Two Very Different Incidents Same Lesson

The firing of the Agriculture Department's director of rural development in Georgia, Shirley Sherrod, for allegedly making racial remarks reminds me of something from my childhood. In my twelfth year we went to a family gathering in the Finger Lakes region. There, because I was studying German at the time, parental pressure resulted in a brief Teutonic conversation with an older distant cousin who had emigrated from Germany during the 1930s. I never saw the man again but later learned that he had been a Brownshirt who had to flee for his life when Hitler decided to eliminate Ernst Röhm and his followers on the last day of June 1934.

Now, I am not comparing Shirley Sherrod to my cousin, nor am I comparing the Obama Administration to Hitler’s regime, but I do believe that the situations are similar in that they both teach the same lesson. Just because you are part of an organization or culture pursuing evil policies does not mean that you are immune from the consequences of those malevolent practices. There are, of course, important differences between the two cases. First and foremost my cousin joined an organization that persecuted Jews and used violence to advance political ends, while Shirley Sherrod did absolutely nothing wrong.

When the victim of your supposed racial bias comes strongly to your defense it seems to me you have been wrongly accused and punished. Barak Obama should apologize to Sherrod and give her job back immediately. However, plenty of other people and groups also share responsibility for her plight. For example, the reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who both work so assiduously to maintain a climate of hyper-racial sensitivity. Also, the website, biggovernment.com who essentially manufactured this controversy. There is nothing wrong with exposing the very serious problem of real incidents of racial discrimination committed by the Obama Administration, such as the Justice Department’s decision to drop the charges of voter intimidation against New Black Panther Party members, though, when you create them yourselves, as in this case, you are no better than Jackson or Sharpton.

However, just as my cousin should not have been surprised when the violence his party espoused became an instrument to be used against him, neither should Sherrod be taken unawares when an accusation of racial bias, comes from her organization, which uses this political tactic on a regular basis.