I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.
His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity. That man’s name matters. It is Nathan Phillips.
The crowd members’ names don’t matter, any more than the names of the crowd members you see in the photo below, from Little Rock’s Central High School in the 1950s. The young men from Covington Catholic High School should know that they will be immortalized, the way the angry young white people you see below were: as a group, a movement, a problem, beyond their identities as individuals.

If one of the priests or teachers with the Covington group today had stepped in to stop them—if even one of the students had said, “Come on, back off!”—that person would be remembered, too. But there is no sign that anyone, student or teacher or parent or priest, did.

Teenagers do stupid things, especially teenaged boys. I was once a teenaged boy, and my wife and I raised two sons. But stupidity doesn’t have to mean hatred and bigotry. Someone taught these young people—those in Arkansas in the 1950s, those from Kentucky today—to behave the way they did. Parents, priests, teachers, neighbors—someone taught these young men.

Finally for now, former senator and presidential front-runner Gary Hart, subject of this recent story in The Atlantic, from his site Matters of Principle. In “The Darkness Before the Dawn” he writes:

Despite the chaos in and around the White House and the fog of stagnation it creates, emanating from a man who could care less for this country, and despite the cultural changes shrewdly observed by my friend, there must and will be a return to sanity and to a brighter day for the country we love. We are optimists because we are Americans.

As Reverend Jesse Jackson used to say about himself, God is not done with us yet.
Details on what God may have in mind for the people of the United States, and what Earthlings may do about it, ahead. . .