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Let's stamp out bigotry!
By Bob Weir
A few years ago, I wrote a column giving my opinion of a Supreme Court decision regarding Affirmative Action that allowed a person's race to be considered when public universities make admission decisions.
In essence, I wrote that the 5-4 decision allowing some forms of Affirmative Action based on race was wrong because it gives the perception that blacks and other minorities are academically inferior to other races. Well, I always receive responses to my column, some favorable and some critical. The responses that week were running about the same as usual until I received an email from a guy who would make David Duke look like a candidate for the Honor Society. He began by viciously attacking me for asserting that blacks are the intellectual equal to whites, referring to what he calls, "voluminous data" that suggest the opposite.
Every bigot I've ever met will invariably resort to some obscure research by another bigot in an attempt to provide evidence and justification for their hate-filled existence. I can't imagine how some people can go through life hating everyone that doesn't look like them, sound like them, or behave like them. To live in such a narrowly defined orbit is to be culturally illiterate and spiritually moribund.
It reads like a multitude of excerpts from Mein Kampf, and a handy guide for Ku Klux Klan meetings. The cretin who edits the page had apparently read my column before because he referred to my past law enforcement background. (He also believes that cops are intellectually inferior. That really got me upset.)
This guy, and others of his ilk, has nothing but bitterness in his otherwise vacuous life. When you wake up each day with hate in your mind, you inexorably chip away at the best life has to offer, as you move precipitously toward the worst. There's an irony in the lives of people like this because, in their delirium, they believe they are performing some sort of patriotic duty by spreading their corrosive dogma. In truth, they are a clear and present danger to our country because they espouse everything that contradicts the principles of democracy. Everyone should be involved in a campaign to stamp out bigotry because it represents the worst malady in the mind of man. That doesn't mean the mentally unbalanced don't have the right to publish their racially motivated projectile vomit into the dark recesses of cyberspace. This is America, and, like it or not, we must tolerate the elastic boundaries of free speech. Yet, we must also alert the public to the venomous bite that lurks menacingly behind the words, or one day the rabid jaws of intolerance will sink its poisonous fangs into someone we love.
Make no mistake about it; racists and other malcontents come in all colors, and they all represent threats to a civilized society. My column has been similarly critical of African-Americans, Latinos, and others who use their minority status to subvert the law or take unfair advantage of a "politically correct" social order. The moment we start categorizing people on the basis of their physical characteristics we are sowing the seeds of prejudice and creating the stereotypes that feed the insatiable appetite for bigotry. We can only imagine how much misery and loss of life we have endured because of this mindless preoccupation with pigmentation. I'd like to believe that my bigoted critic will abandon his loathsome pursuit someday, but, judging by his caustic repertoire of names for every conceivable non-white in the universe, it's unlikely that he will ever untie the cords of his self-imposed, mental straitjacket. This guy, with his malodorous online garbage dump, hurled obscenities at me for not seeing things as "objectively" as he does. I was happy to discover that in the final analysis we could agree on something.
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