I am going to take you on a journey through history to show you why the current battle for Ethnic Studies and other human rights is so important, especially since it is directly related to what happened yesterday.

Arizona is now experiencing what Latinos have been experiencing, and it is time to stop the hate!

You could write a whole book on the connections, but we will explore a brief overview of Hate in Arizona today.

As a response to yesterday’s tragic events, Laine Lawless, very well known in Tucson as a member of the Minutemen, issued the following on her Facebook page:

AZ Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (Dem) assassinated in Safeway store parking lot in Tucson by another Democrat! Too bad Traitor Raul Grijalva wasn’t with her! He won’t be missed!

Who cares?

I care and let me explain why this matters. The reason many Latinos and Ethnic Studies students know these people, including Lawless, is because they would often show up at our events and cause trouble.

Tucson did not care. Most of you reading this perhaps did not care when they did show up.

You cannot turn off the hatred. You cannot go out in the desert and hunt Mexicans like it is a sport and just turn that hatred off when you enter the city. Meanwhile, as a Minuteman, who are you out there with, spending days and nights chatting with over future plans?

Neo-Nazis such as JT Ready and Sean Pearce, Russell Pearce’s son, who now works for Sheriff Arpaio.

Some of these Minutemen would show up, as they did back in the Spring of 2006, to Armory park, where students and the community were gathered in downtown Tucson. They started on the corner across the street, but the police determined that their First Amendment rights were SO important that they forced their presence into the middle of the park even though the organizers of the park event had a permit.

This is like renting a ramada at the park, paying the fees, and then some jerks show up at your kid’s birthday party and start yelling out racist slurs, and the cops allow them to yell at your family because of First Amendment.

First of all, this would not happen, as the cops would probably take them away.

But when it’s a bunch of brown kids, then the cops INSIST on the First Amendment. And then they turn their back when other crimes are broken which I will mention shortly.

The Minutemen, Liane Lawless included, were now in the middle of the park yelling racist slurs at teenagers. Then they broke the law by starting a fire in the middle of the park.

While for most of us if we were to start a fire in the middle of the park, not at a firepit, we would be arrested, but if you are a hateful person and burn a Mexican flag while shouting hateful language, the cops look the other way. Literally turn the other way… facing the brown youth while the white supremacists behind them break the law.

This was Tucson in 2006, before Tom Horne’s side-kick Margaret Dugan came to Tucson High School and ordered that there would be NO questions or discussion, just her speaking. They specifically targeted and went to all the Mexican-American studies classes and told the students to be silent. So the students put duct tape over their mouths, and during her speech they stood up and walked out.

Brown youth voices silenced once again.

That is what started Tom Horne’s vendetta against TUSD, which finally came to fruition in 2011 when he was able to use powers granted to him in HB2281 take the first step in banning Ethnic Studies courses.

A quick recap of 2006: Republicans like the Minutemen come and yell at you and you have to stay silent. Then government officials come and lecture you about loving Republicans and you have to stay silent. All of these events are related, especially if as a Tucson High School student you are in the middle of it.

The general public may not care, but this is reality nonetheless. This really happens in Arizona.

When minutemen can’t hunt Mexicans out in the desert, they pick on brown teenagers. In fact one of them had a daily taunt session, standing on the corner across from Calli Ollin, a high school run by Chicanos por La Causa, right next to Main Library downtown, and with a bullhorn he would shout racist slurs at the Latino youth.

This is the kind of environment Latino youth have to go through everyday, being called a wetback and spic everyday when you are a teenager? Life is already tough enough, self-esteem issues at a max, and now some angry white dude is trying to instigate a fight with you, following you with a bullhorn hoping you strike back.

Just take it.

Accept it.

The rest of Tucson doesn’t care about you.

If you do something, TPD will be glad to add another brown kid to the prison system. Cha-ching for CCA!

Fast-forward to today

You have already seen plenty on the media about Sarah Palin painting crosshairs on Giffords’ district.

Lock and load!

Don’t retreat, re-load!

If the crosshairs were not bad, why did Sarah Palin take them down from her website this weekend?

JT Ready is already noting the fact that Gabrielle Giffords is the

“first Jew to Congress from Arizona.”

Giffords district is along the Mexican border, and the rancher that was killed, Robert Krentz, was in her district. They immediately blamed a Mexican for the shooting even though, to this day, there is no suspect.

A few weeks ago a border patrol agent was killed just south of Tucson in Rio Rico.

JT Ready sent a message to my friend in the Latino media up in Phoenix that

“Your people took one of ours today. We WILL get revenge.”

The point here is that the same anti-Mexican, anti-Immigrant forces are also neo-Nazis, and Nazis tend to be anti-Jew last I heard. They are filled with hatred of humanity.

As I said earlier, it is hard to turn off the hatred.

It is hard to go from hating an immigrant, a person living here for 20 years but who doesn’t have papers, and then to look at me and embrace me because I do.

If you hate my Mexican brothers and sisters, you will hate me.

If you hate any person, you will hate me.

If you hate, you hate all of us.

Because hate has consumed you.

The federal judge that was killed yesterday, Judge Roll, had death threats against him in the past for a case he heard involving illegal immigrants in 2009.

Who do you think was sending those death threats?

What kind of groups, what kind of people?

What kind of people can kill an innocent 9 year old girl?

Also in 2009 two minutemen, Shawna Ford and Gunny Bush, invaded a home in Arivaca, in Southern Arizona, and killed 9 year-old Brisenia Flores.

The media ignored Brisenia’s murder for the most part.

Thankfully they are not ignoring Cristina Greene’s senseless murder yesterday, but does one get more press coverage than the other? What is different?

Regardless, the end result was the same.

Two 9 year-old innocent girls sacrificed on the altar of hate in Arizona.

Hate.

Hate.

Everywhere.

They can no longer see humanity.

The heart.

The soul.

The temple of the Holy Spirit.

The person that Jesus died for.

A human being.

All they see is the color of the skin. And it is different from theirs. That is all that is needed.

Shallow

We should not judge people based on the color of their skin.

We should not “judge a book by its cover.” Yet this is what Arizona is doing today. Fox News bashes TUSD Ethnic Studies based solely on judging a book by its cover.

Occupied America… oooh they are “occupied.”

Pedagogy of the Oppressed… see they are teaching they are “oppressed.”

They clearly have not read the books. Yet these are the verdicts that come from our leaders, Tom Horne and John Huppenthal and people like Bill O’Rielly continue to spread that misinformation.

That fear.

That hatred.

If you hate a group of people so much that you are willing to incite violence against them, that hate is hard to turn off.

It will turn into hate of your friends, your family, your community.

You may even branch off and become isolated, a loner, a “lone-wolf” acting alone.

But the hate came from somewhere. We are not born into this world with so much hate, especially one rooted in racism and politics.

Creating the Consciousness of Hate

You cannot have hate until you have the most primal of human emotions present.

Fear.

Once the seed of fear is planted in an individual, it can grow to consume them, especially if it is watered and nourished with a daily supply of fear.

They are invading our country!

Aztlan… they want to retake the United States!

We are going to be the minority!

Border invasion!

Illegals!

They don’t speak English!

They are taking our jobs!

They are not one of us!

There is a really good book called What’s the matter with Kansas? In it the author explores why so many poor Republicans will work against their own best interests to rally behind rich Republicans?

How was this masterful brainwashing accomplished? Do not tax the rich… because one day I will be that rich person?

The problem with this type of logic is that it breaks apart quickly. Once you have had your fill of Theory and Rhetoric about this, you look at Reality and notice it is much different than what you hear from Republicans and Fox News.

People start to question this and before you know it, they are so fed up with the lies that they elect the nation’s first black President.

With logic and reasoning not on their side, and with the fear of terrorism waning, the Republicans had to bring the fear closer to home.

The terrorists are not on the other side of the world. They are here, coming in from south of the border!

And a Muslim Kenyan is in the White House!

They don’t speak English.

They pray to the Virgin Mary.

Or Allah.

They don’t look like us!

They are the “seed of Cain” according to Mormonism.

They are taking our jobs.

Taking all our health care.

Taking all our money.

They are taking over our schools!

These “anchor babies”… these less-than-humans… these immigrants… these poor brown kids… they are going to our schools and learning English. They are learning science and math and learning about their heritage and history and culture. They are graduating as valedictorians over our own kids.

They are going to college and graduating.

They are scientists and engineers. Congresspersons and Supreme Court justices.

They are writing their stories in the media. They are exercising their own First Amendment rights and speaking out, petitioning the government for a redress of grievances.

They speak. They are in the media. They are a threat to “our way of life” because they are not “one of us.”

John Huppenthal, the current state Superintendent of Public Instruction, ran ads last year saying.

“John Huppenthal is one of us… he stopped bilingual education… he will stop La Raza!”

and he won…

Listen to Jon Justice in the morning and listen to the fear that you hear.

Fear of people, fear of life, fear of Democrats…

Political hatred

The election of the first black president changed everything.

People were afraid that a non-American was in the White House.  And Fox News fanned those flames, and so did right-wingers.

“We are not afraid of Obama coming to Arizona… he has to show us his papers also!” – Russell Pearce.

We end up clinging to the Bible in these times… the same Bible which the right-wing claims is predicting that these are the end times.

The apocalypse is near.

Time to cling to those Bibles… and those guns!

What good is a gun if you never use it?

Set a target, set your crosshairs on Gabby Giffords. Say lock and load. Say don’t retreat, reload!

And then take no responsibility for your actions.

The entire 2010 election in Arizona was run on fear. Consider the superintendent’s race. You had a 30 year veteran of teaching, Penny Kotterman, running against a state legislator who is a big fan of more charter schools, and who voted to cut funding to schools.

But he was pro-SB1070, and anti-Ethnic Studies, and that’s all you need for victory.

Feed on the fear, not the facts.

Final words

In order to win an argument, you either need a lot of facts or a lot of fear. You can appeal to a person’s higher brain of logic and reason, or you can appeal to their lizard brain of “fight or flight.”

Since the Republicans lack logic and reason, since they KNOW they are in trouble because you cannot balance the budget unless you raise taxes since so many vital services have already been cut, they must appeal to fear.

Schools have been shut down, healthcare slashed, and how do you get away with even more cuts?

Schools are evil, schools are promoting the overthrow of the US Government! Healthcare means jobs lost! Lies, fear, and hate.

This whole attack on the 14th Amendment is a distraction. Russell Pearce knows he cannot balance the budget with their Republican economic policies, so to prevent an uprising from the people he is trying to distract us.

It’s the Mexican’s fault!

Those kids in TUSD are evil!

And meanwhile no jobs are created, schools cut, parks closed, and more prisons built.

As the situation gets worse, there are some who are troubled who will take the distractions seriously. Perhaps Obama really is not American. Perhaps Giffords really is a Communist.

Perhaps Tucson High School students really are trying to overthrow the US Government.

THEY MUST ALL BE STOPPED!

And events like what took place yesterday are the results.

Hopefully we can come together as a community and realize that when you preach a hateful message, hate will grow from hate and spread like a virus, and with uneducated people (since schools get cut) with more guns and a lot of fear that these are the end days…

… perhaps the Republicans are trying to ensure an Apocalypse takes place.

It’s not just Arizona Republicans that are behind this. It is anyone who is neutral and silent when humanity is being attacked.

My solution is simple. Stop the hate. Spread the love.

Don’t hate your human brothers, help them! And help the Arizona Republicans by voting them out of office next time so they have some time to reflect on the world of love rather the rhetoric of hate.

Things are different in Arizona today, and I hope people realize that this struggle has been going on for a while, and the events that took place with Giffords yesterday are part of something much bigger.

It is not enough to ignore the right-wing hate speech. It is not enough to turn off Jon Justice or Fox News.

They need to be off the air so that the more gullible in our society do not take their message of hate to the next level. This is the only way to prevent future catastrophes.

As long as hate rules the waves of Arizona, forming a Collective Consciousness of Hate, fearful people with guns will act, and the end result will never be a good one.

Stop the fear.

Stop the hate.

Educate.

And if you want peace, work for justice. Justice for students, justice for gays and minorities, and justice for immigrants.

Only then can we become one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty…

… and justice for all.

“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

- Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik

The shooter does not need to belong to an organization. He belongs to something else.

He is a US Citizen that is constantly bombarded with airwaves of hate, playing of his fear, and with the right buzzwords and messages, can ignite the spark in the lizard brain that leads to fear.

Crosshair set, the target’s on Giffords.

Lock and load. Don’t retreat, reload!

One down, 18 more to go, including an innocent 9 year old girl, born on 9/11, a day of horror, and lived until 1+8/11, another day of horror.

Dear Right-wing media and Sarah Palin:

Take responsibility.

Mean what you say and say what you mean.

Even if what you say is mean.

Take responsibility.

- Three Sonorans

To everyone else, if we stood up to these messages of hate in the past, perhaps we could have avoided the current situation. Nonetheless, these voices are stronger than ever.

Please help us fight the hatred, fear, racism, and xenophobia in this state.

When hatred is heard all around us, silence is no longer an option.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 9th, 2011 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Headline news. Tags for this post: arizona news, brisenia flores, ethnic studies, gabrielle giffords, hate, hate groups, hb2281, Headline news, joe arpaio, john huppenthal, jon justice, jt ready, liane lawless, militias, minutemen, neo-nazi, nsm, sarah palin, tucson news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.