Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson revealed Wednesday his home was vandalized in May, urging for people in similar circumstances to take "the high road."
Carson wrote a Facebook post in response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend. He first mentioned an incident he and his wife encountered years ago in Maryland when a neighbor put up a Confederate flag.
"A friend of ours who is an African-American three-star general was coming to visit and immediately turned around concluding that he was in the wrong place," Carson wrote. "Interestingly, all the other neighbors immediately put up American flags shaming the other neighbor who took down the Confederate flag."
He then brings up a more recent event, when his house and a neighbor's in Vienna, Virginia, were "vandalized by people who also wrote hateful rhetoric about President Trump. We were out of town, but other kind, embarrassed neighbors cleaned up most of the mess before we returned."
Carson ends with a call for people to recognize, "In both instances, less than kind behavior was met by people taking the high road. We could all learn from these examples. Hatred and bigotry unfortunately still exists in our country, and we must all continue to fight it, but let's use the right tools. By the way, that neighbor who put up the Confederate flag subsequently became friendly. That is the likely outcome if we just learn to be neighborly and to get to know each other."