Columnist Susan Snyder: Language of hate is ageless

Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2002 | 8:24 a.m.

The caller said she didn't know where else to turn.

"I am the victim of harassment," she said.

She started to explain as I reached for the Rolodex to get her a phone number for the U.S. Labor Department.

"It's not at work," she said. "It's my neighbor."

She described him as French-speaking and Haitian, and described herself as Russian-speaking and Jewish.

She works full time as a casino cashier and part time as a Russian interpreter and translator. She says the trouble started when her neighbor's son wandered over to her patio and began playing with the stuff she stores there. He didn't destroy anything, she said, but he wasn't invited either.

"It was trespassing. I went over to his house, and he said, 'You are Russian, and you are lying,' " the woman recalled. "He said I'm Russian and uncivilized."

She called Metro Police, which sent two officers to her home. They took down the information but there wasn't anything they could do aside from suggest she have as little contact with her neighbor as possible.

"The officer said everyone has a right to free speech," the caller said. "But I wanted an apology."

We have a right to withhold those, too. It's a free country.

I, too, wonder about the other half of this story. I wonder what the ongoing dynamics have been and whether the caller's story sounds worse simply because she got to the phone first.

Mostly, I wonder about the child. I wonder where he was, how much he heard and what he learns from watching the adults around him. I wonder if he will learn to define people based on where they come from, who they worship or what they look like.

Gangs that shoot each other in the streets of our valley should scare us, but no more so than the groups such as the one police said were handing out racist fliers at our high schools, skate parks and neighborhoods last week.

People hold the guns that kill, but racism lays the foundation for the hate that pulls the trigger.

In 1989 a teenage skinhead in Florida was convicted of murdering a black homeless man behind the Tampa Museum of Art. Hate inspired a 15-year-old boy to beat a man to death.

In an interview for a story about skinhead gangs published a few months before that slaying, this same boy -- then 14 -- said he "would kill somebody if he had to" for "the cause."

He is serving a life prison term with a possibility of parole in 2014. But his sentence began long before he threw the first blow to the old man's head.

Young people are easily led, and hate is a powerful leader. It grabs firm hold of children who have nothing else to follow. What they hear -- and what we don't tell them -- should scare us.

Such hate is where terrorism comes from, in the suburbs of our nation's capital or a theater in Russia or New York City.

"He just hates Russians," the woman said of her neighbor.

Maybe. He's probably a lost cause. But I wonder who his child will hate.

After all, it's a free country.