By Dorian De Wind
It has been mentioned before, sometimes in passing, sometimes at length. However, the grotesque, cruel irony — the perverse senselessness of it all — did not fully register with me until I read a short, eye-opening column in TIME Magazine.
As had been quite apparent from his past actions and diatribe and as it became crystal clear from his after-the-rampage shouts, anti-Semite, white supremacist (“loud racist, good neighbor“) Frazier Glenn Cross, AKA Glenn Miller, wanted to shoot some of those Jews, those “children of Satan,” who “take over our government, our banks, and our media.”
In his infamous ”Declaration of War,” Glenn Miller, the then-leader of the White Patriot Party, offered his “Aryan warriors of The Order” 10 points for “smiting” a Jew, 25 points for an “influential Jew” and 888 points for Morris Seligman Dees, the co-founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
And therein lies the grotesque irony: The victims of Cross’s cowardly murders were not Jewish.
David Von Drehle in his TIME piece says, “This is significant–but some reflection is needed to see what it means,” and he expands:
Cross shouted “Heil, Hitler!” from the back of a police car after his arrest for killing Reat Griffin Underwood, 14, a Boy Scout who loved to sing, and the boy’s grandfather, William Corporon, an admired physician. Members of a thriving United Methodist congregation, the victims were shot in the JCC parking lot. Terri LaManno, an occupational therapist and Roman Catholic, was killed at Village Shalom, where she was visiting her mother.
Yes, they were all white and Christian and did not fit in Cross’s evil “point system.”
Von Drehle concludes:
Make no mistake: the crime was no more senseless and the killer no more wretched simply because he killed the very people he imagined to be his own.
What Cross’s error shows is that even the most race-obsessed and tribe-conscious person imaginable–after a lifetime spent aggravating differences–could not tell one person from another when he left his cocoon of resentment. In the real world, we are mostly alike. While Cross nursed the idea that genes divide us, he proved himself wrong in the end. Shotgun poised, he couldn’t tell who was who or which was which.
Now, that is “significant” and deserving of much more reflection than you or I may have given it in our immediate horror and revulsion at what this man did in his quest to take “his” country back from the “Niggers, Jews, Queers, assorted Mongrels, White Race traitors, and dispicable [sic] informants.”
There was only one little problem for this bigot, however, as Drehle alludes to. In our great melting pot called America, the alleged murderer could not even identify his enemies — his victims — for, in the final analysis, we all are the same, all Americans, all human beings.
It is only in their sick minds that the likes of Cross conjure up differences that make us worth 2, 10, 20, 50 points in their despicable [no sic here] supremacy system.
Under his own, perverted point system Miller got exactly zero points for his act of hate, bigotry and cowardice.
Our court system will give Frazier Glenn Cross, AKA Glenn Miller, exactly the number of judicial points he deserves.
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Preceding reprinted with permission from The Moderate Voice