicago."

"We beat Hitler, didn't we?" I was stunned.

"Just tell her you're Hungarian." (It's funny now, as I think back on it. I don't know how that would have helped.)

Then it was my turn. The woman glared down at me, and asked, "What's your nationality?"

I stiffened my back, gave her my best 7-year-old steely-eyed look, and said, "I'm an American!"

The woman sneered while motioning for me to proceed. As I ran to the pool, I heard my cousins and the kids behind them saying, "I'm an American."