The One Thing We Shouldn’t Tolerate

In Westminster and Garden Grove, residents don’t want communists to come calling.

In Mission Viejo, residents don’t want low-income renters in their midst.

In Newport Beach last year, a councilman suggested that large Mexican families were hogging beach space.

Even the laid-back surfers of Southern California got their wetsuits in a bunch a few years ago when windsurfers laid claim to their waters off Seal Beach.

We Americans like to think of ourselves as the most tolerant, inclusive people on the face of the earth. If we are, things must be pretty rough in the rest of the world.

Give me your tired, your poor ... but, please, not on my block.

To the long list of those snubbed, shunned or otherwise told to “get out of my neighborhood” by Americans, the latest are representatives of the communist government of Vietnam.

The U.S. government has renewed relations with the people it fought in the 1960s, but the large Vietnamese American population in Orange County has told the communists to stay out of Dodge.

I’m not picking up the torch for the Vietnamese government -- I don’t care if a delegation visits here or not -- but Little Saigon’s intransigence on the matter seems the ultimate irony at a time when our soldiers are dying to convince hostile Iraqi factions to put the past behind them.

Nor am I being glib: The grievances of many emigrants in Garden Grove and Westminster toward the communists are not to be forgotten. I’ve heard a number of them firsthand in previous conversations with residents.

When someone tells you of family homes or businesses that were dispossessed or of physical cruelties, it’s not hard to understand why the hatred runs so deep.

But should that hatred drive public policy today? Should it be used to extort public officials into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t do?

City councils in Westminster and Garden Grove are proposing measures to keep communist trade delegations from setting foot in their towns. They’re doing so not because it’s good for business -- the factor that drives 99% of any council’s decisions -- but because their residents have made it clear they’ll hold them accountable if they don’t.

As we’ve reported, it’s not unlike the hold Cuban Americans have on Florida politicians when it comes to dealing with Cuba.

You could argue that city officials should be responsive to their constituents.

Or you could argue that officials have a responsibility to lead the citizenry or, at least, not let them hold a town hostage to old hatreds.

The plain fact is that the angry masses of Little Saigon are letting old animosities determine policy toward a country that, a full generation after the Vietnam War ended, wants to normalize relations.

It was that anger, for example, that fueled a series of angry days and nights in 1999, when thousands protested a Westminster merchant who hung the Vietnamese flag and a picture of communist leader Ho Chi Minh in his video store.

An American tradition says we put old hostilities behind us. We remember the past, but we try to create a better future.

Isn’t that what we’re asking Iraqis to do?

I’m not saying America’s bouts with intolerance compare to the problems of Iraqi society. But when we see our people tilting in that direction, we should try to straighten them out.

That’s the challenge in Little Saigon.

Because, in another not-so-grand American tradition, Little Saigon is saying: This is our neighborhood, we hate you, stay out.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.