Stories like this are puzzling, not because the specifics make no sense — they unfortunately do — but because in the year 2008 in the United States there are still people who do harm to others for no other reason than racial, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.
I don’t mean to sound naive, or to come off as some pie-in-the-sky type, but what gives? Perhaps I am just more sensitive to these things than others, having been subjected to it while growing up. As a Jew, I have heard the slurs, some of them unconsciously offered by well-intentioned people. I remember a friend in high school telling me he could tell who was Jewish and who was not just by looking people. I remember getting into a fight with a friend, a Puerto Rican kid who lived down the street, just because he used one of the standard anti-Jewish pejoratives — which led me, in one of those moments that I can look back on in sorry and embarrassment, to call him some pretty nasty, ethnic-based names in return.
That was in the 1970s and one might think that we wouldn’t have to deal with this stuff anymore. And by we, I mean all of us. But the coded language used during this presidential campaign against Barack Obama — and not just by John McCain, Sarah Palin and the right wing, but by Hillary Clinton and her camp during the primaries — is just one very public example of how much work still needs to be done.
As is the way too many people speak when they are in what they might view as their comfort zones — among family and friends, for instance — the way whites they use the “n-word” around family members, the names they call Muslims, Hindus, Latinos, Jews, gays, or even Italians, the Irish and Poles. This kind of nastiness remains an epidemic, a festering wound that can only be cured by exposing it to light.
We’ve continued to allow this atmosphere to exist, an atmosphere that is conducive to the violence that has struck Carteret in recent weeks. We have a responsibility to change this atmosphere and make it unacceptable for this kind of nonsense to continue.
Hank Kalet 