Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 19, 1995 TAG: 9510190041
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Roanokers were proud, for example, to elect and re-elect a black Republican mayor, a soothing presence who won votes from whites and blacks alike.
Roanoke's lively downtown, where people converse face to face in a marketplace, is the envy of other cities.
But not only should we take pride in such civility, we also should recognize its precariousness and its limits - and try to expand it.
Our region doesn't exist in splendid isolation. We aren't immune to the conflicts - among classes, races, genders, religions, generations, etc. - that afflict the nation.
So one thing we could do, speaking of nation, is to recall what ours is about.
America is defined not by the origins, ethnicity, culture or religion of its people, but by a set of ideals we hold in common. A big part of these ideals is freedom, which entails an understanding that all of us and all our beliefs need not be the same.
It's one of the greatest things about America. In places like Bosnia - where tribalism triumphs over cosmopolitanism - differences become demonized and civility is smothered. Fear and violence serve the fascist dream of homogeneity.
America isn't Bosnia, of course, but neither are we bliss. Group assertiveness can threaten our civic ideal in various ways.
For instance, the march on Washington this week - as much as it fostered pride and affirmed old-fashioned virtues of self-help and responsibility - was diminished, not just because a bigot led it, but because it excluded women and whites. As Martin Luther King, Jr., warned, separatism is the enemy of racial justice.
Even so, it would be wrong for whites to react by retreating further into enclaves of negligence, even more wrong for some politicians to exploit the divide, as they traditionally have. As President Clinton said Monday, whites must clean their house of racism. That house includes Western Virginia.
In a similar vein, Roanoke City Council members were right to be confused by a request, by the Committee on Gay and Lesbian Concerns, to "consider the monopolistic control of Lamar Advertising over political and civic billboard campaigns in the area and its ability to unduly and negatively impact the civility of our city."
Lamar's rejection of an ad campaign for local billboards, which would have simply said "Diversity Enriches," was a shameful bow to prejudice. But an unpleasant hint lurks in a request for government action. Monopolist or not, Lamar has a right to turn down any business it chooses. Group assertiveness can be dangerous when, in the interest of sensitivity, it would diminish free speech - such freedom belonging to everyone, advertising companies as well as would-be advertisers.
Even so, Council has good cause to act on the citizen committee's other request: for a statement "reaffirming that the city's diversity does indeed enrich our civic life." Roanoke is a better place to the extent gays and lesbians feel comfortable and welcome as members of the community. Making it so is not the citizen committee's job alone.
An excellent analysis of such matters appears in a piece about the Million Man March by Washington Post writer E.J. Dionne Jr. "What America most needs right now," he suggests, "is not group self-involvement but its opposite: a persistent and patient effort to vindicate the rights of those who do not belong to our own group. That means that whites need to speak up against racism, non-Jews against antisemitism, the native-born against immigrant bashing, blacks against white bashing" - and, we would add, heterosexuals against gay bashing.
As a railroad town, Roanoke has a tradition of being more open than many communities. Building civility and dignity and respect is a project to which all of us, not as members of one group or another but as Americans and human beings, need to renew our commitment.
by CNB