Last night Obama's campaign office was vandalized with racial epithets. You can read about that here: http://www.dailykos.com/...
This is the town that made me what I am. I am not the sum of that city's parts, but rather a reaction to it. I am a liberal, Democratic, progressive, and this is why I left.
Vincennes, Indiana is many things, and most of them absolutely awful. The local homosexual community hides itself, and occassionally gets "fag-bashed" while cruising the local monument, the George Rogers Clark Memorial.
It's a town with two serial killers on the loose. A gay teens body was found EXSANGUINATED in a field when I was in highschool, but the killer was never caught. The other one preys on young women at a tennis court. But the story is never in the papers.
When I was a Junior the FBI came to town because of a race riot that broke out over a white girl dating a black guy. He was beaten and left in the street, everyone got out their guns. The local paper reported it as "a mugging."
I was personally beaten within an inch of my life (on the ground being kicked thinking "These morons are too stupid to realize they're about to kill me.")
It's a town the spends more on a gym for basketball than for teachers and classrooms.
It's a town where that the ACLU is suing over the Ten Commandments in the town square--and the town is willing to spend all their money defending it.
It's a town where the central park has a circular road through it: built by the KKK for marches.
The police chief's son once told me how his dad was in "the Papa Bears" -- a secret racist club.
It's a place where they protest The Last Temptation of Christ and ban The Golden Compass.
This is a town where atheists are chased down and beaten.
This is town where hicks throw bottles of beer at pedestrians.
This is what my politics, my beliefs are a direct reaction to. I will never be able to take the angel's route like Obama. I don't have that kind of courage left. But Obama does. He's standing up to this. He's willing to run for President in a country with cities like this.
That takes something incredible, something brave and audacious and incomprehensible to me.
I Hope he wins. I hope for our country, our people, and towns like mine that don't know any better than to be evil. Evil. Evil versus hope.
That's all for today brothers and sisters.
Yours,
The Reverend SPX
First Church of Democracy United
Now go tip someone less bitter than I am.