Old News for Some of Us

Terrorism and the proliferation of barbaric acts is front and center in much of the news we see and hear today.

It is being compared to atrocities that happened centuries ago, but as this article explains, we don't have to go abroad or way back in our own history to see these same kind of heinous acts by American citizens perpetrated on American citizens.

The money quote -

The Ku Klux Klan was a domestic terror organization from its beginning, said Pilgrim, who finds it offensive when, after 9/11, some Americans would bemoan that terrorism had finally breached U.S. borders. 

"That is ignoring and trivializing -- if not just summarily dismissing -- all the people, especially the peoples of color in this country, who were lynched in this country; who had their homes bombed in this country; who were victims of race riots," he said. 

Victims of lynching were often burned, castrated, shot, stabbed and, in some cases, beheaded. Bodies were then hung or dragged through towns for display. 

Most of these atrocities occurred during the eras of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow -- but not all. 

It was 116 years after slavery and 40 years after Jim Crow when 19-year-old Michael Donald's body was found swinging gently from a Mobile, Alabama, camphor tree in 1981. A perfect hangman's knot containing 13 loops held the noose wrapped around his neck, and a squad of Klansmen stood on a porch across the street, looking on as the police gathered evidence. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/27/kkk-terrorist-organization_n_6764866.html

How soon we forget.

Or . . .

How soon we choose to forget.