For use: Sunday, August 26, 2001

 Future Shoes 
"Minnesota, South Dakota, and Missouri"

by Michael Finley

This weekend a group of Ku Klux Klan types held a little rally on our state capitol steps in Saint Paul, and there was a big hullabaloo locally, on what was the best way to respond.

One group, made up of people who are not averse to confrontations, mostly newcomers to the state, held that it was necessary to respond with the utmost vigor and show the Klan that they and their racist craziness are unwelcome here.

The other view, held by many politicians, but also people like myself, was that the best thing you could do to the Klan was look the other way. I personally don’t link this public entity calling itself the Klan and made up mainly of hapless attention-seekers to the night-riders of  generations ago, anymore than I equate today's mail-order Nazis with the Third Reich. They are a phantom of the real thing, a wishful thought of evil, not its living essence.

I figure, if the Klan holds a rally and no one shows up to scream back at them, the TV cameras have nothing to film. Whereas, if you surround them with righteous indignation, they come off as one side of a reasoned debate. If something genuinely nasty happens -- a shouting contest, a pushing match, a car tipped over and set on fire -- that helps them more than it does us. In a way, it even proves their point that the world is going to hell without their Caucasian leadership.

It being as free country, protesters did show up at the Minnesota capitol, and they effectively shouted down the Klan, without much in the way of violence -- only four persons were hauled away in cuffs. It was an OK outcome, but still a little out there for Minnesotans. Our preferred way is to roll our eyes and walk the other way.

Compare that to what's happening across the border in South Dakota. If you are unaware of Gov. Bill Janklow, you need to know he is nuts and unembarrassed about the fact. Whereas Minnesota allowed the KKK to speak, and allowed the anti-KKK people to have their say, South Dakota is involved in a Supreme Court to keep gay and lesbian people out of the state's Adopt-A-Highway program.

Last month, the state highway department informed the Sioux Empire Gay and Lesbian Coalition that though they were welcome to pick up trash alongside Highway 38, they would not be allowed to post a sign taking credit for their work, unlike every other Adopt-A-Highway mile in the state -- 2,100 in all.

When the ACLU picked up the group's cause, Janklow announced he would sooner remove the names from every Adopt-A-Highway sign in the state than post the name of  a gay/lesbian group.

"We're going to take a look at the whole program," Janklow said at that time. "I hate to kill a program because people want to show off a lot of things [but] I just don't think these things are worth having lawsuits over."

Curiously, the ACLU has fought this exact fight before in other states, including one last year on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan in Missouri.

But Janklow is not without Solomonic wisdom of his own. He has proposed that a website be created to honor those who pick up litter by the wayside. People driving through an area who are impressed with the cleanliness of the shoulder need only go online and find the names of whatever benevolent association has been combing the area with stickers and Hefty bags.

But he refuses to publish the name of any gay groups on the website. If they demand credit for picking up trash online, he would order the website removed.

All this has to be very discouraging to the gays and lesbians of South Dakota, who I'll bet already know a thing or two about discouragement. And wouldn’t it be a subversive deed, for those people to be out there by the highway, acting like regular people, as if all they had in mind was doing a good deed. As if!

The truth is, I wish I lived in neither Minnesota nor South Dakota, but in Missouri, where the local Klan maintained a stretch of road. It can only do those fellows some good to be out there picking up bottles and cigarette wrappers and beautifying the America they love so passionately.

And it gives us a chance to exercise our rights of expression, too. I keep a litter bag in my car, and I usually empty it when I stop for a fill-up.

But for the Ku Klux Klan, I’d make an exception.

  Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley

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