12 AUGUST 17, 2017 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
EDITORIAL
A united Queens will defeat bigotry
Queens prides itself as being one
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of the most ethnically and religiously
diverse places on the
planet. That is something the majority
of us take pride in.
If we are honest with ourselves,
however, there is a very small group of
people in our fair borough who don’t
feel the same way. They are afraid of
change, afraid of diff erence, afraid of
people who don’t look like themselves.
Sadly, this group exists in varying
numbers in every corner of this nation.
Such irrational fear is misguided
and wrong, but when these hate-fi lled
people band together, they have a
tendency to lash out violently against
those patriots who believe in justice,
tolerance and diversity.
We witnessed that in Charlottesville,
VA, on the weekend of Aug. 12, in
which white supremacists and neo-Nazis
clashed with those who came to
denounce the hate being spewed in
the town. One of the white supremacists
then took this heinous display to
a murderous level by driving his car
into a crowd of counter-protesters,
killing one and injuring 19 others in
what many rightfully described as an
act of domestic terrorism.
The incident was sickening enough.
Then President Trump, a product of
Queens, waited two full days to condemn
white supremacists and neo-Nazis
by their names. His comments came
only aft er a tidal wave of criticism
from many sides that he should have
made such a condemnation in the
immediate aft ermath of the incident.
Trump’s initial refusal to call out
the white supremacists by name emboldened
the bigots; CNN cited one
neo-Nazi’s remark that Trump had
“left the door open and clearly said we
are all equal under the law.”
The president’s failure of leadership
indeed gives the bigots the opening
they’ve wanted to spread their hate
into the mainstream. That must never
be accepted or tolerated. Our nation
fought a world war to defeat Nazism,
and we’ve worked too hard over the
last century to beat back intolerance
in our pursuit of granting equal civil
rights to every American.
Queens residents are already rising up
against white supremacy, as evidenced
in a protest rally held on Aug. 15 in
Jamaica. Beyond organized action, however,
we must all do our part to instill a
tolerant and just society in our borough.
We must treat each other with
respect, and if we see someone acting
out to harass or intimidate someone
because of who they are, we must all
stand up and tell them to stand down.
Why? Because history tells us that
when white supremacists know they
are outnumbered by good people,
they will run back into the holes out
of which they crawled.
