Tom BalazsOver the past few days, the events in Charlottesville have begun to reverberate in Chattanooga in small but disturbing ways that reflect the larger myopia of the national discourse on free speech and freedom of assembly.
It began a couple of days ago with the firing of Terrance Hightower, a worker at the fast food joint Mojo Burrito who was outed by a colleague for attending the Unite the Right rally in Virginia last weekend. Lillie Stubsen, a self-described Communist and fellow burrito maker who informed on him – and I use that term deliberately – believes she has a responsibility to “fight Nazis until the day I die.” Apparently, part of that fight involves getting them fired.
Stubsen, herself, no longer works at Mojo Burrito either, but she wasn’t fired for being a Communist. She quit. Apparently she needs more time to fight Nazis.
I don’t know Hightower or Stubsen, but I do know a thing or two about Nazis.
I know because my mother told me how she hid from them for three months in the basement of a Budapest hospital after they deported her father (who died in Nazi hands) and murdered her mother.