I am a soldier in the U.S. Army. I am also a Jew. And if that is a concern for you, we have a fundamental problem.
Because this country — the one that I serve and which I’m sworn to protect — is not big enough to accommodate my ethnicity and your hate of it. One of us will have to go.
I call upon the citizens and authorities in Cortez and Mancos to remove the spray-painted swastikas currently adorning the “Toxic Spill” property on Highway 160 between your communities. Their continued presence is an assault on the integrity of our culture.
The longer a symbol of hate is permitted to endure in public, the more the casual passerby becomes desensitized to it. Its lingering presence begins to suggest that our neighbors tacitly co-sign its supposed harmlessness.
But a swastika is not harmless; it contains in each of its immoral spokes the ghosts of genocide. Yet once desensitized to the swastika, people lose any semblance of the sins it represents. It becomes normalized, inviting debate about the indisputable and emerging anew as a symbol around which to rally.
To the decent people among us: condemn the swastikas. Demonize the vandalism. Ask the Mancos Board of Trustees to fund removal of that hateful insignia. Marshal law enforcement to eliminate these scars.
And to the authors of this hate: you are not Americans. You are imposters unworthy of the privilege of your citizenship and the tenets of free speech it affords you. My service is not designed to give you a safe place to hate; it is to secure a nation that stands as a shining beacon beckoning any who cling to the last embers of hope.
Yes, maybe your symbols will remain on the property, and maybe they’ll even recruit new partners in your thirst for my destruction. But when you come for me, I’ll be waiting. I’ll be armed and committed to the promise of America. I will not go silently. And my path to the gas chambers will be littered with the evidence of my resistance.
CPT Jesse S. Sommer
Fort Polk, La.
