A hatred that can destroy men’s souls

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June 12, 2009 | The News & Advance | Lynchburg, Virginia

Of all the spots for hatred to rear its head, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum had to have been the last place anyone would have thought.

It is, after all, a museum dedicated specifically to the Nazi Holocaust of World War II and its 11 million victims and generally to the consequences of racism, bigotry and hate, working to eradicate those evils from society.

But Wednesday, James von Brunn changed all that.

The 88-year-old Maryland man strode into the Washington, D.C., museum and began shooting. According to The Washington Post, von Brunn stepped into the museum, pulled out his rifle and fired at a security guard. Other guards opened fire on von Brunn.

On the floor, mortally wounded was Stephen Tyrone Johns, a six-year veteran of the museum’s security force.

A veteran of WWII, von Brunn wrote on his white supremacist Web site that he had come to believe he had fought for the wrong side, that Adolf Hitler was right in trying to rid the world of Jewish people.

On his site, he writes of returning from the war to a New York City he didn’t recognize, one totally controlled by a powerful but unseen Jewish cabal. Every job he didn’t get, every career setback he experienced, everything wrong in his miserable life he blamed on “the JEW.” In 1981, he even went so far as to try to kidnap and hold hostage then-Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and the Fed’s board of governors. He was later convicted and served more than six years in a federal prison.

Von Brunn’s cancerous hatred, unfortunately, isn’t unique ... only how it ultimately manifested itself is.

As much as American society has progressed in the last 40 years, racism and bigotry still find fertile ground just beneath the surface in far too many people.

Psychotic hatred isn’t a liberal or conservative thing nor does it infect only people of faith. Racism can be found in souls regardless of the outer skin color. George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi movement, was an atheist who, like Hitler, merely twisted the words of religion to form a basis for his hate.

And we encounter it right here in our city. When you hear someone complain about the Fifth Street roundabout as a waste of money over there or downtown revitalization as a waste of resources in that part of town, you know what’s being left unspoken.

Society must somehow overcome its irrational fears of change, its distrust of “those people” and its anger toward “them.”

And right here in Lynchburg, we’ve perhaps hit upon part of the solution in the form of last year’s Community Dialogues on Race and Racism.

At its core, the Community Dialogues were all about people getting to know one another. It’s difficult to hate someone you know by name, rather than “those people.”

Sadly, Wednesday’s museum shooting in Washington tells us that we’ve got a long way to go before we can rest ... if we ever can.

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