As many of us, regardless of our political stance, cherish the success of Barack Obama and the national mental breakthrough it represents, others have reverted to primitive stereotypes. The Los Angeles Times reports that just a month after his election,
[N]oose hangings, racist graffiti and death threats have struck dozens of towns across the country. More than 200 such incidents — including cross burnings, assassination betting pools and effigies of President-elect Barack Obama — have been reported, according to law enforcement authorities and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups. Racist websites have been boasting that their servers have been crashing because of an exponential increase in traffic. And America’s most potent symbol of racial hatred, the Ku Klux Klan, is reasserting itself in a spate of recent violence, after decades of disorganization and obscurity …
“We’ve seen everything from cross burnings on lawns of interracial couples to effigies of Obama hanging from nooses to unpleasant exchanges in schoolyards,” said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala. “I think we’re in a worrying situation right now, a perfect storm of conditions coming together that could easily favor the continued growth of these groups.” Experts attribute the racist activity to factors including the rapidly worsening economic crisis; trends indicating that within a generation whites will not comprise a U.S. majority; and the impending arrival of a black family in the White House …
“The rhetoric right now is just about out of control,” said Brian Levin, director of Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. “When you get this depth of hatred, it usually is the smoke before the fire.”
One white supremacist leader, describing himself as moderate, professes alarm.
“There is a tremendous backlash” to Obama’s election, said Richard Barrett, the leader of the Nationalist Movement in Learned, Miss. “My focus is to try to keep it peaceful. But many people look at the flag of the Republic of New Africa that will be hoisted over the White House as an act of war.”
The reaction is shown in acts both big and small.
In the small Louisiana town of Angie, 58-year-old Judy Robinson put an Obama sign outside her home a few weeks before the Nov. 4 presidential election. The morning after Halloween, she awoke to find the words “KKK” and “white power” spray-painted around her yard …
Late last month, two men with ties to a notoriously violent Klan chapter in Kentucky were charged in a bizarre plot to kill 88 black students and then decapitate an additional 14 students — and then assassinate Obama by shooting him from a speeding car while wearing white tuxedos and top hats.
Let us hope that these kind of acts stay as the drunken antics of a few uneducated bigots. But I’ve lived through the assasinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, gunned down by people of similar backgrounds, and I really have to wonder if Obama will survive his term.
Posted by jakking 
Jak's View of Vancouver v.3 