There ARE decent Americans even in places you’d assume are pure MAGA. If you find yourself with time on your hands in Dallas take a field trip. Same if you happen to cross through Van Zandt county on the interstate east of Dallas. Head to the unincorporated community of Ben Wheeler and visit a shop named the Blade Bar. Not a gun store, but a knife shop. Ask for the owners, a couple named Johnathan and Rhian Sibley and thank them. For standing up for what’s right. What’s decent. For the America that used to exist where the vast majority abhorred the fascist ideology my parent’s generation fought so hard to defeat. Our country needs more, and more people like the Sibleys to “go viral” in the America we now live in.
It’s a simple yet profound story I found from The Independent. Some couple went into the Blade Bar with a couple of sheathed knives. One of them was no ordinary knife. It had a Hitler Youth emblem embedded in the hilt. Sibley was asked to take it out, something he had no problem with doing. What he objected to was then placing it in the handle of the OTHER knife! Sibley is one of countless folks out there in towns and cities, just someone with a small business made possible by an atypical skill – in his case making and working with knives and cutlery. It seems he’s always been the kind of guy I’m telling you about today. His ‘claim to fame’ as it were was an appearance during season five of the History Channel’s Forged in Fire. It’s a show where knife/blade makers compete to see who best performs projects.
So Sibley, a guy from the proverbial ‘middle of nowhere’ had his fifteen minutes of fame and that would have been that. Kinda cool appearance on a real TV show he could point to but hardly someone who was on a show that would make him famous. However now Sibley, along with his wife and knife shop have been propelled to internet stardom. He shared surveillance footage of the encounter “in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” he wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. Here’s how things happened:
A couple, who remain unidentified, entered the store at about 1 p.m. carrying two sheathed knives.
“What are we wanting to put in,” Sibley can be heard asking the customers in the exchange caught on video.
“I need the emblem out of that,” the woman begins in the muffled audio, pointing to a Nazi symbol from the handle of one knife, adding she wants it placed in the hilt of a second weapon.
“Nope, won’t do it,” Sibley responded sternly.
“Oh, really?,” the woman replied.
Sibley continued: “Nope, you’ve got Nazi bulls**t,” he continued, shaking his head. “If you wanted a modern German forestry seal of something in… I will de-Nazify s**t but I won’t re-Nazify s**t.”
“OK,” the woman said before the couple left the store.
What I find both amazing and hopeful about all this is Sibley decided to post this encounter on his social media at all. This is after all some spot on the map town, in TEXAS. You’d think everyone there is MAGA through and through and if not openly downright White Power, Christian Nationalist types then at least ok with such views. This small business is the Sibley’s livelihood and pissing off their clientele by making a post friends and folks in their community and county with what amounts to a “Keep your Nazi sh*t out of our shop” is a good way to go under. That makes the owners of the Blade Bar either very courageous, or says that the MAGA/White Christian Nationalism we assume is standard in rural areas of Texas isn’t as pervasive as we thought.
Either way this is for me at least pretty damned encouraging! Sibley wanted folks in his community and the area where he gets his customers to see where he stands. He wanted to make a PUBLIC stand on the matter. Otherwise in a place like that he could have just told the story to family and friends and in a few days everyone in town would have known about it. So yeah, posting it was a big thing to do. What’s really neat is that it turned into something much bigger than he ever dreamed. As of yesterday when the article I’m citing said there have been over 300k views combined on FaceBook and Tik Tok:
Sibley told CBS 19 that he’s spent more time on TikTok in the last three days than he has cumulatively in his life, responding to an outpouring of positive comments about his service denial.
His wife hasn’t just sat idly by either:
Rhiannon Sibley said that it’s important for businesses – particularly those that sit at the heart of a community – to uphold their morals.
“We stand our ground and we hold our morals and it’s incredibly important to us to show integrity in our business and our life and in everything we do,” she told the news station. “We want to make sure that we are a part of the change we want to see in this world.”
It only takes a couple of minutes to read the linked article and if you have a need to feel good about something I swear this will fill that need. Reaction has been positive. So like I said at the beginning if you find yourself in that neck of the woods make the effort to visit the Blade Bar and express your own thanks. Or, perhaps like me you can buy a generic ‘Thank You’ card with nothing on the inside and write a message of support. Trump isn’t the only one who can “flood the zone” and WE can flood a zone worth flooding for something good.
********** And now, a message from Ursula I hope you take to heart **********
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I read it and I’m thankful, Denis, that you provided the link. I’m hoping that the kudos the Sibley’s are receiving are coming from a broad swath of society and not just rabbis and Jewish community members. The article rightly showed concentration on the gratitude of that segment of society, but we all need to lift up this couple and their morality!