About 75 people carrying signs and American flags walked from Peterborough Elementary School to the Peterborough Police Department Saturday for a “Pro Police, Pro America” rally.
“I just want Americans to maintain hope that there are people like us that are proud of our country and where we come from,” said organizer Greg Carter, “and that what unites us is the fact that we’re Americans and we share that pride and we share that history and we are united in our cause, and that divisiveness is not the answer – we need to unite.”
At the PD, Carter and Jim Graham spoke to the crowd in praise of the police department and suggested a need to return to traditional American values.
“Since I moved to this town, my family has been protected faithfully and fulfilling their duty 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, snow, rain, sleet, protecting all of us,” Graham said before thanking Peterborough Police Chief Scott Guinard.
“For a town as blessed as we all live in, we have a chief who has maintained a presence,” Graham said. “He is firm, he’s fair and he’s friendly.”
Graham said he agreed with residents who’d called for more training for the police department in response to police violence around the country and the ensuing conversations between the town and its citizens in a pair of Zoom meetings.
“That doesn’t mean we defund the police,” Graham said. “That means we need to increase the budget of the police to give the chief and his officers the training they need to be able to…fulfill their duties to the folks of the city and the town and the country.”
Carter, a volunteer firefighter and son of former state representative and American Steel Fabricators owner/president Mark Carter, gave a stump speech of sorts, outlining what he called the “four major barriers” between society and those imperfect people whose human nature would harm that society. Those barriers – conscience, family, police and church – are being broken down by “radical ideologies,” he said.
“To live in a society that dismisses family values and inner conscience, criminal justice and faith in God is to live in a society that emboldens criminals free of consequence for their actions and allows us to regress into vulgarism,” he said. “We must not allow radical ideologies to overtake America that so many generations before us have sacrificed to establish and protect.”
Carter said that he believes black lives matter, but does not support the group affiliated with the slogan – nor the mission of the 25 or so protesters on scene, who stood on the police department lawns where they’d installed signs bearing the names of people of color who have been killed by the police around the country. Those protesters engaged Carter in a lively debate after the event about whether or not America was founded on and continues to engage in systemic racism, the merits and flaws of capitalism, and whether or not poverty in black communities is both a result of generations of wealth accumulation disparity resulting from slavery and the root cause of the disproportionate racial crime rate.
Carter wrapped up his speech by decrying identity politics, using one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most well-known lines: “Judge one not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character,” met with a round of cheers and applause from the gathered crowd. The line is from King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, in which King also said “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality…It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality….There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”