Racist lessons won't be lost in North Idaho

If anyone wants to argue about relics’ historical value vs. how they’re perceived today, please go ahead.

While you’re at it, toss in words or other symbols that might not have been offensive once upon a time but now can provoke heartache and acts of bloodshed; that mean something somewhere to someone and something completely different to someone somewhere else.

Debates on topics such as these have been raging for as long as humans have been able to articulate disagreement. Yeah, darn near forever.

People are going to disagree in degrees, from shades of gray to black and white. They’ll disagree based on their early family inculcation, their education, their religious beliefs, their friends, their enemies, their level of compassion, their grasp of logic, and of course, their inherent need to not be wrong.

So let’s not quibble. Let’s see if we can agree on something based on both common sense and common decency.

North Idaho has never been a hotbed of racism, but a small cluster of mentally and socially unwell people calling themselves the Aryan Nations managed to alter that image on a global scale. Even now, years after their inglorious implosion, our region is sensitive to any insinuation that those racist coals haven’t died out completely. Worse looms the fear that whatever drew racists here in the first place lingers still, with the potential to produce its poison all over again.

That’s why depicting black children as melon-munching “pickaninnies” anywhere constitutes a colossal spasm not just of the brain, but of the soul — here more than most places thanks to the racists who squatted here before.

There is no rationalizing it, no excuse. To brandish that message with the Confederate flag in the heart of a Coeur d’Alene Independence Day parade serves only one healthy purpose: That by the pain it inflicts, it pulls good people together remembering at what great cost the freedom of speech has been won and preserved.

Because of where we’ve been as a community, we know where we never want to go again.

And nobody’s going to win an argument suggesting otherwise.