Watching emotions run high across the mainstream media is difficult to watch.
What happened to the people at our embassy in Libya is tragic. It’s a harsh reminder that for every action there is an equal or greater reaction.
People across the Middle East rioted because of a movie, a reaction that most would say is an over-reaction. Most people would say they’d never kill over a movie. Most people are not extremists. Let me be clear: I’m saying that the people responsible for our personnel’s deaths are the extremists.
It’s not too long ago that American movie-makers managed to incite their own people to take extreme actions. In the early days of cinema, one of the first American epics was “The Birth of a Nation.” It was a tale about the re-construction south. It painted the Ku Klux Klan as heroes, most notably in the film’s climax, during which the supremacists ride on horseback to save a white family from rioting blacks. All the while, Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” plays in the background. Francis Ford Coppola would draw on the scene in his classic, “Apocalypse Now.”
“The Birth of a Nation” was a denigrating, completely misleading piece of tripe, and it managed to increase enrollment in the Klan, a group that most Americans would agree is extremists.
Here is the point: the First Amendment, while a wonderful part of our Constitution that I use every day, can lead to dire consequences. What you say can and will impact someone else. Ignoring that fact is akin to ignoring the right’s true power.
Going forward, I hope that cooler heads prevail. I hope the killers from the embassy tragedy are brought to justice. I hope that the anger of many because of the actions of one subsides.
On an unrelated note, I’m still holding coffee hours at Hearthstone just west of town hall on 116th Street on Tuesdays from 3 to 5 p.m.