No “Both Sides” to Charlottesville

Let’s be clear. There is no “both sides” to Charlottesville.

Yes, we have free speech in this country and while it’s specifically to stop the government from stopping us from saying whatever we want, let’s not get in the weeds on that one like we always do.

Let’s look at it like this: A group of people whose main tenet is that whites are superior and the earth should be “cleansed” of everyone who isn’t white were marching around chanting “Jews will not replace us” as well as “blood and soil” (yes, a Nazi thing, just FYI) all while rallying around a statue of a confederate general.

Many things the president said about Charlottesville were incorrect, from who had permits, to the implication that you need them to protest to begin with. He even lied about the winery, which his son owns and isn’t anywhere near the largest in the country.

But “both sides” were at fault?

Just think it through from a moral perspective.

You have hundreds of people marching and chanting and armed to the teeth saying the want to kill you and they are the master race.

You are there to counter-protest and things get ugly. You stand up to people who want to murder you. One of your fellow counter-protesters gets killed when a car rams into a crowd.

And the President says “both sides” are to blame? Multiple times? Sure, the press was hounding him about it – but that is their job. How can they not hound him about such an outrageous statement?

Yes, I do know there are some fringe black groups who are anti-white; they are being tracked just like any hate group – and if they showed up with tiki torches calling for the murder of people, I would protest them too.

But that is not what Black Lives Matter is. BLM is a group of people standing up for themselves as they get beaten down over and over and over and over again, saying “Hey! We matter too.” We. matter. too.

They don’t promote hatred of other groups, they are asking for the same support and respect in the world that white people get.

I am walking a fine line trying to talk about this as white woman, but as I look around at Facebook threads, I am scared how many people, especially young people, are not getting this.

We have been brought up to think for ourselves and question authority and that it’s good to buck the system – which is great. So I understand how the idea of Trump rattling cages is appealing. I understand that mainstream media is a corporate whore and politics is stupid.

But I also think that maybe some are a generation too far away from World War II? I am stuck on all those people who died. The millions of Jewish people who were killed just for being Jewish. The millions of 20-something boys who had to go kill other 20-somethings because a group of people thought they were better than everyone in the world and wanted more land for the Lebensraum.

And then I keep coming back to this “both sides” argument.

In the 1920s and 1930s… the groups who protested and boycotted and fought the idea that whites were the superior race… do we think of them as the problem?

No, we consider them the resistance. They were saying “Jewish Lives Matter.”

So, yes. There *are* two sides to this.

The RIGHT side and the WRONG side.

Photo by Ryan M. Kelly / The Daily Progress