Why Hate Groups In America Remind Me Of My Dog Lucy.

It’s been about a week since the tragic events in Charlottesville Virginia took place which ended up with one dead woman and a whole bunch of injured people.
From all accounts, this was an organized pro-Nazi, pro white supremacy group event where the attendees arrived with guns, rifles, shields, body armor, knives and torches. Obviously expecting the best but preparing for the worst.
What I don’t understand is they were so prepared to face. This, in fact, turned out to be a bunch of unarmed, angry students and citizens of Charlottesville who didn’t want this kind of shit going down in their city.
I guess these protesters, and it’s still not clear what they were protesting about, really might have had some other purpose in mind. And that became pretty obvious when one of them decided to turn it into a home grown terrorist attack by mowing down a bunch of people with a car, tragically killing one of them.

Which, of course, is when all media induced hell broke loose.
These hate groups have always kind of fascinated me. Probably because I’m not what you would call a joiner. I will join a couple of people for coffee and maybe join the odd networking group. But that’s about it.
Now a lot of this could be attributed to the fact that I am a writer and we are solitary people by nature. But I think it has more to do with staying objective.
Once you make the decision to join a political party or a hate group or political association, you have already said to yourself, this is what I believe.
So I find it very difficult to understand someone who has come to the belief that guys like Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin had it right. And that people who supported slavery and the generations who came after them who supported black racial hatred and segregation had it right.
As a writer, I have a natural curiosity about what makes things tick, people especially.

Most people have a belief system that gets them through their lives with a laissez faire attitude. These people believe that the color of a person’s skin or the manifestation of a person’s god don’t matter nearly as much as the basic humanity they possess.
But the people who organize these hate groups and recruit people who basically have not developed a belief system are a mystery to me.
Mainly because if you listen carefully to them to find out what it is they actually believe, you will discover more often than not that they just don’t know. This is betrayed by the vagueness of their answers.
These people are very much products of a lineage that have always hated. The government. Black people. Hispanic People. Jews. Muslims. Gays. Trans-genders. Women. Take your pick.
They have grown up in a culture of hate. And so their natural tendency is not to stop hating, but to turn that hate into some sort of movement, attracting others of their kind.

The Why Of It.

Obviously, these people are hoping to gain some sort of power for their movement. And, frankly, that’s a lot easier to do in this day and age. With all the free publicity they can get from the 24/7 news cycle.
But the real question is this: If there is no belief system behind this quest for power, what happens when and if get it.

The Lucy Analogy

I had a dog once, a beautiful little Kerrie Blue terrier named Lucy. Lucy was the policeman of our back yard, and she loved to chase squirrels. She could do that shit all day.
I know that she was not interested in catching a squirrel, because one day, she actually did. I was only about 10 feet from her. And the expression on her face was one of total doggie freak out.
She dropped that squirrel like it was a hot coal and then came over and sat beside me. She was obviously in shock. And I guess it was a classic case of being careful what you wish for.
After that, she continued to chase squirrels, because that was her instinct, but her body language was definitely more subdued. Almost like she wanted to chase them but had no intention of ever catching one again. Because who needs to deal with that.
Well, I feel the same way about these extremist groups in the US and everywhere for that matter. By that, I mean what would happen if they actually had enough power to control a country. They would not have the slightest idea of even where to begin.

Hatred without a belief system is basically just madness expressed as anger.
I said that.

The trouble with the hate groups in the US, if course, is now they have been empowered by their fearless leader, the guy they voted for. But what they don’t understand is that nothing that he says or does is really about them.
It’s about keeping his voter base alive, even if a tiny chunk of them, which is all these hate groups represent, is actually the antithesis of what America is all about.

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