A Community Divided

Listening to the radio while driving through California's Central Valley recently, I was struck by the number of hate-filled talk shows that filled the airwaves. These guys made Rush Limbaugh sound sane. They talked about everything from how America is being controlled by an international Japanese-Jewish mafia to how citizens should purchase guns before the Second Amendment is taken away by a "liberal-biased" Supreme Court. Whoa.

Shock-jock radio is part and parcel of America's First Amendment protecting free speech, but it's also a powerful source of divisiveness in small-town America, where people spend a lot of time in cars. Almost a quarter of Americans get their news from radio talk shows.

Patrice O'Neill's excellent documentary, "The Fire Next Time," explores the effect of such radio on a Montana town. The film covers tensions that have arisen between the forces of economic development, environmental activism and anti-government extremism in the Flathead Valley. It shows how neighbors in a peaceful town can turn against each other when extremists are given the power to broadcast messages of hatred on the radio dial.

O'Neill is co-founder of The Working Group, which produced the community-building film "Not in Our Town," and conducts a national program to help communities deal with intolerance by holding film screenings and community discussions. O'Neill was asked by a citizen of Flathead Valley to bring her program to the town of Kalispell, and "The Fire Next Time" arose out of her two subsequent years spent in the Valley, gaining the trust of locals to discuss their issues on camera.

In 2000, as loggers and mill workers faced lost jobs and rising living costs, right-wing extremist John Stokes bought a local radio station and began broadcasting messages blaming environmentalists and government officials for their woes. He announced the addresses of local environmentalists on his station, leading to death threats against them. In a particularly emotional passage, the daughter of a local activist learns how to shoot a gun after the lug nuts on her wheels were loosened, almost causing her to crash. Local politicians were also targeted; the mayor of Kalispell had three nail-induced flat tires in the period of one month.

Stokes also began broadcasting his own version of hate speech. ("Jewish Holocaust survivors ... did nothing about the deeds or the actions that led to the slaughter of your people.") In the midst of the turmoil, the local anti-government militia group Project 7 was discovered, along with a cache of guns and a hit list that included the police chief and sheriff. The news served to intimidate some activist citizens of the Valley into silence, and furthered the schism between Kalispell's townspeople.

That's when O'Neill's group arrived.

O'Neill succeeds in getting people from both sides of the issues to speak to the camera -- including Stokes. The film's main message is that dialogue must continue in towns like Kalispell dealing with intolerance and violence; community members must not be silent but must act quickly to dispel ignorance. O'Neill speaks about "how quickly we can become enemies and be dehumanized, particularly if you have the power of media repeating that there's a reason why we're losing jobs. There is an enemy and they're identifiable and they're a person." The film also shows how people interested in uniting in peace can use the media -- in this case, a film -- to offset those messages of hatred.

Whether the two sides actually will achieve some compromise in the land-use issue -- and what that compromise will look like -- remains to be seen. Stokes' shock-jock radio continues, and will no doubt be fueled by this film. But hopefully, people across America who watch it will start viewing those on the opposite side of an issue as human, and not an evil enemy.