(Mary and Murray Judson, publishers of the Port Aransas South Jetty newspaper, are another Texas newspaper family and longtime friends of the Cookes. Mary makes some good points about the hate-filled world we live in. And it could happen here in Rockdale too.— K.W.C.)
Watching The Laramie Project, a production of the Port Aransas Community Theatre in recognition of PRIDE month, the sobering thought that “Hate is alive and well in the U.S.” kept streaming through my mind. (And kudos to PACT for presenting it!)
I thought of Uvalde where, at this point, we don’t know what the motivation was, but only someone filled with hate could look at the faces of those children and not only kill them but destroy them. In the process, he destroyed countless other lives.
I thought of Buffalo, New York, where on May 14 a white supremacist had such hate for people of color he made a pilgrimage to a Black neighborhood to kill as many Black people as he could. I thought of El Paso, where hatred motivated another white supremacist to make a trip across the country to rid that city of as many Hispanics as possible when he took aim in a Walmart on a Saturday afternoon in August 2019.
I thought of the shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Pennsylvania, where in October 2018 two different shooters claimed the lives of 11 Jews in Pittsburg and one in Poway.
I thought of the young revelers in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in the summer of 2016 who were targeted by a homophobic gunman who killed 49 and injured dozens of others because they were gay and lesbian.
And lest you think these things can’t happen in Port Aransas, it has. Michael Robert, a gay owner of the Sea Horse Inn here, on Aug. 8, 1996, was brutally stabbed to death because of his sexual orientation.
People are not born hating others. They are taught to hate by those charged with molding their characters. Today, the most prevalent teachers of hate are the keyboard warriors on social media who mock and malign people whose political and/or social viewpoints are not parallel to theirs. That hate is spilling onto our streets, our schools, churches and other venues where people gather.
Is this who we want to be? To maintain my sanity, I have to believe that we are better than that as a society. I have to hope there is a silent majority that does not participate in spreading hate.
Given the violence that this level of hate has promulgated, we are at a point where silence is no longer an option.
We have to speak out against this hatred. If we don’t, we contribute to its proliferation. We— everyone of us who does not speak out—put a stamp of approval on the mocking, the disrespect, the derogatory and demeaning behavior that is a pandemic fueled by hatred in this country. We are better than that. Aren’t we?
—Mary Judson, Port Aransas South Jetty
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