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Shame on Them
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Published: October 23, 2008
What is our state coming to? In the past several days, at least three ugly acts of vandalism have hit the Obama campaign here. Whether you support Barack Obama or John McCain for president, you should say loud and clear that such cowardly and potentially dangerous acts won't be tolerated in North Carolina.
With Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, scheduled to speak at Wake Forest University today, local Democrats and Republicans should say with one voice that vandals don't speak for North Carolina.
In Winston-Salem last weekend, vandals spray-painted "Free Palestine" and "liar" on the building that houses the Obama campaign headquarters. While Obama was speaking in Fayetteville Sunday, vandals slashed tires on 30 cars parked at the rally. And in the most jarring incident, a dead bear cub draped with a pair of Obama campaign signs was found Monday morning on the campus of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee.
Several students are in trouble over the incident. School officials said that it appeared to be a stupid prank, not a political statement, and it happened after the students found the cub's carcass while camping. Officials said the students told them they took political signs at random to cover the bear's wound and stop blood from spilling into the bed of the pickup truck they were driving.
Then why the prominent placement of the Obama signs? Carrying the poor cub's body back to display on campus was incredibly heartless and stupid, but it's hard to believe any college student wouldn't realize what kind of a signal they were sending by using those signs in that way.
But just in case they didn't, they should be ordered to take some history courses. These vandals and others like them are playing with fire, even if they're too ignorant or too young to realize it.
Anybody with a little knowledge or a little age knows all too well that such acts of vandalism, along with hate speech and bigotry, can create a very hazardous climate. We saw the horrible assassinations that climate helped lead to in the 1960s. We know all too well the danger that any president or presidential candidate faces -- or any major black leader.
For Obama, as the first black to win a major party's nomination for president, that danger is even greater.
He should face the toughest scrutiny America can give him, just as McCain should. But neither candidate should have to worry about violence against his campaigns, or, God forbid, himself. And neither campaign should put up with hate speech at rallies. There have been reliable reports of people at rallies for Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin shouting "kill him" in regard to Obama, although the Secret Service says in the latest Newsweek that it was unable to corroborate accounts of those remarks.
The irony about the vandalism in our state is all the positive press the heavy presidential campaigning has brought us. It's just possible that many outsiders have realized that we're a leading state in the New South instead of some backward holdout. A few cowardly acts by vandals won't change that picture, especially if we all speak out loudly against these creeps.
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