{"id":138,"date":"2020-11-02T16:05:52","date_gmt":"2020-11-03T00:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/?p=245"},"modified":"2020-11-02T16:05:52","modified_gmt":"2020-11-03T00:05:52","slug":"opinion-things-turning-ugly-in-east-long-beach-as-election-nears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/news\/commentary\/opinion-things-turning-ugly-in-east-long-beach-as-election-nears","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Things turning ugly in East Long Beach as election nears"},"content":{"rendered":"

I walked the dogs on Sunday morning up one East Long Beach street lined with jacaranda trees<\/a> and down the next, with a long stand of trees that bloom with yellow blossoms in early fall that are as striking and every bit as messy as the purple jacarandas, but a lot less heralded.<\/p>\n

I was walking Annie while Jasper whined and howled at home. They\u2019re strong dogs and you have to walk them one at a time or they\u2019ll take off after a squirrel with the leash-holder flying in the air behind them like a kite.<\/p>\n

Annie and I walked past a house I\u2019ve always admired for the sign in its yard: \u201cIn this home we believe:<\/p>\n

\u201cBlack Lives Matter<\/p>\n

\u201cLove is love<\/p>\n

\u201cNo human is illegal<\/p>\n

\u201cFeminism is for everyone<\/p>\n

\u201cScience is real<\/p>\n

\u201cKindness is everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Controversial? Some would say no, not at all. And there are others who would take issue with almost every part of that signage.<\/p>\n

Annie and I walked on to the end of the block, then wound around and walked down the next street, which eventually took us to the side of the house with the sign. On the garage door was a startling spray-painted message: \u201cBLM Kill Whitey\u201d and on the stucco nearby, \u201cBLM Deth 2 Whitey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, with Jasper on the leash, I would learn from the couple who owns the home that the same message had been sprayed at a couple of other houses in the neighborhood as well as at Grace First Presbyterian Church<\/a>. The couple didn\u2019t see or hear anything and they said they planned on putting up cameras. \u201cJust let people know this isn\u2019t what we think,\u201d said Valerie, the wife, as she looked at her defiled garage door.<\/p>\n

The news of the spray-painted messages took off on social media, with hundreds of people in Facebook groups and on Nextdoor offered (for free!) their opinions on the matter. It was \u201cboard\u201d kids, it was \u201cAntifa\u201d using reverse psychology to make people think it was Trumpers. Most commenters believed it certainly wasn\u2019t BLM because the message was neither BLM\u2019s philosophy, nor was \u201cWhitey\u201d a part of BLM\u2019s vernacular.<\/p>\n

Things eventually devolved into arguments about whether the painted message was or was not a Black person\u2019s handwriting.<\/p>\n

The Rev. Jonas Hayes, senior pastor at Grace First, said he was a bit hurt by the vandalism, but he said,\u00a0 \u201cPeople in the world are experiencing different types of trauma\u201d these days. He attributes much of that trauma to the COVID-19 pandemic, and he wants to steer his church into a greater understanding of the trauma that\u2019s being suffered by people in the community. \u201cWe as a church want to be present in the trauma; we\u2019re not immune to people\u2019s struggles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hayes offered no opinion on who was responsible for the scrawled message. \u201cI have no clue who it is,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all have no idea who in the world did this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back home, the dogs, exhausted, flopped on their beds in front of a fan while I sunk into despondency, which began as only a relatively light case of despondency, but it grew deeper to the point where I was going to need a political therapist or a handful of different colored drugs when I heard a lot of honking coming from Wardlow Road, which, not surprisingly, came from a long posse of Trumpers in their $80,000 fully-loaded Ford F-150s with their American flags, now co-opted by Trump followers as a glorious symbol of racism and white supremacy, flapping frantically in the the truck beds.<\/p>\n

The honking caravan showed up on social media, too, with commenters battling in favor of one candidate or the other, with one person remarking, \u201cGenuine unbridled enthusiasm for a candidate. It\u2019s refreshing.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not refreshing; it\u2019s depressing and disheartening and not just a little frightening. Things are going to get ugly in the coming days as Trump will attempt to wrest the election in his favor. And the honking I was hearing Sunday as his followers gunned their engines and brayed in bellicosity while waving their Trump flags just a couple of blocks from my house made me worry now just hours before Election Day, how big of an army our current president has at his disposal, and how eager they are to fight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The news of the spray-painted messages took off on social media, with hundreds of people in Facebook groups and on Nextdoor offered (for free!) their opinions on the matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":1082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[69,20],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[22],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","tag-election-2020","tag-tim-grobaty","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}