This is the world we created. Now we have to fix it.

I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write about tonight, and then this photo came across my feed on FB.  And just like that, I realised I had a subject for a post tonight.

I have a lot of reasons for believing in social justice and equality.  Growing up, in grade school I was constantly bullied and harassed, in part for my name, in part because of my very German last name.  I got called the full litany of names...but mostly Nazi.  The German side of my family came to America long before the ascent of the German National Socialist Party, and thus well before Adolf Hitler rose to power.  I could never have been a Nazi, nor could my family.  Nor would I want to...even as a wee one, I believed that all people were supposed to be equal no matter what.

A year or two on, I saw someone drive up to the mailbox and put a sheet of paper in there.  After they drove off, I went to the mailbox and looked to see what it was.

It was a flyer for the KKK.

I gave it to my dad, who freaked out over it.

Now, I live in Hunterdon County NJ.  It's a fairly affluent county, and pretty heavily WASPy.  For me, seeing a flyer for the KKK was a shocker that there was an outside world that thought much differently than I did.  It affected me.

In the intervening years, I've been called a faggot, a sissy, a tranny, a shemale, a cocksucker...you name it, I've probably heard it more than a few times.  I've been beaten up twice, once getting attacked from behind.

And this is digression.

The photo above is of Heath (now apparently Isadore) Campbell.  You may have heard of him, as he made national news 7 years ago when a local grocery store refused to make a birthday cake for one of his children, who happened to be named Adolf Hitler Campbell.  His sisters were named at birth  JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell.  I use the past tense because to the best of my understanding all three children were removed from the home and have been fostered or adopted.

But Heath carries on.  With his little Hitler mustache.  And his SS officer's uniform, blissfully believing that he's in the right, that his ideas are the right ideas.

If you go to the Southern Poverty Law Center site for hate groups, and zoom in on New Jersey, you see a little dot in Hunterdon County.  That's Heath Campbell, who depending on the site you read, is a member of the American Nazi Party or Hitler's Order.  He's about 10 minute's drive from me, apparently.

Again, I live in New Jersey.  Growing up, I had expectations and ideas about how things were supposed to be...and as I grew up, I rudely awakened to find out they're not really that way at all.  I've seen what happens to friends of mine.  I see what happens to friends of theirs.

I see what happens to me.

When people ask me why I fight, and why this matters to me, I ask how could it not matter to everyone.  And if pressed for reasons and evidence, I point to my sort-of neighbour, who is everything I am not, and everything I refuse to be.