Thank you to all who responded to my request for tips on the hate crime I mentioned yesterday. You know, still nobody was able to turn up anything concrete, but I did get a lot of information on different hate crimes that have happened recently.
It plagues me and many others – a dreadful thought that won’t go away – how are people capable of these kinds of acts? Isn’t it terrible? But then again, I completely understand.
Think of hating the people that commit these types of crimes like a seed that you plant in your mind. It splits and sprouts the more you tell other people about it, the horror of it. The story spreads and the roots take hold in your head. Those people you told of this awfulness, explain it to others and pretty soon you have a nice field, and you can stand above everyone and sow all the seeds of hatred into more minds. Pretty soon the growth gets out of control, wild weeds popping up everywhere that you cannot predict, since you haven’t ever planted this particular seed before, much less in soil possibly more fertile than your own. Is this getting too “Consider the lilies” for you?
Then you have a jungle of poisonous plants, starving for some kind of fertilizer, looking for water, reason, blood – which is spreading out vast and too quickly to hold back. Then one green leafy shoot strikes out, taking an innocent victim to sustain its own need for more hatred.
We watched “The Warriors” recently. It is a brilliant film, just put out on DVD. I remember its initial release, when people were warned not to go to the theatre, for fear of gang related territorial clashes, as all the small warrior tribes that exist in society would come to see themselves portrayed as heroes and villains up on the big screen. This was a clever marketing ploy, as it brought even more patrons out to see the film, hoping to catch a glimpse of real life violence, a publicity stunt akin to the passing out of barf bags to audience members before schlocky horror movies in the 70s. “The Warriors” is a fictional fantasy of a futuristic, yet inescapably 70s, New York City, and all the gangs that ruled the different boroughs. They have a common leader, who preaches to them about unifying their personal struggles, and to remember that their strength lies in numbers.
Anyway, the leader is assassinated, and then the crime is pinned wrongfully on The Warriors. You should really see it – especially for the costumes. I wish gang members would be this elaborately attired, but then again, the true success of a gang lies in its ability to blend into society without being detected, so no one is going to be wearing a baseball uniform and that KISS style makeup every night to participate in gang related activity.
I saw that film back then and remembered a strange sense of longing, or actually a desire to belong, to a gang. There were none that I was eligible for, my age and my race prevented my induction anywhere, thankfully. I am still not really able to join one now, unless you call GLAAD or NOW a gang. What is great about “The Warriors” is that it has gangs that identify themselves along different lines, that will at times cross racial barriers, even gender ones (look for The Lizzies!). In real life, this is uncommon.
I believe hate crimes and hate groups are born from that desire to belong – love, ironic and twisted. It is a need for allegiance to that love, to prove one’s ardor to a creed, decided upon by whomever and whatever decides to get planted, what grows from the field, what will bloom, what will wither and what will die. With every season, turn, turn, turn.