Guest opinion: President Trump’s call to ‘stand by’ should concern all Idahoans

“Stand by.”

When the president of the United States was asked to denounce white supremacy on the national stage, his response was “stand back and stand by.” That was it. “Stand by.”

Stand by for what? A call to take up arms against American citizens? A call to stand guard at polling stations on election day? A call to walk the streets of our communities carrying assault weapons? Stand by for what?

That was the response.

I’ve since been waiting to hear comment from Idaho’s elected representatives, but that echo chamber is silent. Do our elected representatives who serve in Washington, D.C., remember Idaho’s history? Do those representatives in the state who voted against a “Too Great for Hate” license plate in the Idaho Legislature remember our history?

Etched in the stone of the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, George Santayana reminds us, “Those who cannot remember their history are condemned to repeat it.” And if we haven’t forgotten our history, then why the deafening silence in response?

It wasn’t too many decades ago, when “standing by” was an Aryan Compound in northern Idaho. “Stand by” had branded our state as a “haven for hate.”

In his book “Hate is My Neighbor,” co-authored with Tom Alibrandi, Bill Wassmuth stated “To ignore hate groups, even though they usually include relatively small numbers of people, is to miscalculate the impact that they can have on a community.”

Wassmuth knew the impact. In standing up against the compound, his home was bombed; his neighbors were intimidated in the streets; and property values and tourism plummeted in the Idaho panhandle. Who would want to live in or visit a community in which hate walked the streets and threatened the residents?

Stand by.

In a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, white national hate groups in the United States increased 55% in the past four years.

“The increase in hate groups include many which openly advocate violence, terrorism and murder, and ‘accelerationist’ groups who believe mass violence is necessary to bring about the collapse of our pluralistic society,” according to the report.

In 1986, Bill Wassmuth was a beloved Catholic priest and spokesman for the Kootenai County Taskforce for Human Relations. It was a different time. It was a time when our state leaders denounced hate.

Idaho Gov. John Evans said the state of Idaho would not tolerate the kind of violence that happened to Bill. The Aryan Nations, the governor said, had no place in Idaho. Elected representatives neither stood to be photographed with extremists, nor were they silent in their condemnation.

It is a different time. Now we have some representatives who won’t proclaim that we’re too great for hate; now they say nothing.

But then, just as it is now, Wassmuth knew what it meant to be vulnerable — what those who have been targeted because of religion, race or sexual orientation have known all along.

He said it then, and we say it now. “We say YES to the dignity of each person, and NO to racism and prejudice; YES to nonviolence and peace, and NO to violence; YES to unity, and NO to division.”

It’s not that difficult to say — but some have nothing to say, and they, too, would rather just “stand by.”