A tale of two cities

Honorable Mention

Editorial/Column

Division 1

A tale of two cities

Taylor Bundy

Grade 11

Intelligencer Journal

Manheim Township HS

Adviser: Claudia Esbenshade

The differences and similarities that separate and entwine two currently noteworthy locations are somewhat unfathomable. Compared to my own personal values of tolerance and the generally accepting environment in which I live, the recently exposed racial tension underlying two of today’s high schools strikes me as an incomprehensible atrocity.

On Oct. 3, Warwick High School’s 1,600 students were faced with a formidable flashback to a more heinous margin of American history.

The morning of the insidious incident was marked by the taunting of several black students by a group of white students in a section of the school’s parking lot dubbed “Redneck Row.”

Confederate flags allegedly adorned many of the “Redneck Rows” vehicles, a symbol of outward bigotry, yet an eruption of latent racial hostility.

“Redneck Row,” Confederate flags…

It all seems to add up, yet the equation has no solution.

The Warwick episode is apparently not without a prelude. The past week’s newspapers and Internet postings ascertain the various claims of compounding racial turmoil in the Lititz area, as previous cases of harassment and verbal abuse have reportedly taken place within the district.

Why, in a post-Civil Rights movement area, is modern society still feverishly scratching away at the scars of its past, consequently causing our community to spill its heated blood?

Apparently, the land of the free is flecked with racial flares. A small Louisiana town has reached its precarious precipice of infamy by way of the Jena Six trials, in which six African-American males were prosecuted on charges of battery regarding retaliatory beating of a white student who had earlier harassed the youths.

Segregation was apparent at the Jena high school. Evident racist attitudes were displayed when the mosses were hung on a schoolyard tree after several black students attempted to cross the segregated boundaries; symbols of the South’s racially turbulent past were dredged up into the present day.

To my honors U.S. History class-enhanced mind, I would believe the Jena case, although equipped with existing evidence of the crime in question, is comparable to nationally renowned race cases such as the Little Rock Nine or Scottsboro Boys. As protests persist and riots reign, history is in the making.

In the back of my mind ruminates the behaviorist notion of environmental cause and effect. All thoughts of ethics aside, are the Warwick and Jena situations both not the outcome of a certain system of beliefs? And were these belief systems not instilled in the minds of youth for the umpteen years of their lives?

Although my own values of tolerance, acceptance, and open-mindedness are certainly the only reality I find myself content to grasp, it is logical that perhaps others are raised with opposing, though equally as strong, beliefs.

Lititz, Pa., and Jena, La., share the facade of a small, perhaps even close-knit town, yet both locations are plagued by a racial divide. The great wall of racism exists not only in these aforementioned residences, but globally.

Although we have come a long way in terms of the quest for acceptance and equality, let’s hope the wheel of history will not reinvent itself. Let’s hope collective society will not take a turn toward intolerance and lurch into the prehistory for which prior decades and centuries are known.

And most importantly, let’s hope that, in the land of golden opportunity, the Golden Rule will someday be ubiquitously embraced.