The Way We Are

By BOB HERBERT
NYT

Stephen Johns, known as “Big John,” was opening the door for a man he thought was just an elderly visitor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington when he was shot dead on Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Johns was a security guard. The bullet that killed him was a reminder of the continuing menace of bigotry and violence that pervades this country — and that we insist on underestimating.

The authorities have identified an 88-year-old, hard-core white supremacist, James von Brunn, as the killer. Our knee-jerk tendency is to comfort ourselves by declaring that this guy is so freakish, so far out of the American mainstream, that he is not representative of much of anything. Sane people are not violently obsessed with blacks and Jews. The murder was a tragic aberration. After all, this is a country that only recently elected an African-American president.

So let’s mop up the blood from the museum floor, and try to keep matters in perspective.

The problem when we think in terms of freaks and aberrations is that there are so many of them, which calls into question just how freakish or aberrational they really are. Was it an aberration when, according to authorities, Scott Roeder went into the lobby of a Lutheran church in Wichita two weeks ago and shot Dr. George Tiller to death? Hardly. The murder of Dr. Tiller, who was the nation’s most prominent provider of so-called late-term abortions, was the fourth assassination of an abortion provider in the U.S. since 1993.

(More here.)