This afternoon, James W. von Brunn, a noted white supremacist and Holocaust denier from Annapolis, stepped into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., wearing a Confederate hat, and opened fire indiscriminately with a long rifle, killing a security guard named Stephen Tyrone Johns before being shot in the head by two other guards.

Von Brunn, 88, reportedly a World War II veteran, did this while the museum – sacred ground to many, many Americans – was filled with innocent schoolchildren.

The assault comes only a few days after President Obama’s historic and touching visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Von Brunn’s action doesn’t make any sense, of course. It defies logic. But for years, he has been outspoken about his hatred for Jews and African-Americans, and even told one of his ex-wives that he planned to go out in a fiery blaze of glory.

As of this writing, he is barely holding onto life and is in critical condition at George Washington Hospital.

Perhaps his action will inspire his fellow adherents of hatred. But it should also encourage those of us who strongly believe in equality, justice and non-violence to recommit ourselves to fighting the hatred in our midst.

More than anything else, it should remind us not to be lax about the bigotry out there. We all have a tendency to look at discrimination and hatred as a thing of the past, something that fills the history books but has no place in our lives and society anymore. We’ve moved on, we figure. People’s ethnic heritage, race and religion don’t matter in America anymore. We’ve achieved Dr. King’s dream. After all, we now have a black president. People don’t openly use ethnic slurs anymore. (Or they usually don’t.) Stereotypes are viewed as boorish and passé, like polyester suits and perms.

This horrible happening in the nation’s capital today should remind us that this is not the case, and that hatred is alive and well here. We always have to be ready to meet it head-on.

Let’s hope that those kids in the museum today, rather than being scarred by the experience, will always remember the sounds of those gunshots ringing out as a call to never forget the hatred that unfortunately seems to be a component of the human condition.

interesting.. his name isn’t really von Brun….  he just wanted to be German I guess….