So, I understand that there are people out there that aren't upset and outraged by the extremist terrorism that happened in Charlottesville and claim they don't support racism but they also refuse to stand up and speak out for any multitude of reasons. But I want you to consider something when you think of your inaction, your silence, your complacency, your refusal to acknowledge the brutal reality of what has brought our country to this point.
When you sit there in idle neutrality remember this: Hitler and the NAZI party did not rise to power without the support of good, upstanding, and moral Germans who did not necessarily agree with the hatred, murder, execution, and genocide of their fellow Germans, fellow countrymen, fellow neighbors, their friends and families but did not oppose it at all costs, at all turns, at every time it reared its ugly, toxic, hate-spewing head.
Hitler and the NAZI party did not rise to power on a global scale without the appeasement from other nations that simply believed granting Hitler an inch here, an inch there would prevent outright war, would prevent them from following through on the ignorantly-Phrenology-based, xenophobic, overtly hostile, and blatantly violent rhetoric that lead to the genocide of over 10,000,000 innocent people through execution by gun, and--when that proved too slow--chemical weapons, forced-labor camps, starvation, incineration, and medical and scientific experimentation to name a few.
Remember the people that sat by and watched NAZI and SS soldiers round up their neighbors, friends, and loved ones; watched them dig ditches; watched them kneel before the ditch they dug; watched as the soldiers executed each man, woman, and child with a gun shot to the back of the head; watched as they were lead to cattle cars destined to their graves; watched as the bombs fell and kill their own families as the Axis crumbled and the sword of Damacles fell upon the German people that sat by not wanting to stand up, to speak out, to fight ignorance and hatred.
Who will speak for you when the machine knocks on your door? Will you stand by and watch your neighbors enter cattle cars, death-by-labor camps, ovens, gas chambers, and mass graves? Will you sit as men, women, and children are ruthlessly hated and executed? Will you allow the torches to set aflame your friends, neighbors, coworkers, lovers, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and children?
Will you sit there and say it's not your fault, your responsibility, your duty, your place?
Will you sit idly by as it happens and deny reality?
Will you deny white privilege and the extremist terrorism emboldened by it exists in your armchair unaffected by the terror because your privilege allows you that freedom?
Will you deny the literal life and death struggles that all non-Whites face because you look at the world with “colour-blind eyes” from a “post-racism” ivory tower?
Will you remain silent because this unending battle doesn't directly affect you?
What will you tell your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren in 50 years? Will you tell them it wasn't your place, your responsibility, your place to stand up and say something?
Will you read them the memoirs of Holocaust survivors? The memoirs of Holocaust victims that never made it out?
Will you tell them the stories and read the memoirs of your grandparents and great-grandparents that stormed the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, that fought across the Rhine, and that drove through the deserts of North Africa facing unending torrents of machine gun fire to fight beat the fascist war machines back to Italy, to Germany, to Japan?
What will you tell the people?
Charlottesville is waiting.
America is waiting.
The world is waiting.
What say you now?
