“The bigger issue for me is that in a city of almost 300,000 people, we continue to have just a handful of people who live their lives looking in the rearview mirror. Other midsize cities are concentrating on the positive, marketing the positive, attracting jobs and businesses. We continue to discuss what happened when gas was 28 cents per gallon. That’s what holds Greensboro back — a small group of people who make an industry of racism and unhappiness, marketing all that’s unpleasant and negative no matter how long ago these things occurred.”
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Who in the hell is Mike Barber ...to decide that trauma suffered by other people is unworthy of thought, reflection, or mention?
Who in the hell is he to tell those who suffered that trauma to get over it?
If his daughter had been killed in the shootout — or had died prematurely in any other way — would he be OK with me or anyone else telling him to get over it?
...We’re supposed to believe that Greensboro is being held back, or even could be held back, by such a small group of people?
There is no need to furnish a plaque for the KKK rally,
which has caused this city so much strife
over these many years.
It is one of the darkest days in Greensboro history.
Roy Carroll's Rhino Times
...It’s OK for places from Andersonville to Auschwitz to “market all that’s unplesasant and negative no matter how long ago these things occurred,” but it’s not OK for Greensboro?
But, much worse, ridiculing and diminishing the tragedies in the lives of others displays, at the very least, a stunning lack of human sympathy. Doing so for political gain, as here, demonstrates nontrivial amounts of sociopathy.
...White people tell victims of racism to get over it. Men tell women who have been raped, and/or whose rights are under assault in areas ranging from reproductive health to equal pay, to get over it. The wealthy tell Americans whose wealth has been stripmined where it hasn’t been swindled to get over it. ...And on and on.
...Yet that is where Barber has chosen to place himself.
Mike Barber could argue against the marker on historical grounds.
...Barber’s comments, uttered from a place of race, gender, and class privilege and obviously aimed at strengthening that place politically, put him squarely in the middle of a stream of American political thought whose source lies somewhere between Bob Haldeman and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
If anything is truly holding Greensboro back, it’s that kind of attitude.
It’s despicable.
It’s evil.
And I just thought someone should say so."
https://blogontherun.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/massacre-vs-shootout-mike-barber-drags-the-discussion-backward/
