Imagine a camouflage-painted Humvee festooned with about a dozen giant “F*** JOE BIDEN” flags, and a few more flags with similar themes (including at least one depicting a rat in the style of the major parties’ respective animal logos, with the legend “Demo-RATS”), parked on the median of a commercial highway in a busy suburban area. Now imagine that on one side of that highway, right across from that median, is a street fair filled with kiddie rides, food stands and other vendors, with hundreds of small children and families in attendance, in the parking lot of a commuter rail station and up one of the cross streets.
That’s what I saw this morning in Bellmore, a community on the south shore of Long Island in the Town of Hempstead.
For the past few years I’ve often seen little Nürnberg gatherings of vehicles and people flying flags like this on Sundays, in the corner of a mostly-empty parking lot at the Bellmore LIRR station, and I’ve known for years that there are plenty of right-wing Nazis and Drumpfenführer fans on Long Island, especially on the south shore. But I’ve never seen anything like this; waving a literal truckload of giant “F***” bombs in front of a crowd of hundreds of little kids and families, in a place where and at a time when you know that little kids and families will be there, because you know that little kids and families will be there. This spectacle made me sick to my stomach; so much so I couldn’t stop to take a picture of it for this diary. The photo above doesn’t do it justice. It was grotesque.
(According to Census data, Bellmore is 87% white, has a median income of $139,988, and 52.9% of its residents have college degrees. It’s in a Democratic district, New York’s 4th, currently represented by Rep. Kathleen Rice.)
As I’m writing this I’ve been advised that the police were called, but as of 11:45 this morning the stürmabteilung Humvee was still there, flying its giant “F***” bombs in the view of hundreds and hundreds of small children and their parents. I’m also told that Long Island Loud Majority — which the SPLC has designated a hate group — has a booth at the fair.
There’s no longer any point in tsk-tsking the so-called Family Values® Party anymore, and free speech is free speech, but Jeebus Fleebing Cripes. This is despicable, appalling, and wrong; I don’t care who you hate, or why. All you’re really doing, expressing or accomplishing by deliberately waving a whole bunch of giant F*** bombs in front of hundreds of little kids and their parents, is telling the world that you HATE. That you’re filled with hate, driven by hate, consumed with hate, feel nothing but hate, and that hate feels so good to you that you just want, indeed need, to share your hate with the world in the hopes that others will HATE who you hate, and what you hate, as much as you do. Nothing but hate can be discerned from this act. Nothing.
It’s now been about 45 minutes since I saw this and I don’t know if it’s still there; I have no plans to drive back over there and find out. I can’t get it out of my mind.