c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of Religion News Service.)

UNDATED _ Despite the horror of the shootings in Los Angeles last week, most of us find some comfort in the fact the confessed assailant was an unstable extremist.

We have spent the last week focusing on”those people”who perpetrate hatred and racism. It is much easier to look from afar at white supremicists than to come closer to home and examine our own hearts.

This lesson became clear to me during the time I spent in Bosnia during the war. One evening I sat in a recently reopened restaurant in Sarajevo surrounded by the carnage of war. The owner, once a wealthy man, was now waiting on the few tables himself. The life of privilege he had known was gone forever.”This war should never have happened,”he told me.”We didn’t hate each other. We lived together in peace.”It was only a few extremists who stirred things up,”he added.

It was something I heard from Bosnians, Croatians and Serbs alike. Everything had been fine except for the actions of some madmen who had stirred up the latent nationalism of their fellow citizens and destroyed the country.

I met many Bosnians who had married Croats or Serbs and many families who weren’t even sure what to call themselves anymore.

But there was something else, something strangely familiar that made me realize the war was not just because of extremists.

Sitting with a group of Croatians I’d hear comments like,”That’s how Bosnians are. They are dirty. They don’t take care of their property.” Or with Bosnians,”The Croats have all the money and power. They only help each other.” And the Serb perspective:”We are the ones who worked hard to defend this country. The Croatians live off of what we created. The Bosnians are just lazy and live like animals.” These types of comments often came from peace-loving, upstanding people who abhorred the war and the atrocities committed by extremists. Their comments were not hateful in their eyes. They were just telling what they viewed as facts.

Yet I returned to this country with an unsettled sense of what fosters hatred and how wars get started. And I was reminded of those comments this week as I saw so little self-reflection and so much hand-wringing over fringe groups.

The tragedy of last week can be attributed to one madman. But unless we all pause and examine the tensions just beneath the surface, we fail to understand the real dangers in this society.

The fact is that widespread prejudice still exists against Jews, blacks and immigrants in this country. You hear it among parents who think their white children are at a disadvantage for college.

You hear it in offices whenever an African-American gets a promotion and office gossip explains it in terms of affirmative action instead of merit.

You hear grumblings in industries that shut down on Jewish holidays.

Sure, we all live together happily. We even intermarry. But if we are really honest we must admit we may be politically correct, but Archie Bunker”truisms”still pervade our society on some level.

White supremicists with guns pose a danger to our society. But so do average citizens who characterize Jews as pushy, blacks as lazy and immigrants as illegals. And so do any of us who listen to such comments and don’t speak up.

Some people think the way to stop hate crimes is to more tightly control extremists. But I think we need to do a better job of exposing the prejudice simmering beneath the surface of some of our most upstanding citizens.

DEA END BOURKE