Charlottesville forces us to choose a side

Occasionally, journalists at The Record and NorthJersey.com share personal observations and experiences — not opinions — about the stories they cover or the day’s biggest headlines. Jennie Coughlin is deputy director of digital production at NorthJersey.com

When the news alert popped up on my phone Saturday, I saw "Charlottesville" and was torn by the journalist's desire to find out everything and the probably-natural reaction of wanting to look away from the ugliness. 

For 12 years, I lived just “over the mountain” from Charlottesville, in Staunton, Virginia. Both small cities now are blue spots on an otherwise deep red map, but Staunton was purple when I first moved there in 2002.

My next-door neighbors had a rainbow painted into the fan detail on their Victorian house to match the flag flying from the front porch, but the major hotel in downtown Staunton is the Stonewall Jackson Hotel, right next to the Shakespeare theater. The city high school is Robert E. Lee High School, home of the Fighting Leemen and Lee Ladies. 

Staunton's been debating renaming the school when it renovates the building. Even in this blue city, many are irate at the suggestion. After desegregation in the 1960s, the former Booker T. Washington High School students had to attend Robert E. Lee High School rather than rename the merged schools as Staunton High School. 

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That's hardly surprising in a region where Confederate Memorial Day (the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend) still gets celebrated, complete with re-enactors. Virginia natives explained to me Memorial Day was "a Yankee holiday."  

As a carpetbagging Yankee, I didn't know what to make of that in 2002 when I moved to the Shenandoah Valley to work at The News Leader in Staunton, part of the USAT TODAY NETWORK. One of the photographers, who was a re-enactor and a North Carolina native, explained that Confederate Memorial Day and the re-enactors were celebrating Southern heritage. His explanation didn't seem that different from my home state of Massachusetts and Revolutionary War re-enactors. 

But people say "heritage" a lot when referring to Confederate history. They always insist it's about heritage, not hate. Some even believe that. 

He did. Until one day, he changed his mind. 

A few years after that first conversation, he was covering the Confederate Memorial Day event, along with a reporter who grew up just outside the city limits. She is black. The photographer is white. 

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That day, he saw how people treated her. When he described it to me later that week, he said he'd realized they might say "heritage, not hate," but they didn't mean it, even if they wouldn't admit it to themselves. 

He stopped re-enacting. After that experience, he just couldn't do it.

He could have found an excuse. He could have ignored what he saw, or rationalized it away, blaming the differences on people knowing him, not her, or on her role as a reporter. Instead, he gave up something important to him because their involvement for the wrong reasons tainted it. Another re-enactor in the area later did the same, for similar reasons. 

Contrast that with President Trump's rationalizations Tuesday. 

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I still can't wrap my mind around the horror of what happened in Charlottesville: the marchers with torches, the people who traveled from around the country to defend the indefensible, the groups that chose the same hate that led to a world war almost 80 years ago.

But what we can learn from Charlottesville is we all face the same choice as that photographer: To stand for what's right, or to excuse those who are wrong.

He was there Saturday, covering the rally and everything that surrounded it. A balloon full of pepper spray or something similar hit him right in the face, and acid burned his arm. He was back there Wednesday for Heather Heyer's memorial service, and said it was difficult for him to go back.

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My initial instinct, to look away from the ugly, is one we've probably all had at some point since Saturday. But what happened in Charlottesville involved white supremacists and neo-Nazis who traveled from as far as Burlington, Vermont, and Maumee, Ohio. We can't say because we live in New Jersey, it's not our problem. 

This ugly isn't just in places where public buildings bear the names of Confederate leaders. It doesn't always come waving a flaming torch. Sometimes it comes in forms we want to excuse because it's easier than doing what that photographer did.

Either way, when it comes, we have a choice: Take a stand, or look away. 

Follow Jennie Coughlin on Twitter @CoughlinJennie