Mick:

This is a sobering perspective, not just because of the gruesome deaths involved, which happen so much less frequently now, but because of the terrified hatred that lay behind those deaths, as well as those of so many others. That hatred is still alive and rampant in the back alleys and the small diners in many corners of this country. I think, for example, of the hatred that killed Matthew Shepherd in a storm of Christian silence. I think of the storm of consent that led Dan White to murder George Moscone and Harvey Milk.

The price of freedom, it is said, is eternal vigilance. What that vigilance must be tuned for, set its radar on, is not the threat of fascists, communists, socialists or independent thinkers, all of which can rise or fall in the market of ideas without excessive strife. It is the much more insidious threat of human hatred. If our alarms consistently went off when that threat loomed we would be a better people.

A