Carol and I contribute to the Southern Poverty Law Center which has compiled a long list of successes through lawful pursuit of people and practices prejudicial to the poor, the immigrant, the migrant worker and all forms of racial and religious hatred.  Their report on Hate Groups is most enlightening.  Did you know there are organized hate groups in every State of the Union?  We have them in Florida because Florida is part of the old South and racial distinctions still linger.  But it is the NAZI imports as well as home grown gangs of shaved head thugs who sow Anti-Semitism and similar messages about “mud” peoples who are the migrant workers, guest workers and immigrants who wish to become citizens. It is also a White Supremacy thing latent in many neighborhoods.

What the Center exposes are the practices of private militias who are waiting for enemies to invade.  They are paranoid but dangerous for they have access to weapons of mass murder thinking they are preparing for invasion.  These are the bunker building weapon collecting types who just know the stranger is suspect because you didn’t grow up with him, know him and depend on him for your life which is ever in danger of attack.

The SPLC produces Teaching Tolerance and has just sent me a copy of Close to Slavery, publications that expand our knowledge of the cancer growing within our democracy. We close our eyes on scenes that make us feel queasy and would rather not think of uncouth things going on – certainly not in OUR neighborhood. SPLC tells it how it is and this is from lawyers and educators who the government of conservatives would rather not hear from. Tort reform is one weapon against the lawyers of SPLC who won significant victories against Neo-Nazis and, in particular, old cases of bombing school building in the old south by unreconstructed un-American southerners.

Close to Slavery is about slave labor here in America and not the legal slavery still operating in Africa and Asia.  We treat migrant workers who come to earn some money to send home and GO BACK to their families like slaves while they do the kind of work that “Americans” just will not do – the stoop labor and work that dirties the hands and makes the worker old before his or her time.

I cannot decide which is worse – the hate groups or the kind of slavery we practice here in the good old U.S. of A.  In any event write or call: SPLC at 400 Washington Avenue Montgomery, Alabama 36104 or www.splcenter.org.