The Nazis next door

For the past week, I’ve been inundated with messages from people asking for me to write a story about the recent national spotlight that’s been put on Upper Sandusky due to a pair of local parents who have been outed as Nazis in charge of a “dissident homeschooling” network.

I did my due diligence. I read all the details I could. I listened to their appearance on the Achtung Amerikaner podcast, where they casually said horrific things about gay people and people of other races. Like the rest of you, it made me sick to my stomach when the mother said “we are so deeply invested in making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi.” 

I’ve thought long and hard about how to address the issue. In the early stages, we couldn’t write an article in the “news” section of the paper because the story at the time was simply “Local couple believes F&^$*d up ideology.”

As much as I despise racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia, people believing something horrible isn’t a front page news story, especially if they’re doing it privately. It would be like if I wrote a front page story about someone believing in Scientology or practicing witchcraft. My job isn’t to tell people who or what to believe in. My job is to report the news.

But now that local and state officials have gotten involved with statements condemning their actions, we can actually write a news story about it. Of particular importance is members of the state legislature and department of education promising to investigate Ohio’s extremely lax homeschooling standards that allowed this situation to happen in the first place. Teaching children to be Nazis is on par with child abuse, in my opinion.

Something important to remember as Upper Sandusky and Wyandot County deal with the fallout of this mess is that racism, homophobia and other forms of intolerance are learned behaviors. This isn’t something that happens naturally. It is  taught to innocent minds by other racists.

I grew up in a small farm community where pretty much everyone was white, and the only interactions I had with anyone of another race were seasonal migrant farm workers who would only be in school the first few weeks until harvest season was over. People weren’t openly racist or homophobic, but it lingered under the surface in snide remarks and jokes that were in poor taste, some of which I remember telling to get cheap laughs. Everyone that was in or near my grade who has “come out” as gay since graduating did it after they left my community, because they didn’t feel safe there.

I’ll admit I had some pretty ignorant beliefs until I left for Ohio State University in 2004, where I had Black and Asian roommates who were regular people just like me. I met gay people who dealt with some of the same daily problems and issues as the rest of us. My world got completely flipped upside down. I changed what I believed to become more open-minded and tolerant, and I was a better person for it.

It’s nice to see area organizations and local leaders railing against Nazism, but if we want to truly defeat this ideology locally, we need to attack it in a different direction. I don’t think we should attack hate with our own hate. That will only insulate their beliefs and harden their exteriors.

Instead, let’s be more like like Daryl Davis, a Black man who attended KKK rallies. Davis is a personal hero of mine. He befriended card-carrying Klan members and over time, they could no longer rationalize their racist beliefs. He’d ask them, ‘Why do you hate me when you know nothing about me?’ The more they learned about Davis, the more they realized he wasn’t any different of a human being than them. One by one, they’d hang up their white robes. Davis has been responsible for up to 200 people leaving the Klan.

Just two and a half weeks ago, we had some white nationalists hold a rally in the center of our downtown, looking to stir up trouble and trying to spread their message and grow their community of hatred. Those ideas are archaic and they need to be challenged. They don’t stand up to any type of scrutiny or cross-examination. They are only allowed to exist if those people stay inside their tiny little racist bubbles.

Whether you’re gay, straight, Black, white, Jewish, Christian, Democrat, Republican or whatever, we are all human beings. We all bleed red. We all have hopes and dreams and desires. The more we can preach that, the more people understand how alike we are instead of different, the brighter our light will shine in this community, and that will shrink the shadows in the corner where the Nazis hide.