Well, after last Saturday (Aug. 29) no one can say that racism is not alive and well in the Owensville, Rosebud, Gerald area.

No one can say that what happened  in Rosebud in 2014 when the NAACP walked and rode through town on their way to Jefferson City was an aberration, a one time thing, a few people’s reactions,  an unfortunate event.

It is here, it is real and it showed its ugly face in Gerald on Saturday.

They came in numbers, they brought their guns, their hatchets, their Confederate flags and their Trump hats and paraphernalia. They mostly did not have the nerve to stand at the microphone and admit it. They denied or rationalized it on the stage but as they yelled responses back to the speakers and had heated, sometimes name calling, side conversations with supporters in the crowd, they admitted it.

And their ignorance. 

They were armed with their weapons and some with alcohol…and with hate!  

Some were former elected officials and at least one current elected official was present. That can be addressed at election time.

It takes ignorance to be racist…to judge others only by the color of their skin takes ignorance.

Black Lives Matter is not the same as saying all lives matter. All lives do NOT matter until Black lives matter as equally as white ones.

The reason we use the phrase Black Lives Matter is because for over 200 years in this country they have not.

For generations they have not!

When they were property, they were seen as expendable. When they were segregated, they were seen as unimportant.  For almost the first one hundred years our country existed, they could not vote.  It took another 84 years until Brown v. Board of Education gave them at least a chance at an equal education.

Generations were trapped in poverty until then. It took another 10 years for the Federal Government to enforce desegregation and pass a law to ban efforts of voter suppression such as literacy tests.  

Still today there are attempts at voter suppression and  neighborhoods consisting primarily of blacks find their schools underfunded. And finally — many studies have been done showing that percentage wise, more blacks are killed by law enforcement than are whites. 

We support law enforcement as did the organizers of this event.

We are thankful they were there that day. Our presidential candidate is NOT for defunding the police and we all know that there are way more good cops than bad ones. There are also so many good people in these communities and we still believe that most in the area are not racists.

But we all need to call it out when we see it.

It is ugly.

Those people with their smirks, their flags glorifying a horrible war fought against our own country, their need to liquor up before the event, their guns, their fear, their anger, their ignorance…those people on that day, represented the very worst of us.