With racial assaults and nonviolent marches in Georgia, downstate New York, and even as near as Middletown, a question arises as to the roots of hatred. Unfortunately, racism is one of those expressions of a general and latent hatred that seems to be in all people.
Hatred is a hydr-headed monster which manifests itself in varied fashions.
Sometimes it masquerades as patriotism, as it did in Hitler's Germany or Joe McCarthy's red-baiting. Its masks are innumerable, all concealing the same ugliness beneath. For instance, some who live here in the river valley have their own expressions of hatred. Some natives, apparently forgetting that we are a nation of immigrants, shun newcomers to the area. They are apparently seen as somehow different, if not because of the color of their skin, then simply because they are viewed as outsiders.