Hatefulness Just Boomeranged

Sat., April 18, 1998

By Rebecca Nappi rebeccan@spokesman.com (509) 459-5496

The dark hours after midnight can be a dangerous time for the soul. You wake up from bad dreams and can’t return to slumber. So the mind churns and fearful, angry thoughts surface. Life seems impossible. But finally, sleep returns and morning arrives with its light and promise.

Recently in Spokane, in those existential, dark hours, two incidents happened that shocked, angered and worried people. Sometime in the middle of the night before Easter Sunday, a person, or perhaps several people, sprayed graffiti all over St. Augustine’s Church on Spokane’s South Side. The words “Satan rules” and “Jesus died for his own sins NOT MINE” are just a sample of the messages. The others were too crude to print in this newspaper.

A few days before the vandalism at St. Augustine’s, residents along High Drive and the Browne Mountain area woke up to find hateful letters wedged under their welcome mats. The letters accused the residents of being “slothful yuppies” committing crimes of affluence. Who did these things? Lost, young people already blaming society for their anger? Adults who knew spray-painted obscenities and hate mail shoved under a mat will rattle and hurt others? Or perhaps they were folks who experience those dark hours of the soul and lack the skill, hope or desire to shake them off when morning comes. They carry that angry darkness all day.

The good news in all of this, and there’s plenty, is that so many stepped forward to help. The young altar servers at St. Augustine’s offered to help Monsignor Robert Pearson scrub the messages away. Several parishioners offered money to pay for the professional cleaning job. Rabbi Jacob Izakson of Spokane’s Temple Beth Shalom stopped by the church to express his condolences.

And fortunately in the South Hill neighborhoods, there was already a place to go to share information about the hate mail and talk through the disgust. Linda Haladyna is the Block Watch coordinator in one of those neighborhoods and she heard from more than 20 neighbors about the letters.

Those actions - the concern of the altar servers, the open pocketbooks of parishioners, the Rabbi’s kind gesture, neighbors working and talking together - are actions of light and good. They will prevail, because the spray-painters and letter-writers are cowards of the night.

Their work can be thrown away in the trash or sandblasted to oblivion, while the determination of those united against the fear lives on and grows.

Local journalism is essential.

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