What explains it? What explains the darkness, the stark hatred inside people like Charles Worley, the so-called pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church in the town of Newton, North Carolina? Worley says his adherents “should build a great big large fence 50 or 100 miles long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. You know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”
The problem with people like Charles Worley is that they know their choirs, how to draw them in and how to preach to them. Such choirs come from the uneducated, the fearful, the bitter, the prejudicial, the resentful. Should we hold Charles Worley to account, or should we instead indict his more numerous, complicit lay supporters?
As Barack Obama said, infamously, in Pennsylvania, in 2008:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. They fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Well, that’s one explanation. But I think it goes deeper. People the world over do the same thing every day. Blame the immigrant. Blame the government. Blame the newcomer, the different one, the one who doesn’t believe what I believe. Blame him. Not me. Hate him. Not me.
Call me naive, but I think that public school education is the key. I had no idea, when I moved to North Carolina, that educated people could be viewed with such suspicion, and that education itself could be held in such low regard. Frankly, it is depressing to see what amounts to willful ignorance among a significant part of the populace here. It is not just some knee-jerk right-wing resistance to teachers’ unions. It is against teaching, period. Parents want to preserve their right to teach their children to hate the people they hate.
I don’t think I will live long enough to see this change. If it does, and I do, please come visit me in the rest home, give my shoulders a shake to wake me up, and shout to me, love won.
I will wake you up and let you know. It comes from fear, yes, I think it is mostly fear that you are what you hate. There was a kid in high school who used to hiss”faggot” at me everytime he passed me in the hallway. I am sure he is now happily married to the man of his dreams … or in a worst case scenerio, dead or hating himself deeply
Lester, as always, thank you for reading and for sharing your thoughts.
Good thoughts, Craig. It is very troubling and perhaps expression of outgroup hatred is more open and accepted in the south. It is everywhere and every-when. But there is progress. Fear of the outsider seems to be innate, but the good news is that the tribe has expanded from a few dozen related hunter-gatherers to larger national and other group identities including religious groups. Betty and I happen to be driving in Europe this week on vacation. Despite varying languages people everywhere here seem so much like us and so accepting of differences and outside-ness. Europe has its own problems but does represent an attempt to expand the non-hated in-group. Unfortunately it seems that our genes and basic culture favor only our families and not something abstract like humankind. But the tent is gradually getting bigger. So I am cautiously optimistic in spite of the many signs of hatred.