Intolerance Breeds Hate, Hate Breeds Violence
Yesterday, at around 2PM, a man was shot in Washington DC. For a city plagued by drugs and violence, it would be easy to hear this and consider it just a statistic. This shooting was one caused by the centuries of hate and intolerance that have bloomed for generations and now fester in the faux-underground of people’s living rooms and ‘secret places’. At the National Holocaust Museum in DC, James W. von Brunn, an elderly white-supremacist, opened fire in a crowd, shooting Stephen Tyrone Jones, a security guard at the museum, mortally wounding him.
What do we do? How do we react?
Von Brunn’s blind vigilante actions proceeded to remind us that we must remain ever that we must remain ever “vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms”, as President Obama so succinctly put it. We are reminded that this hatred exists in our society on a daily basis: in the passing comments uttered by those who do not know any better to the overwhelmingly disturbing hate crimes that are so frequently in the news, from the intolerance of the cab driver who won’t pick up a black passenger to the suburban teen who posts on KKK blogs.
There are wars on terror, on drugs and on crime in our country today. But can we have a war on hate? I can’t answer that question, but I can do this:
“Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
[...] judging by some of the new and persisting wounds that exist in America – such as the shooting at the DC Holocaust Museum, the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, and the fact that the victims of Katrina are are [...]