48 Hours in Charlottesville: Fear, Nausea, and a Sad Lack of Surprise

My husband and I watched this heart-wrenching Frontline documentary last night. It was incredibly well done and profoundly disturbing, tragic, scary and sad. I cried. And my heart felt sick. Brutality is so hard to witness, including the awareness that something happened to these perpetrators of violence, often as young children, which has compelled them to project such inner hatred and fear outward onto other human beings. Among my ongoing prayers is that more and more of us will use our consciousness of the violence in our midst to propel us into an ever deepening commitment and intention to be the peace our world so urgently yearns for. Bless us all, no exception. — Molly

DOCUMENTING HATE

The violence didn’t shock me; the inaction in the face of it did.

By A.C. Thompson

Watch “Documenting Hate: Charlottesville.”

I was driving through the lush Virginia countryside along Route 29 last August when I saw it: a long convoy of military vehicles, most of them troop carriers.

After a few moments, I realized what was going on. The soldiers were headed south to Charlottesville, where, in a few hours, hundreds of white supremacists were expected to convene for the largest public gathering of racial extremists in decades. I was going there, too, on assignment to cover the rally.

Given what had happened in the previous months — three people stabbed at a Klan rally in Anaheim, seven people stabbed at a neo-Nazi event in Sacramento, street fighting that stretched on for hours in Berkeley — I feared it might be a bloody scene in Charlottesville.

As the convoy trundled along in the slow lane, I shivered a little despite the heat. The authorities, I thought, must be expecting a storm of violence if they were mobilizing National Guard.

At 11:14 a.m. on Aug. 11, 2017, I pulled over and tapped out an email to my editors with the subject line, “In case of emergency.”

There was “likely to be violence,” I wrote, adding that it was possible that I’d be swept up by police responding to the unrest. I wanted them to know that they might be getting a call from a hospital bed or jail cell. 

It was, as they say, a moment. The next couple of days were full of them.

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