What the President Should Have Said About Charlottesville
My fellow Americans,
Today, a man drove his car into a crowd of people, killing one and injuring 19 others, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
This man was there to attend a rally organized by white supremacists, including the KKK and Neo-Nazis.
Here in the United States, we do not convict people of crimes outside of a court of law, and I will not do so now. But the video evidence is plentiful, and appears to me to be conclusive, and damning.
The woman who was killed was 32 years old, and her name is Heather Heyer. She was not killed by a person she was fighting with, or by a person trying to defend himself from her. She was standing on the street one minute, and crushed by a car the next.
Together, as a nation, I’d like to take a moment of silence to mourn the loss of Heather Heyer, to offer our support to her loved ones, and to reflect on the tragedy of her death and what it might mean for each of us, and for our great country.
I’d like to speak now to the men who gathered in Charlottesville this weekend carrying Nazi and confederate flags, chanting Nazi slogans and offering Nazi salutes, armed and dressed for battle; as well as anyone listening who may feel sympathetic to their cause.
You call yourself white supremacists, but you are superior to no one. You have nothing to be proud of today. The blood of Ms. Heyer is on your hands, and the shame of that responsibility shall haunt you to the ends of the earth, and for the rest of your days.
Your anger is misplaced. The people you hate have not and do not cause the problems you see in the world and in your lives. I urge you to take the energy you have applied to casting blame on others and turn it inward. Whatever is causing your pain, whatever abuse you have suffered, whatever injustices you have witnessed, whatever opportunities you feel have been denied to you, begin the journey of separating your inner injuries from the outside world and finding peace in this life. See a therapist. Visit a church. Move to a different town, away from acquaintances who fuel your anger.
But whatever you do, know this:
Hate will not win.
It cannot.
The human spirit is too strong. Too resilient. Too prevalent. The more you push for division, the more we will come together. The louder you shout racist, demeaning, ridiculous things at our friends and neighbors, the more quickly we will stand up and defend them. Every time you look at someone else and decide they are what is wrong because of what they look like, or how they speak, or who their parents are, we will be there to hold up a mirror—over and over, until you see that there is something wrong…and that thing is you.
Now, to the rest of you—my fellow Americans—shocked and angry and sad on this tragic day.
Do not give these broken, desperate, pitiful men what they want.
They did not travel to Charlottesville because they care about a statue. They did not cross the country with guns and knives, body armor and pepper spray, clubs and riot shields because they were hoping for a nice, quiet weekend of speeches from their favorite bigots.
They organized this event for one purpose and one purpose only—they wanted to start a fight. They were hoping that if they said mean enough things, and beat their chests hard enough, and made enough threats, that someone with different colored skin would take a swing, and give them an excuse to swing back.
Like petulant children who misbehave because the attention feels better than the punishment, these cowards baited us, and we bit.
And unfortunately, because there was fighting and violence, and because it takes two sides to fight, some in this country will argue that these despicable, racist bullies were not responsible for what happened.
Let me be clear: no one but the driver shares blame for the car that plowed into a crowd of pedestrians. And no one but the racists share blame for their bigotry. Their hatred is their own to live with, and without it none of the violence this weekend would have taken place. None of it.
But as a country, we have to be better than them.
As people who disagree—with every fiber of our beings—with what they stand for, we have to resist the urge to stoop to their level.
Their aim is violence. Their goal is no less than actual war—a war in which they can feel justified and righteous killing anyone who doesn’t fit their twisted image of purity.
But they are few. And we are many.
As has always been the case in history, the good people outnumber the bad by a thousand to one, and it is only in our forgetting that fact that evil has a chance to thrive.
In the 9/11 attacks, 19 men caused death and chaos. But hundreds ran towards it, racing into the debris and placing themselves in mortal danger to save who they could. The entirety of our greatest city came together to support…to repair…and to heal. This country—hundreds of millions of people—saw that the enemy was cowardly and hateful and terrible and decided in an instant that whatever our differences, our love for each other was too strong for that hate to matter. And the rest of the world—billions!—stood in our corner.
Against those odds, those 19 men stood no chance. They hit their targets, but they failed in their goal.
And today, the men who traveled to Charlottesville to pick a fight with America will see that their hate, too, is nothing in the face of our collective humanity.
We will show them, over and over, that we will not be bystanders to bigotry and bullying.
We will resist their chants of ignorance, and remind them that for every one of them, there are 10,000 of us.
We will speak loudly in support of our friends and neighbors that feel threatened and marginalized. We will assemble together, and outnumber them at every turn.
But we will not do the one thing they want us to—the one thing that would satisfy their perverse desires. We will not meet their taunting with violence in the streets.
We will, instead, simply refuse to let their twisted worldview seep into our own. We will silence them with an overwhelming chorus of love and tolerance and cooperation in the face of their claims that it can’t be done.
Together, we will succeed. As a country, and as a species.
One nation, one world, with one voice:
“Wave your guns and flags as much as you want, little man. You’re not fooling anyone. You are not strong, and we are not weak.”
Thank you, and goodnight.
