Why Are Hate Groups Growing in America?

I grew up in northern California and was a small child during the Free Speech movement, the radical Black Panther years, during the frightening killing spree of the so-called Zodiac killer, and after most of that radialism had died down, when members of the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Hearst newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. I very vaguely remember the news broadcast when Dr. King was assassinated, and definitely remember my parents sobbing as they watched the announcement that Bobby Kennedy had died from the wounds he suffered in the shooting in the kitchen at the Ambassador hotel, on the morning of my sister's 5th birthday. I was six years old, neither a Democrat nor a Republican, just a child looking at a man on TV lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor of a crowded kitchen, a small child who understood clearly that whoever killed him for whatever reason had done something horrific, something hateful and senseless.

I remember my mother telling me that these were unprecedented, violent and hateful times that were killing a movement for openness and peace in this country. My mother was forty-two years old, had seen a lot in her lifetime and thought she was seeing the very worst right now. But, I'd read about Sacco and Vanzetti, two fringe members of the larger, mostly immigrant group of radicals tied to the Chicago Haymarket and other bombings or failed bomb plots between 1910 and 1920, who ended up being convicted and executed for murders associated with a payroll robbery in which it was unlikely they actually participated. I understood Sacco and Vanzetti may have been sacrificed by a system desperate to ensure the public that safety and order had been restored and terrorism and terrorists were readily identified and quickly dealt with in the harshest manner possible. I'd read about thrill killers Leopold and Loeb and how their cold-blooded murder of a young boy in Chicago in the early 1920s happened during the resurgence of the KKK in that part of the country and a time of general discontent, and alienation among ethnic and economic groups. And, of course, I knew of all the facist movements throughout Europe clashing with growing socialist and communist groups prior to World War II that culminated in the formation of the Nazi party in Germany and the rise of Hitler that led to the Holocaust. I knew this wasn't the worst or the first of this type of hatred.

But, I understand now what my mother really meant. This was happening in her lifetime, before her eyes and she felt we all should know better and should treat each other better at this late stage of the game. She was appalled by the labels we so readily attached to people - 'radical', 'leftist', 'commie', 'fascist', 'military industrial complex'. In Europe after World War II ended, all of the people who had given impassioned speeches favoring facism in England, for example, touting how the poor and the working classes were the enemy and were ruining our way of lives (because they believed this) were scuttled off to jail or were placed under house arrest or went underground - not because they participated in the Nazi atrocities or even because they supported them, but because they had participated in the harmful rising tide of intolerance and blame that when taken to its extreme, led to people willing to overlook and ignore massive elimination of basic human rights, and eventually of human lives. because to question these horrific offshoots was somehow to question the philosophy itself.

I am a student of history, of human behavior, every day of my life. I try to interact with people in a straighforward manner, taking them at face value, as much as possible. I work in the political arena, where people can have very different public philosophies even as they hold the same basic values and can be deep and abiding friends and compatriots based upon what they have in common rather than upon how they differ. I am grateful every day that I see people of significantly differing political or religious views holding each other in high personal and moral esteem. But I am also aware of growing chasms, huge tears in our basic social fabric, caused by hatred and isolation. I am heartened when I hear a John McCain face down a misguided and misinformed supporter at a political rally and tell her to her face that Barack Obama, who was then a candidate and is now our president, is "a good and decent man". In the real world, even in the real world of American representative democracy at work, little separatesd a John McCain from a Barack Obama, and it comes down to whose leadership skills were more widely favored. In the real world we know decent men and women all basically act in the same manner for the good of the general public when they are vested with the public interest.

We also know ideology can be blinding when we allow it to operate in a vaccum, and so openness is an essential quality in a leader. Where a man or woman comes from, what his or her ethnicity is, ends up mattering little if that person has become open to the world and to the people around them. And, of course, when times are tough, we look to someone who will tell us the truth, even if it is a painful truth.

Or do we?

Hate groups in America are growing, daily. Even though we live in a time when people throughouy the world are more readily connected and have better access to real information about each other, we isolate ourselves into silos. Recently, my alma mater, St. Mary's College of California, had a speaker scheduled for a series it sponsors to air minority or controversial points of view. St. Mary's is a liberal arts college run by the Christian Brothers, and they have never shied away from open thought. When I attended the college in the 1980s I studied under a program intensely based upon a Great Books curriculum. We read everything from Heidegger to Buber, Barth and other Christian Existientialists, from St. Augustine to Sartre to Nietzsche, from Galileo to Plotinus. My professors included religiously, academically and morally conservative Christians to fairly socialist Jewish lesbians to intellectual atheists. We had an active Black Students Union, a chapter of Mecha, a Campus Ministry, Young Republicans and Young Democrats Clubs, a loosely formalized Gay Students Group, and all other manner of social groupings. In a given week I might attend a Mecha dance, a BSU social and a Campus Ministry Bible discussion group. So, I was not surprised to find out that in 2009 William Ayers was among those invited to come speak. St. Mary's is a college dedicated to opening minds as well as spirits. What I was surprised to find was alumni who attended when I did , as well as many alumni of earlier, more turbulent years, vigorously protesting allowing Ayers (or anyone for that matter) to speak on campus. On the day of the actual speech, local agitators who never attended St. Mary's, who weren't Catholic or supportive of the La Sallian tradition or who probably did not know the tradition of Signum Fidei, 'an authentic community of faith',always renewing, stood alongside some angry alumni with banners and signs condeming the college for hosting Ayers. Rather than let something go on outside their comfort zone and not involve themselves in it, or go inside and listen to Ayers and hear the questions of others or even ask questions themselves to assess whether or not this person had anything of value to say about anything or whether anything he might say might at least be thought-provoking - many of those assembled with signs were shouting taunts and getting into some students' faces implying the students were too weak-willed or immature or were sufficiently lacking in intelligence to discern their own views or values from those of Ayers. They were just so consumed with their own anger, their own feeling about Ayers, or what they felt or heard he stood for, with the rightness of their own views, that they could not bear others to hold another view or be open to hearing another voice, or even that others might be willing to give someone with whom they vehemently disagreed the opportunity to speak anyway.

I'm quite certain most of the people who raised such a ruckus and asked for censure of the college or threatened to remove financial support or boycott the school do not believe they acted out of hatred. But, they did act out of anger, and all too often anger is how we manifest a hate we cannot or will not identify within ourselves. We may tell ourselves we don't hate liberals, or we don't hate radicals, but this man killed people or supported killing people, or was a terrorist or a subversive, and therefore he has lost his right to ever speak in society again - that it's somehow just insanity to let him speak before a small crowd of thinking people because he may somehow indoctrinate them. Frankly, such an attitude is reminscent of other movements that sought to limit speech and public gatherings and sought to readily label and compartmentalize people according to religion or sexual orientiation or political view or association with anyone of any 'undesirable' sector. I saw some of the newspaper photos of people whose faces were contorted in anger just inches from the face of students who simply wanted to go inside and listen to someone else, and I wondered if in the cold light of day any of those people looked at the pictures of themselves and thought, "Wow, I look bad. I look angry. I look like some crazed radical wanting to shout down any other voice or opinion."

It was a situation I didn't have strong feelings about, a speech by someone I'm not that interested in (granted I do associate his name and that of his wife, Bernadine Dorn, with what I read of the Weather Underground as a child and a teen, and I did not have a favorable opinion of them), but I found myself appalled at the uproar. The differing opinions, the differing values or points of view are things I respect, but to see and hear people who attended school right alongside me, who benefited from an open environment and who were exposed to thoughts and words both compelling and appalling, wanting to squelch dialogue and shouting angry, disdainful things at young people they did not know, was chilling. Twenty odd years ago we lived in dormitories with people of other races, other faiths (our campus had a large Iranian and Arab population in the 1980s), all sorts of political stripes. People raised in conservative midwestern Republican homes listened to Bob Marley singing of the Buffalo Soldiers, Redemption Song, Get up Stand Up, and while it didn't change who they voted for in the 1984 election when campus Republicans probably outnumbered campus Democrats 2/3 to 1/3, we were able to separate political ideology from basic values and issues of equality, dignity and decency. I suppose I could cynically say, 'and then we grew up', but we all know that we are essentially the same people at ago 40 or 60 that we were at age 20, our bodies are just older, our minds hopefully a little more well read. So it's not that simple.

The truth is, people born after World War II, and especially people like me, born at the end of the baby boom and after, have had much greater ability to know and understand our fellow human beings, those outside our neighborhoods or churches or comfort zones, than any other previous generations in human history. We have also had the benefit of more comprehensive, graphic and personalized literature, documentaries, and written press about the impacts of hatred, the atrocities before and within our lifetimes. We have seen the depths to which humanity has allowed itself to sink time and time again by choosing to divide itself rather than come together - and yet much moreso than in my parents' generation, I am witness to an 'us versus them' entrenchment in this country and elsewhere around the world that boggles my mind and breaks my heart. We daily enable hate. We have the resources to better understand, to explain, to come together, and yet we choose to go to only 'our own' sources, 'our own people', so we can reinforce our beliefs and denigrate those of others. More than that, we don't simply malign points of view or political ideologies, we demonize those who hold them, or who we think hold them, or who says things that sound a bit like 'what those people say'.

We have a president in this country who has served about 40 days so far, in a time of virtually unprecedented global economic decline, in the shadow of more than seven long years of war. No person in the position of President Obama could be an ideological purist to any political philosophy or party platform of which I am aware , and clearly chart a course to both recovery for this country and some form of unification. When I hear people talk on editorial 'news' programs of both the so-called right and left wings, I hear such angry rhetoric and such harsh criticism, not based upon actions undertaken or contemplated by the President to date, but based upon the speaker's ideology and his or her anger that his point of view is not the one dominating. When Bobby Jindal gave his stilted, rhetoric heavy and substance light commentary on the President's recent address, pundits from both parties and sides of the aisle criticized Jindal, some validly for what he failed to say or what he actually did say, and many for purely ideological reasons. Only Rush Limbaugh spoke up for Jindal, with characteristically coded, angry rhetoric - "The people on our side are making a real mistake if they go after Bobby Jindal. We cannot shun politicians who speak for our beliefs just because we don't like the way he says it." I didn't find Bobby Jindal's commentary hateful, just non-substantive and too focused on ideology rather than on actual problems or on the President's actual speech and current solutions or concrete alternatives, but I did find Limbaugh's phrasing and word choice troubling. President Obama is on 'our side'. You can speak as an opposing point of view on policies, etc. without having to create an 'us versus them' dynamic, especially when it is an all inclusive one. Meaning, if you are willing to represent 'our' so-called core values, as dictated by the likes of Limbaugh or say, Chris Matthews on the left (not that Matthews uses as much vitriol as Limbaugh but his language is often equally polarizing), then we have to be with you all the way.

I am going to be very frank in how I interpret things like what Limbaugh said. Bobby Jindal is Indo-American. The Palin thing isn't working out so well, so we have to go to people of color to offer an alternative to the person of color in the White House. Bobby Jindal espouses conservative views (us) - therefore even if he says inane things or doesn't measure up with his analysis of what the President said or what is being done, we have to be with him and support what he says or we seem weak and in some way tolerant of the views of our President and his party (them).

I have listened to and experienced racial and religious undertones all of my life. Words like Limbaugh's energize BOTH extremist and isolationist bases, not just his own. He perpetuates an us versus them political dynamic where absolute power for 'our' point of view is the end game. To me that seems both anathema to democracy and dangerously exclusionary. Entrenchment, intolerance, isolation are all poxes upon democracy but necessary tools of domination, and they are definitely part of the arsenal for fomentation of hate. First you divide, then you entrench, then you build anger at 'them'.

And if we are angry right now, we need to look at who we are angry at and why we are angry at them. Why were so many people so angry about William Ayers, hardly the most controversial person to speak on the St. Mary's campus (and it wasn't as if he was a commencement speaker)? Why was William Ayers such a presidential issue? After all, he did personally know both parties' candidates and had actually served on the same board as John McCain, a board funded through the Annenberg foundation - a more mainstream and conservative a funding source one could scarcely hope to find. Neither candidate espouses Ayers' points of view or defended his past, and President Obama, like most of us born after 1960, really only knows of Ayers 'radical past' from history books or what he happened to catch on the news as a child. Senator McCain was off in a prison camp most of the time Ayers was with the Weather Underground. Obviously neither had any ties to the man at that time. So, again, why was Ayers such a hot topic? Because he was a tenuous tie to terrorism. Because some people in this country want to put a skin hue and a religious connotation to terrorism. President Obama is black. He is a Christian, but he comes from Muslim ancestry (just like my own kids). He had broad appeal and is an even-handed individual not easily drawn into conflict. He was almost too white to be viewed as the black man he actually is in some people's view. There was no WIllie Horton for this campaign. There were no swift boat pilots. There had to be someplace where the hoardes of money going toward campaign commercials and literature that did not have to pass the smell test could be directed. Some of us wanted to be angry at Barack Obama but we wouldn't find enough good reasons why. Those are the people for whom William Ayers was resurrected, brought front and center, and villified. It wasn't for people who disagreed with Obama's actual policies, those who would never vote for a Democrat for purely ideological reasons - it was for those people who couldn't otherwise justify it. William Ayers is white. He epitomizes in some ways the image so many of us have of former Yippies and Weather Undergrounders and other upper amd middle class white kids who became disaffected with American Democracy or capitalist society. He was not Sarah Jane Olson, living the affluent suburban life for years after her SLA involvement by assuming a mainstream identity even as she remained a suspect in a robbery and murder. Ayers stayed above ground, became an academic and seems to have remained a vocal critic of what he views to be the excesses of capitalism and intrusion upon personal freedoms, even as he worked within the fabric of civic and public service to ease those excesses and recognize those freedoms. In short, he seems to have tempered his approach from one of outside agitator and anarchist to an alternative voice within the so-called 'system'.

The reason Ayers stuck to Obama despite clear and obvious evidence Ayers had become an accepted member of society equally acknowledged by both Republican and Democratic mainstream philanthropists, politicians, academics and community activists was through the careful insidious juxtaposition of the words 'terrorist' and 'Obama'. That constant juxtapostion fueled anger and hate. As many times as you might reasonably disclaim such an alliance or association (as indeed John McCain did), the reiteration of those words over and over again reinforced fears and deep seated anxieties, insecurities, and ultimately hate. And, had William Ayers not been tied to Obama, there would not have been the furor AFTER the election, over a small speech in a small series at a small college known for its open-mindedness and commitment to philosophical inquiry. The hordes had already been lined up to think a certain way about someone and to make other connections - and somehow letting Ayers speak became about so many other things unrelated to him or his planned talk or the purpose of the alternative views speaking series.

Most hate grows of discontent. A lot of people are discontented. They face economkic uncertainty, they face confusing signals in church, or socially or politically. They feel the earth shifting underneath them a little and they grow uneasy. Most people who end up, say insisting that a man be fired from his job with a local theatre group because he gave money to support California's Proposition 8 to reverse the right of gay people to have access to civil marriage, don't think they are being bullies or are acting out of hate. They are just responding to the hatred and isolation they are feeling. But, in truth, if you believe in civil rights, you believe in the right of anyone to participate in our democracy, including provide financial support to a ballot initative, even if you find that initiative to be regressive or hateful or unconstitutional. So you move from this place where you are an oppressed minority just looking to breathe free like everyone else, to becoming an oppressive force to squelch the breath of someone else. We begin to create a vicious circle of wanting to shout down and close off the other views. The truth is, your oppression of me doesn't justify my oppression of you, nor does my retaliatory oppression in any way negate the inherent injustice of your initial oppression.

Right now we hate because we aren't willing to coexist. We fear having less and less of what we hold dear, and we fear someone else getting our share. We don't hate because we want to hate. We don't see our words or actions or strategies as hateful. Why? Because we aren't looking closely enough.