Thank you for this. If anyone here understands where you're coming from it might be me. This means a great deal.

I've read your letters. You're human. So am I, and I am every bit the hypocrite at times. Human, you know. No saint. I just keep trying. It's a goal, not a status.

While I once again largely agree with the thrust of your post, I find it aimed at a particular group of people which betrays a certain prejudice which, as always, blinds one to the wrongness of others, who look or act or smell or sound a little more like us.

I am a lifelong Republican and a congenital conservative -- in the mold of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Dwight Eisenhower, even Barry Goldwater late in his life. I detest what has become of the party of my father, and I think I probably addressed most of your points in my previous post to you. It is a very strange place I find myself in, racially mixed but outwardly whiter than white (so that I can conveniently say I don't give a rat's ass about race), a southerner who has been called "the consumate southern gentleman" without a trace of irony, and also a "bleeding heart conservative."

I believe in punching the big guy -- but while he is alive and in front of me.

So I would say I have to relegate turnip to the same status as many of my countless dear cousins, many of whom pretend to be white or honestly believe they are -- and why not? They pass for white whether they know they're passing or not. Maybe turnip's doing the same thing for all I know. If so, I feel for him. I certainly do feel for his ignorance, and I do call it that because I have no evidence that he is an evil person (if he is even a he). I have plenty evidence he is dumb as a stump, but apparently he knows that because of the moniker he uses.

That's how I deal with people like turnip, but if I knew him or was related to him, I'd still show up at his funeral and I wouldn't piss on his grave. He is a fellow human, and we're all of us far from perfect.

The problem is that some of us are actually evil. I believe in evil as a potential, which I have found to be a sticking point with many atheists and folks from thataway, because it implies something supernatural. It's just an argument I've encountered. Clearly you have no problem with the concept of evil. I'm glad. I only wish you didn't seem to believe it is confined to below the Mason-Dixon line.

You said something worth repeating: "...civility is not about being kind to those who are like you... that's just tribalism." Amen, my brother. And tomorrow I will go meet once again with my tribe.

Pray for me.

I would only say that hate is hate. There isn't good hate vs. evil hate. Contempt for evil is understandable, but hatred is what stains the human soul, and when and if we learn to feel hatred because of hatred, then the first haters have simply won us over. They've won.

I appreciate your comments and I hear you. However, I think you make a common error when you ID the problem as southerners and the south. It is certainly the most obvious example of what's been wrong with us as a nation since its inception, but hardly the inately knowingly evil region. There have been racial and other sorts of "differentness-related" atrocities committed all over our fair nation. As a southerner I am inclined to think of people such as Morris Dees and Wendell Berry as beacons of heroic rightness. Perhaps even Wm. J. Clinton would qualify. The late William Bradford Huey. Faulkner. Willie Morris (with whom I particularly identified because of his childhood). These are not a rare breed, and they have all taken to task Mr. Helms and others like him in their respective times.

By the same token, one of the most egregious lynchings in the history of this country took place in Pennsylvania. One can't very well lay the Black Wreath upon a single region, as fashionable as it may seem. To be fair, racism and simple bigotry have been pretty evenly distributed, and the south has evolved, generally, much faster than the rest of the country, given the handicap under which it has worked.

As the apocryphal bumper sticker spoken of by Brother Dave Gardner read, "I might be slow, but I'm ahead of you."

If the south is "our crazy uncle in the basement", then consider that most at large child molesters are relatives, even if they live in the midwest, California, Boston, New Jersey, etc. They're all over the place, and none is worse than the others, except that the more subtle the racism and bigotry (as in Boston as a grand example), the more difficult it is to uncover and undo.

I'm not saying you're wrong about the south: I just think you left out a lot of other territory that's got its own human stains to deal with.

Thank you, that was perfect, and crystallizes very well the difference I was trying to put my finger on.

--Ron

<<Clearly there is a difference between irrational hatred and justified hate. Unfortunately, conservatives - as well as many liberals it would seem - would have us believe that irrational hatred is justified and justified hate is irrational.>>

Indeed...

Thank you. You're right. And this is the problem as I see it, and as I have had to live in it: one can only descend to the level of the monstrous if we don't take Nietzche's advice. We become what we behold, and civil society can't afford that.

"An eye for an eye and eventually the whole world is blind."

This is a really difficult but possibly very worthwhile discussion Helms has kicked off (absolutely no pun intended). And your point here is, of course, very well taken. It is a fine line to say the least, especially for one like me, a southerner raised to be different from most of my cousins (I was an only child), brought up by a father who, though very secretive during much of his life, ultimately stood head and shoulders above most of those around him and a mother who taught me that I must never use the word "hate" nor to feel it as an emotion. Then I was turned loose among my less-educated, dirt-poor cousins in southern Maryland and flatland Viriginia, to practice the art of loving -- not just simple tolerance. I agree, tolerance does not mean sainthood, and there is a time and a place for everything. Jesse Helms, for instance, was alive for a long time -- seemingly centuries -- and during his life there were plenty of opportunities to not tolerate him nor his veiws nor his hate-driven work. I might well have cursed him to his face, but I was raised not to lower myself to the level of that which I found intolerable in others. It's not easy being this way, especially when most of the clan is a self-hating, mixed-race hillbilly mess who no doubt will be talking fondly of ol' Jesse when I arrive at the family reunion tomorrow. At least they'll start doing it when they see me coming.

Mother, blood and soil; it's a tough one.

When I go down there tomorrow, into the dragon's jaws once again, I will be among people who have very mixed feelings about me, and it is largely mutual. Still, if I need them I know they'll show up for me, and I will for them, at least so long as it isn't because of some unspeakable deed which, so far, has exceeded their reach. Then again, some of them are pretty ok. Especially the visibly black ones. The ones who are more Potowamac Indian and Irish are the most insecure (and, interestingly, the most ignorant, often willfully so). It is that last cluster which grew up in a three room shack, 12 of them, without indoor plumbing, seven boys in one bed, one separate (because he'd had polio and was more fragile); the two girls slept on daybeds (I guess that's what they were) in the "big room" where the wood stove was. When I stayed over, I made eight in a bed. Yes, there was the mandatory car up on blocks.

The mostly Irish contingent are almost as bad, except for a couple who were closest to me in age coming up. I've won them over. They even laugh at the fact that we're "racially confused." And one of the Dozen now has an actually black grandson, upon whom he dotes. The others mutter, but they show up anyway. One we refer to as "The Grand Dragon." Each year he gets a little more upset by that. Evolution takes time.

An aside here: while dragged along on a fishing trip in 1949 I accidentally found a lynching victim. I was four years old. I didn't quite understand what it was I briefly saw, but I never forgot it, nor the smell, nor the pervasive feeling of something more terrible than my tiny mind could take in.

But back to Helms. Yes, the people who lynched Negroes shared his views, and he pandered to those views in order to get where he wanted to be: at the top of that truncated pyramid.

There does, indeed, sometimes come what we call "killing time."

Each year the reunion is a little less tense. Tomorrow I will be there as my youngest daughter introduces her Indian (eastern type) fiance to them. Some are excited. Some have no idea what's coming. It will be interesting, possibly entertaining, and it could even wind up being one of those times when I have to spit in someone's face.

But I won't leave til I'm ready.

Nobody said it was easy.