Hatred

The voice that left the message was course and vile. "Ain't none of your business how I'm registered . . . I'd never vote for a Democrat, they're all crooked and stupid . . . Don't ever send anything to me again."  

Really?  This in response to a friendly, straightforward Get-out-the-Vote letter that my daughter and I sent to fellow Durham Democrats in our neighborhood.

So it's okay that people make calls like this? to a neighbor no less?  Especially when you're a registered Democrat who would logically receive such a letter?  I don't know why she's chosen to register as she has, perhaps to vote more effectively in local primary elections, but she shouldn't be surprised to get mailings from the Democratic Party.  What bothered me the most, though, was the hate in her voice.  Why not a simple, polite call that asks me to remove her from my mailing list?

I was watching the funeral service for Congressman John Lewis when the call came in and fortunately didn't answer.  The anger I felt simply listening to the message was hard enough to contain.  I felt like calling her back with an equally hateful response or sending her a demeaning letter.  But I thought instead about John Lewis:  his humiliations, his arrests, and his beatings.  The hatred he endured over a lifetime of 80 years dwarfed my bad encounter with a neighbor.  Like him, I wouldn't let this experience poison me.

Still, it's hard to know what to do with hate.  Martin Luther King, Jr., would counsel love.  Others, forgiveness.  For me, it's enough to say that I might understand my neighbor if I had lived her life.  And while I won't exactly turn the other cheek, I'll refrain from meeting hate with hate.  It's the best I can do right now.

Suburbanista

Someone needs to tell Donald Trump that he's got his suburbs on backwards.  Sure, they're not one size fits all, but their style has changed.  Suburbs no longer wear uniforms; they're colorful and varied, even subversive at times.  I know, because I live in one.

Determined to eliminate a fair housing law established under Barack Obama, President Trump is warning that Joe Biden's zoning policies will "abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs."  He thinks he's scaring us by saying that crime rates will rise and property values decline.  It's all code, of course, easily deciphered, for Black and Brown people moving in.  "Suburbia will be no longer," he says.

The trouble for Trump is that suburbia isn't so White anymore.  Nor is it Republican.  In fact, Democratic households outnumber Republican ones in my north Durham neighborhood, where people of different colors, ages, and genders have lived together for years.  Many of us detest Trump's endless race baiting, and we denounce his response to protests in support of Black Lives Matter.

Interestingly enough, protesters in Portland have employed one of suburbia's trademark symbols--the leaf blower--to counter tear gas attacks from federal agents.  It's as if urban and suburban citizens have joined together to demand civil rights.  Whereas Trump wishes to pit the two against each other, we've teamed up to stand him down.

So on this Sunday in July when the body of John Lewis crosses one last time over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, soon to be renamed in his honor, let's remember what he said: "I believe in freedom of speech, but I also believe that we have an obligation to condemn speech that is racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic, or hateful."

Racist appeals to suburban voters meet the Congressman's definition and must be condemned at every opportunity.