Our small town weekly newspaper published an advertisement this week which told employers who hire illegal workers, “this is your last warning.” An Internet search for the group responsible for the ad took me to this web site www.sovereigntycolorado.com which begins playing the national anthem when I open up the page.
In Broken Heartland: The rise of America’s Rural Ghetto, (pub. in 1990), Osha Gray Davidson discusses the growth of hate groups in rural areas.
Although the scores of far-right groups that honeycomb rural areas are only loosely knit together, most of them share a Byzantine philosophy that combines ‘constitutional fundamentalism’ with a religious movement based on racist throught called ‘Christian Identity.’They *refuse to recognize any government authority higher than the county sheriff (’posse comitatus’ is Latin for ‘power of the county’). They *believe that they alone are the true American patriots, and believe *the framers of the Constitution envisioned a ‘Christian Republic’ instead of a Democracy.
The Minutemen in Colorado apparantly are a spin-off of the Arizona vigilante group now “patrolling” the Mexican border. They are pandering to the already existing xenophobia of the founders of these little agricultural communities in eastern Colorado - German Lutherans, German Catholics, Baptists and Nazarenes, people who never had to interact with someone not like them until they started growing sugar beets and needed field labor.
These are the people who exemplify the Jeffersonian values that are the “best of America,” — hard working traditional families — if we pretend there is no racism in the land.
Now when the facilitators of community development groups come to town and ask these good people in meetings what their biggest concerns are, the top two are water and Mexicans. When the results appear in reports and newspaper articles, it has become “water” and “immigration.”
I put down the local paper and picked up the newsletter from the Southern Povery Law Center. Photos of four white men who look just like all the young white men in my town appeared with a story about a “pasture party” these guys had where they entertained themselves by severely beating a mentally disabled black man and then leaving him for dead along a country road near their town of Linden, Texas.
Johnson, 42 at the time of the incident, had the mental capacity of a 12-year-old. On September 28, 2003, he was brought to a “pasture party” to serve as the night’s entertainment. Pickups were backed up to a bonfire as partygoers taunted Johnson. They got him to dance a jig around the fire, and someone tried to get him to pick up a burning log, witnesses said.
One of the young men punched Johnson in the head and knocked him unconscious. Instead of taking Johnson to the hospital, the men dumped him into the back of a pickup truck and left him by the side of a remote rural road.
Johnson suffered serious brain injuries, and he’ll never fully recover.
Since the Cass County, Texas, juries that heard the cases against two of the defendants acquitted them of serious felony charges, recommending only probation, and the other two were allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges and testify against the others, the Center has filed a civil suit for damages.