Indiana has seemingly become a hotbed of racism and violence.
You may remember the wacked out fella that shot an innocent man coming out of the Korean Church on the Bloomington IU Campus a couple of years ago? He (the shooter)was a member of the worldwide church of god ran by the nut from Illinois.
Well, to add to this. Two men were arrested from my county recently. They were militia members, who were preparing to bomb a theatre in bloomington because they were doing a production of Jesus that the militia felt was derogatory. Thank god, they were caught in the planning stages.
In Terre Haute, there is a privatly run holocaust museum called Candles. The woman who runs it and founded it is a holocaust surviver. Someone spray painted anti-semetic graffitti on her museum and burnt it down!
Last week, in Sullivan County, someone for the second time spray painted the home of a Latino family with "spic get out" type graffiti, and burnt the home to the ground. The family barely made it out of the home alive!
There are KKK groups in Indiana who are constantly petitioning for parade permits, meeting in small towns, and creating an uproar in communities that don't want them there.
And you know what? People on the whole are taking it in stride. I mean, there seems to be no uproar about it. Just drone like, just the facts type news reports. Nothing said about this problem as a whole, or what to do about it.
Bloomington is a very liberal and open minded city. It is considered one of the top gay friendly places in the country in fact. You would think that the citizens there would help in these matters, but the bloomington paper remains essentially silent.
It seems that communities in Indiana are so insular. People in bloomington are not interested in what goes on in a neighboring county for example. If these things happened in their county, there would be action!
One problem is that the more progressive and vocal places like bloomington have no telivision networks available outside their city. Terre Haute on the other hand have two stations. But the problem is, all they talk about is farm news, agriculture etc.
They refuse to even discuss these awful attitudes and arsons in any detail. They quickly mention so and so is taking collections up for candles, but never report on racist attitudes or how we should keep this from happening again.
There is no heated call to find the culprits either. Like it isn't even important.
What really gets me is, these two cities are university towns! IU and ISU. Where is the voice of reason and activity? Where is the outrage and demand for action?
"All that is needed for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing"