Yes indeed, how dare John Mellencamp besmirch the good name of a town like yours, filled with such stellar exemplars of racial amity as could vote for someone like that. How dare he, and how dare we - those of us who have spoken out against the perverted system of justice you dispense in your hamlet - offer our opinions about people and places we don't know.

But here's the thing Mr. Mayor: we do know you.

Oh sure, Jena is not any worse than a lot of other places. And yes, it's always easy to beat up on some little southern town, making it the presumed seedbed of everything racist, rather than seeing the racism therein as symptomatic of a larger national problem. I'll give you that much. As a proud southerner that burns me up too.

But we know you just the same.

"Mychal Bell and the other five could have rotted in jail for the rest of their lives for all you could have cared."

The one thing we know for sure, that I know as certainly as I know my own name, is that your town is filled with good Germans. The kind who, irrespective of their own racism, almost uniformly refuse to condemn the racism of their fellow citizens, fellow churchgoers, neighbors or family.

Your town is filled with people who never expressed any concern about this case until it brought them, and you, bad publicity. Some white folks now are saying that those attempted murder charges were extreme, but where were they a year ago? Nowhere to be seen or heard from, Mr. Mayor, that's where. Mychal Bell and the other five could have rotted in jail for the rest of their lives for all you could have cared, and so long as the media never made mention of it, everything would have been fine.

Thus the lesson for today, Mayor McMillin, and please make note of it: complicity has a cost.

And here's the sad irony embedded within that lesson - one which you and your compatriots utterly fail to recognize, and which whites have failed to understand going back to the days of slavery, when most whites didn't own slaves, but also never spoke out against or challenged those who did: namely, that all of this could have been avoided. You and yours could have prevented it. You could have made it all go away: the angry denunciations, the demonstrators, the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson, the T-Shirts reading, "Free the Jena Six," Mellencamp - all of it.

If you had only taken racism seriously from the beginning, none of your current embarrassment would have been made necessary. Had you stood up as whites, after those nooses were hung at the high school - had you stood up and said "We as whites are offended by this act of racial intimidation" - and called for the expulsion of the students, your town could have remained an obscure outpost, familiar to no one beyond central Louisiana.

Had you stood up to the school board - had you demanded that black students be allowed to speak at a board meeting in September, after that body refused to let them raise concerns about racial tensions at the school, because, in the mind of the white-dominated board the noose incident had been "adequately resolved" - then perhaps the issues in Jena could have been addressed, productive dialogue furthered, and you would have been able to avoid the public spotlight altogether.

"Had you stood up, perhaps you could have remained anonymous to the rest of the world forever."

Had you stood up in December of last year when that white man beat up a black student outside a party, breaking a bottle over his head, only to receive probation - had you stood up and demanded that the assault be treated like the serious crime it was - perhaps you could have remained anonymous to the rest of the world forever.

Had you stood up when a white student pulled a gun on black students outside a convenience store the next day and yet wasn't charged (while the black kids who got the gun away from him were charged with stealing the white kid's firearm) - had you stood up and demanded that the charges be dropped and perhaps that kids shouldn't ride around with guns in their pickup trucks - none of this would have happened.

And had you risen up in opposition to your D.A. buddy when he charged those six young black men with attempted murder, claiming with a straight face that their tennis shoes were a deadly weapon - had you risen up and said, these charges are ridiculous, and had you sought to recall him perhaps - I assure you, Jena would have never come to the attention of anyone. And if it did, it would only have been to praise it, for having so many whites willing to stand in solidarity with their black neighbors, and demand equity and justice for all.