Lincoln and Booth
This drama about the Tea Party movement and the NAACP has me thinking. Are racists at Tea Parties? Yes. Are racists at NAACP rallies? Of course. If you get a big group of people together, heaven only knows who is in the crowd. Anyone who says Blacks can’t be racists is delusional. Is that racism justifiable? Is the thug mentality more detrimental to our community than racism? I better leave that alone.
PBS’s brilliant documentary about the assassination of President Lincoln includes a photo with John Wilkes Booth in the crowd at the second inaugural. The last paragraph of that great speech reads:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
As a congressional staffer who lived blocks from the Capitol, I found myself stopping by any rally on the National Mall on Saturdays because I was compensated to serve as a conduit of information between all the people and my congressional bosses. From pro-gun to gun control, pro-choice to pro-life, treehuggers to drill in the tundra, I listened just so I could say I listened. The fetus pictures at the pro-life rallies were as rough as the concentration camp pictures at the Holocaust Museum.
The Million Man March was a historic event but without doubt there were some people in the crowd who had considered taking the fight to another level; that’s what zealots on both sides do. I like to think that positive messages from that event introduced peaceful options to them.
All of my African American friends who are conservative have attended and/or have spoken at Tea Parties. When they looked into the crowd, they were hoping that no signage when overboard. Like President Obama, I understand and respect their concerns with the size and role of government. Of course, I also have moderate African American friends who wonder if leaders of the traditional civic rights organizations are battling for equality or seeking to stay paid. That’s the thing: organizers of groups on the right, left and center often have their personal income in mind before anything– this blogger needs to get paid also. A ruckus is good for donations and the NRA guy and the Handgun Control lady could be dining together in a D.C. tony eatery…. private dining room of course.
As I say weekly, our community should be supportive of a few sensible conservatives or those really nutty folks will be running things.
Project Logic Ga 
As a white, conservative, middle aged man I would say this:
That was a very, very good blog piece. Good work.