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0 of 3 Premium Clicks used this month SUBSCRIBE Print + Online Subscriber Activation | Register x Forgot Password | Need an Account? subscribe | newsletter | deals Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » NEWS NOW More lightning, high winds possible ... Scientist: We need to learn to live with wildfires ... Weather or Not: June in Redding — er, I mean Ashland ... More lightning, high winds possible ... Scientist: We need to learn to live with wildfires ... Weather or Not: June in Redding — er, I mean Ashland ... RELOCATIONS Herb Rothschild Jr.: Duke, Roof and us Comment DailyTidings.com Writer Posted Jul. 3, 2015 at 12:01 AM Posted Jul. 3, 2015 at 12:01 AM » Social News When people begin their responses with, “Of course I feel sorry for those people, but ...” I know they don’t feel sorry for “those people” (itself a tell-tale phrase) They’re not feeling at all. Instead, they’re focused on their ideology, which they’re about to unload on me. Of my acquaintances, the person who most exemplified this displacement of fellow feeling by ideology was David Duke. Duke enrolled at LSU in fall 1968, three years after I had joined the faculty and two years after I had founded the local ACLU chapter. From the outset, Duke publicly proclaimed his Nazi sympathies. Several times he had to seek my help to uphold his First Amendment rights when they were threatened with abridgment. Duke was smart, articulate, well-groomed and polite. He invariably called me “Dr. Rothschild” and spoke to me respectfully. It was an extraordinary experience, because all the time he was sitting a few feet away from me in my office, I knew that if he had the power, he would send me to the gas chamber. Not because he disliked me — I sensed that the opposite was true. It was simply because I was an ethnic Jew, and my belonging to that class trumped all his personal experience of me. This memory was prompted by the report that Dylann Roof told the police he almost didn’t go through with the murders at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston because “everyone was so nice to him" when he sat for an hour in the Wednesday night Bible study class. That Roof even thought about changing his mind indicates his ideological formation wasn’t as advanced as Duke’s, although he was getting there. We’ll have the opportunity, during the protracted legal proceedings, to find out whether he’ll ever perceive his victims as individual human beings rather than blacks, and thus feel something for them. Pathological as is this utter dissociation of attitudes toward a class and the experience of individuals in that class (Jews and Herb Rothschild, blacks and Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney), I can’t decide whether it’s a difference of degree or of kind from what we all do. Many people, for example, have an aversion to snakes or spiders that prevents them from distinguishing the many harmless individuals of the class from the few poisonous ones, and they resist all efforts to acquaint themselves with members of harmless species. That analogy is weak, because we have good reason to be wary of some snakes and spiders, and in practice it’s easier to give a wide berth to all of them than to try to discriminate between the dangerous and the benign. But the more basic point is that we all learn to cope with an otherwise bewildering multiplicity of phenomena by grouping them into classes — hot things, cold things, boys, girls, sidewalks, streets, Baptists, Buddhists — and derive our understandings, attitudes, and behavior toward those classes from what our cultures have told us. I see two challenges here. One is to critique our cultural instructions. They may be inadequate to the complexity or totally wrong, even despicably so. The other challenge is to realize that, while grouping gives us intellectual control, it alienates us from authentic feeling. Abstract love and hate are isolating and self-estranging. Real love and hate arise from personal engagement. Like children before they learn the names of things, we need to open ourselves to the wonder of the individual instance. Herb Rothschild Jr. is chairman of the board of Peace House.   DailyTidings.com Writer Posted Jul. 3, 2015 at 12:01 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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