Letter: A mob by any other name

Posted 11/22/16

To the editor:

A mob by any other name is still a mob. Who among us has not been seduced by the allure of the mob? I know I have. Everyone wants to join a mob, you just have to find the right …

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Letter: A mob by any other name

Posted

To the editor:

A mob by any other name is still a mob. Who among us has not been seduced by the allure of the mob? I know I have. Everyone wants to join a mob, you just have to find the right one like the yoga pants mob did.

As a young hippy I rode the waves of mobs that protested the war in Viet Nam and Cambodia. We had "Tricky Dick" Nixon so the villain was clear. We were an ugly mob and like a nation of our own we sort to rule. Shouting, stopping traffic, and smashing things, somehow in breaking the law we thought we were creating new laws. We weren't. We were wrong to do that.

We were not an impressive mob as mobs go. Not like the mob of Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. The witch was killed and they came out singing as she lay crushed beneath a fallen house. Then, like in a bad western, they steal her shoes and give them to someone else to wear. The hippies never did that. Well, maybe they did, but the Munchkins loved it. Even with the cadaver still rotting under the house they rose up in song and danced around as the "good" witch floats down in a bubble and gloats over her rival's demise. Everyone was so cute it made everything alright. That's a great example of just what a mob can do. How a mob can normalize very negative behavior, make us accept it, then integrate it into our lives.

Mobs seek to take hate and turn it into love by some miracle of human interpretation. But it doesn't always work. Perhaps the most famous mob is the one that chased and killed the monster Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's classic. This innocent creation of an obsessed scientist, fresh off the slab, a child unaware of what he was doing, in joyous play accidentally kills a young girl. He is pursued by the mob that sees him as a monster, and like a little boy in trouble he runs and hides. Our sympathies go with poor Frankenstein. The angry mob that riots to kill him becomes the real monster instead. Humanity rises to the surface as the ugly mob becomes inhuman and vane.

That's how I see the mob that targeted my family and home in what was hypocritically called a "parade". 

Like the Munchkins, no matter how cute you looked, no matter how proper and official you tried to sound, what you did was wrong. 

Like the mob in Frankenstein you are the monster to be feared. Destructive, reckless, mindless creatures of your own creation, bent on intimidation, fueled with revenge, steeped in vanity and conceit, you are a vulgar aberration of what it means to be an American. That's how the world sees you.

Alan Sorrentino

Barrington

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