Pirate's Cove

We had a showdown of asshole versus asshole Saturday in Duluth

White power — the kind that falls in flakes from the sky — would have done a fine job rendering the Supreme White Alliance irrelevant Saturday before Occupy Duluth handed them just about all they could ask for.

For no good reason, Occupy Duluth members (or their affiliates, or freelancers; do they have official membership cards?) defied calls to stay away from the supremacists’ rally at the Civic Center, instead confronting them with chants, shoving and snowballs. The latter might sound like good, clean fun — except throwing any projectile at someone out of hostility is still disorderly conduct, for which four counter-protesters were arrested.

The SWA took the incoming without fighting back (there was some pushing back at those who shoved them), the sort of nonviolent training you’d more likely expect from those opposed to racism as the heirs of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet the opposite played out, lending credence to an SWA protester’s sign reading “Whites can be victims too.”

Is anyone particularly shocked by the attempted violence by the Occupiers? It would have been better, as Robin Washington writes, to respond with love in their hearts to the SWA.