There is a great little restaurant in New Castle, Pennsylvania, called Hugger Mugger.
It’s a family friendly, casual dining place, featuring all American diner food. (Love their French fries.) They offer both Coke and Pepsi.
They also have televisions in the dining room, tuned to news channels.
I was having dinner there, with friends, on an August evening in 2018, when I saw what was going on in Charlottesville.
One of my friends got his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia. He was a little more shocked than the rest of us to see Nazis marching through familiar streets, shouting “Jews Shall Not Replace Us”.
We were all shocked to learn that a young woman, Heather Heyer, had been killed by one of them, while she was protesting against these latter day fascists.
It shouldn’t be hard to denounce Nazis.
We’ve all seen Casablanca. Most of us have read The Diary of Anne Frank. We’ve seen the hideous pictures of Hitler’s concentration camps. We should know that the Nazis are the bad guys.
But our president said there were “very fine people” on both sides.
Most of his fellow Republicans said nothing.
Last year, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania was posting on anti Semitic web sites.
The Republican party has a long history of appealing to the worst in Americans. Rush Limbaugh, a recipient of the Medal of Freedom, called thirteen year old Chelsea Clinton “The White House Dog”, and sang “Barack The Magic Negro”.
Fox News called Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama.”
Pat Robertson blamed 9/11 on Gays, and new agers.
I don’t worry about Antifa harming my sister and her wife.
I don’t worry about Black Lives Matter coming after my friend Karen, or the rest of her Wiccan coven.
I worry about the right, which has become more and more radicalized and more and more violent in the past few decades, going to their homes armed with the AR15s, they love so much.
Which is why I'm not enthusiastic about calls for unity.
Speaker McCarthy made history, when he was voted out of office by a small section of his own party, who thought it would be better to shut down the government than to compromise with Democrats.
Yes, let's let the people who defend our country get their groceries from food pantries. That's so much better than making a few concessions to the opposition.
McCarthy didn't think so. So, a small minority of his party forced him out of office.
Why should I want to work with people like that?
January 6, 2021, I turned on the TV to check the weather report and see if I was going to need more ice melter. I saw an angry mob attacking the Capitol, because the President of the United States told them to.
They broke into the Capitol. They attacked law officers. They came close to killing the Vice President and several members of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
They may have had help from a few Republican members of congress.
I remember the sixties. I remember the violence that followed Martin Luther King's assassination. I remember the madness at the 1968 Democratic convention. I remember the riots that came after four students were killed at Kent State.
The Black Panthers never attacked the U.S. Capitol. Neither did the SDS or the Weather Underground.
Antifa and Black Lives Matter sometimes damage property.
That's not a good thing to do, and it doesn't help anyone's cause. But I will take vandalism over homicide.
The right are killers.
I know a woman who won't take part in protests, because she doesn't want to wind up like Heather Heyer.
I have yet to hear that anyone is missing a Trump rally because they're afraid of Antifa?
Years ago, I sometimes voted for Republican candidates, because they were the best choice. It has been a long time since I did that.
Republicans discovered they could get votes by appealing to the worst in people.
My parents wouldn’t vote for Barry Goldwater, even though they were Republicans, because he was too right wing. for them.
These days he’d be called a RINO, Republican in name only.
These days, my parents would be Democrats, even my dad, who voted for Nixon twice!
When people call for unity, I say not thank you.
I’m not eager to unite with fascists.