Wow, I thought this kind of thing was done away with years ago

[--Pete]

Hi,

First the comparisons you mention are not really valid.

Why? They are all examples of groups that used violence to gain some goal and only managed to generate more violence.

Second, I understand your point, but it is easy to make when you are white middle class in the 60's in the US. A country were an eye for an eye is more or less in the constitution (with the weapons and all) and I guess you can at least imagine that people that for years are treated like 2nd grade citizens, are victims of police brutality and lynch mobs after a few 100 years say to themselves.....I won't take this anymore.

I am, by nature, often a violent person. I completely understand the desire to lash out. But I don't sympathize with it, either in myself or in others. If the objective is revenge, then violence is the path. If the objective is equality and respect, then one Martin Luther King, Jr., is worth a million of Malcolm X.

The big problem of course being that the victims of such behavior are often inncocent people.

No, the big problem is that hate generates hate and violence escalates.

But as I said before, murder or terrrorism and freedom fighting can sometimes be difficult to distinguish. In teh case of the KKK it is not so difficult to make that distinction.

The KKK is a great example of my point. Established to fight the perceived injustices and excesses of reconstruction, it rapidly became a racially motivated organization. The hatred it generated are part of what fueled the racial violence of the civil rights movement. Perhaps, had Lincoln lived and been able to impose his moderate plan for reconstruction, racial relations in this country would be generations ahead of where they are now. But the hatred of the South by the North generated, by many steps and over many generations, the hatred of the race riots of the 60's.

Sometimes violence is needed. But as a great leader will say in the far future, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

--Pete