March 2, 2022- A state legislator, censured for advocating executions of her political opponents, on a public gallows, fired back at those who voted for censure-saying they were picking on a “sweet grandma”.

To be sure, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, even for those who say people of different ethnicities have horns and a tail, or words to that effect. Yet, there are laws that forbid making specific threats against the safety and well-being of other human beings-or hurting most animals, for that matter.

I am sure the legislator is sweet to her grandchildren, if not her children. Loving people who are one’s bloodline is well nigh universal, save for those who are deranged. That tells me the woman has some semblance of heart. Her comments, at a recent gathering of white supremacists, tell me that she has spent precious little time listening to those who offer views different from her own. They also give readers and listeners who disagree with those comments a sense that she herself may be a bit unhinged.

We have had a long, hard road together, vis-à-vis race relations, especially between Blacks and Whites, but also between Whites and First Nations people as well as between First Nations people and Blacks. Much of the discord involves failure to listen, to observe, to accept others for who they are. It’s true that there are people in each group who have taken advantage of their own, and who have ingratiated themselves with the dominant group. It is also true that there are people within the dominant group who have suffered at the hands of “their own kind”. This, however, does not take away from the aggregate of the dominant group, in a good many countries, having the responsibility for erecting a system that perpetuates their dominance, at the expense of those outside their circle.

Real sweetness does not hate.