Examination of Conscience

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Reader Supported News

12 January 11

n November 22, 1963, Mummy picked me up early from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. Driving home to Hickory Hill in northern Virginia, I noticed that all the District flags were at half staff. Mummy told us that a bad man had shot Uncle Jack and that he was in heaven. Daddy's friend and former football teammate, Dean Markham, a Justice Department Rackets Division Attorney picked up my little brother David at Our Lady of Victory. "Why did they kill Uncle Jack?" David asked him. Dean, an ex-marine, combat veteran, known as the toughest linesmen on the "GI-Bill Squad," - the toughest football team in Harvard University's history - wasn't tough enough to field that question. He wept silently all the way to our driveway. When I got home, Daddy was walking in the yard with Brumus, our giant black Newfoundland and Rusty, the Irish Setter. We ran and hugged him. We were all crying. He told us, "He had the most wonderful life, and he never had a sad day."

Neither Beck, Hannity nor Savage nor the hate merchants at Fox News and talk radio can claim to have invented their genre. Toxic right-wing vitriol so dominated the public airwaves from the McCarthy era until 1963 that President Kennedy, that year, launched a citizen's campaign to enforce the Fairness Doctrine, which required accuracy and balance in the broadcast media. Students, civic and religious groups filed more than 500 complaints against right-wing extremists and hate-mongering commentators before the FCC.

The Dallas, Texas, airwaves were particularly radioactive; preachers and political leaders and local businessmen spewed extremist vitriol on the city's radio and TV stations, inflaming the passions of the city's legions of unhinged fanatics. There was something about the city - a rage or craziness, that, whether sensible or not, seemed to have set the stage for Jack's murder. The Voice of America, half an hour after the assassination, described Dallas as "the center of extreme right wing." The Texas town was such a seething cauldron of right-wing depravity that historian William Manchester portrayed it as recalling the final days of the Weimar Republic. "Mad things happened," reported Manchester. "Huge billboards screamed 'Impeach Earl Warren.'" Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant "Stevenson's going to die - his heart will stop stop stop and he will burn burn burn!" The mercantile elite that ruled the city carefully cultivated the seeds of hate. Radical-right broadsides were distributed in public schools; the Kennedy name was booed in classrooms; junior executives who refused to attend radical seminars were blackballed and fired. Manchester continued:

Dallas had become the mecca for medicine show evangelists of the National Independence Convention, the Christian Crusades, the Minutemen, the John Birch Society and Patrick Henry Societies and the headquarters of right wing oil man H.L. Hunt and his dubious activities ... The city's mayor, Earl Carroll, a right wing co-founder of the John Birch Society, was known as 'the socialist mayor of Dallas' because he maintained his affiliation with the Democratic Party.

Dallas's oil and gas barons who routinely denounced JFK as a "comsymp" had unbottled the genie of populist rage and harnessed it to the cause of radical ideology, anti-government fervor and corporate dominion.

Uncle Jack's speech in Dallas was to have been an explosive broadside against the right wing. He found Dallas' streets packed five deep with Kennedy Democrats, but among them were the familiar ornaments of presidential hatred; high-flying confederate flags and hundreds of posters adorning the walls and streets of Dallas showing Jack's picture inscribed with "Wanted for Treason." One man held a posterboard saying, "you a traitor [sic]." Other placards accused him of being a communist. When public school P.A. systems announced Jack's assassination, Dallas school children as young as the fourth grade applauded. A Birmingham radio caller declared that "any white man who did what he did for niggers should be shot." As my siblings and I visited the White House to console my cousins John and Caroline, a picket paraded out front with a sign, "God punished JFK."

Jack had received myriad warnings against visiting the right-wing Texas city. Indeed, there had been a sense of foreboding even within our family as he and Aunt Jackie prepared for the trip. Jack made an unscheduled trip to Cape Cod to say goodbye to my ailing grandfather. The night before the trip, Mummy found Jack distant and brooding at a dinner for the Supreme Court Justices. He was very fond of Mummy, but for the first time ever, he looked right through her.

Jack's death forced a national bout of self-examination. In 1964, Americans repudiated the forces of right-wing hatred and violence with an historic landslide in the presidential election between LBJ and Goldwater. For a while, the advocates of right-wing extremism receded from the public forum. Now they have returned with a vengeance - to the broadcast media and to prominent positions in the political landscape.

Gabrielle Giffords lies in a hospital room fighting for her life, and a precious nine-year-old girl is dead along with five others. Let's pray for them and for our country and hope this tragedy prompts another round of examination of conscience.

Hate Speech in Arizona

By Rev. Jesse Jackson, Reader Supported News

11 January 11

et us grieve the slain and wounded in Tucson, and pray for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, targeted for assassination by a clearly unbalanced young man. Rep. Giffords was shot as she made herself available to citizens exercising the most basic of rights: "to peaceably assemble" and petition their representative.

The heinous act has generated a good debate about the connection between the rhetoric of violence and violence itself. As we approach the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, this reminds me not just of Dr. King's assassination, but also of his response to the violence wreaked upon black citizens in the South seeking to assemble peaceably.

In Alabama, for example, Gov. George Wallace cynically fanned racist fires with his rhetoric and actions, denouncing outside agitators, calling on Alabamans to "stand up for segregation" and decrying the "frightful example of oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this state by ... the federal government."

Civil rights leaders warned that Wallace's rhetoric was like fuel poured upon the kindling of anger and fear caused by blacks demanding their rights. Three months after he stood in the door at the University of Alabama, a bomb planted by Klansmen at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church killed four children. One day later, King stated the simple truth: "The governor said things and did things which caused these people to feel that they were aided and abetted by the highest officer in the state. The murders of yesterday stand as blood on the hands of Gov. Wallace."

It wasn't that Wallace condoned violence, and he surely did not want the lives of four little girls snuffed out. But King argued that you can't simply walk away from the consequences of your actions. Wallace's inflammatory rhetoric and reckless actions fanned the flames of anger and fear of the back-alley racists.

There is no evidence that Jared Loughner, the alleged gunman in Tucson, was a member of a right-wing hate group. He was clearly a young man whose mind was unraveling. But it is exactly the mentally unstable who are most likely to be influenced by an atmosphere filled with hate and murderous rhetoric.

In Arizona, the kindling was there. The economy has been hit hard by the financial collapse, with employment opportunities for young people particularly limited. With families losing jobs or homes, fear and depression are inevitable. Add to this a venomous, racially charged debate on immigration and health care reform, as well as some of the worst gun-control laws in the country.

Arizona's conservative governor and legislature made it legal for anyone over 21 to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. After an instant background check, Loughner was able to buy over the counter a semiautomatic Glock 9mm gun with a 30 bullet magazine.

As Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik stated, Arizona has become "a Mecca for prejudice and bigotry," a cauldron of Tea Party anger, right-wing hate groups and anti-immigrant posturing.

Giffords' life was threatened, her office vandalized. Her Tea Party Republican opponent had invited supporters to "remove her from office" and "shoot a fully automatic M16" with him at a campaign rally.

Giffords was demonized as a traitor, a communist, a fascist, a job killer. The congresswoman was distressed when Sarah Palin's PAC targeted her district by putting it in the crosshairs of a gun site on Palin's Web page. In next-door Nevada, Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle suggested that frustrated voters might have to take up "Second Amendment remedies."

Extreme statements are, as many have stated, as protected under the First Amendment as any speech. And vitriolic rhetoric in American politics can be traced back to the earliest days of the republic. But that doesn't mean there are no consequences.

With rights come responsibilities. In Alabama, King stated what everyone knew to be true: that the extreme rhetoric and actions of Wallace were like setting the woods on fire.

Let us defend every person's right to speech, to fierce and independent expression. But let us not fail to challenge those who exercise those rights irresponsibly, particularly those with megaphones like public leaders or media stars. In the hotbed of politics, we expect them to set an example, not to light a match.