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Anybody Here Seen my Old Friend Ian Smith?: Where do Evil People Go When They Die?

When I saw the name, that name, Ian Smith, in the paper's today, I shrunk back from my own computer.

I'm 48 and was raised to be apolitical by fundamentalist Southern Baptists who thought having a news awareness, with all the ungodliness on display there, was, well, ungodly. We weren't allowed to play cards (tools of the devil) or games with dice in them (like Monopoly). Needless to say, we weren't allowed to watch the news, listen to news radio or read newspapers. Both the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam War, which raged through my adolescence, were tumults I learned of during my 20's in the 1980's. Still, even I somehow knew how much that man hated me and how much his hatred was required to justify white privilege. His racism, and the larger reality of racism in general, was a poison I couldn't avoid inhaling. It's hard to describe what knowing how thoroughly you're despised does to you. And now, like Richard Nixon, Smith's gotten to die peacefully in his feather-bedded mansion. Where's the justice for those who brutalize the world, curse an entire race/continent, and go to their graves defiant?

Posted by Debra Dickerson on 11/20/07 at 3:56 PM | Comments (4) | Email | Print

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