Scott’s Column: Charlottesville Aug 14, 2017 | News I respect what Utah Senator Orrin Hatch wrote on Saturday, “”We should call evil by its name. My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.” My grandfather received a Purple Heart for his sacrifice during the Second World War. He was in the Battle of Anzio, the Allied landing in Italy, and was so severely wounded they initially thought he was dead. My uncle Roy, also at the battle, heard that word and began writing the letter home to his parents informing them that grandpa had been killed. He spent six months recovering in the hospital in Naples and then even more time recovering back home. Surgeons weren’t able to get all of the shrapnel because some was too close to his spinal cord. He lived the rest of his life knowing that if the fascist shrapnel he carried in his body shifted just a little, he would be paralyzed. Grandpa kept some of the shrapnel they took out of him. He would on occasion show it to us grandkids. My grandfather didn’t offer his body in the cause for freedom so that in 2017 Nazis and Confederates could openly attack this country. I am appalled and outraged and, frankly, overwhelmed. Yes, this has always existed. I’m an Oklahoman who lived in the Oklahoma City metro area in 1995 when white supremacist Timothy McVeigh murdered my fellow citizens including 19 children. The 1990’s saw a rash of white supremacist violence, but at the time we all believed it was a tiny fringe group that mostly hid away from the public eye. What we saw this weekend though was a frightening revelation that this wasn’t a tiny, hidden fringe anymore. Young men in polos and khakis openly paraded their vile ideology before the world as they surrounded a church with burning torches while a black woman, the UCC’s own Traci Blackmon, was preaching inside. Later one of those young men borrowed a tactic from ISIS and with his car mowed down a crowd of patriots. As more than one commentator noted, a woman died fighting Nazis in Virginia in 2017. This isn’t lack of civility or political polarization or economic discontent. This is a manifestation of evil. Our forebears of the 1860’s defeated the Confederacy. In the 1940’s they fought a world war to defeat Fascism. In the 1960’s they were triumphant over Jim Crow. And so to us falls the task of defeating evil once gain. As our Congregationalist foremother Julia Ward Howe wrote: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, Who is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, And has loosed the fateful lightning of a terrible swift sword; God’s truth is marching on.
