knotquiteawake wrote:A friend of mine who has a blog and lives in the same city as the victims posted the following updates about this story :
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/ ... ghborhood/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
UPDATE: I’ve just learned that the family beaten for being white is from my town. The mom has breast cancer. The dad is still in the hospital, having his broken eye socket repaired.
UPDATE.2: Turns out my wife knows the mom in this family. “My God, she’s got cancer!” said my wife. “She’s bald! They beat up a bald cancer patient!”
Yes, because of her race.
...
I just want to throw something out there......and I'm a big fat white guy with white hair and white beard.....pretty hard to be any whiter than me unless you're albino....
The home I live in here in Texas is the second time I purchased a home. The first time was back in California, and I intentionally purchased a home in a
nearly 100% black neighborhood in what is known locally there as "Northwest Pasadena." The reason I bought a home there was two-fold: 1) homes in that part of town were selling for less than the rest of Pasadena, and that was what I could afford; and 2) I've never had a problem living among my black brothers and sisters. Why would I? If one of
them would have had a problem with it, well that's on them. But I never did. After I moved into the neighborhood, I learned that none of them did either. I had wonderful neighbors. Almost certainly most or all of them were lifelong democrats and didn't share my politics, but it didn't seem to matter in terms of quality of neighborhood. They were splendid people. Most of them had either
built those homes and were elderly and still living in them, or their parents had built those homes and now the second generation is living in them. The neighborhood was developed in the mid to late 1940s, and the home owners were all black middle class families—many with government jobs (teachers, polstal workers, JPL employees), but of two of my neighbors across the street, one was a retired musician (a founding member of The Temptations' band), and the other owned a general contracting business. We bought our home as part of a probate sale. The seller, a black man, had been
born in that house and lived in it all his life until he married and moved away. His parents were the builders. The man who built it was a JPL employee...I don't know what he did there, he might have been a janitor for all i know...but he had converted the entire garage into a giant faraday cage and was conducting his own electrical experiments out there. Obviously an intelligent man, if a little unorthodox. But these were all people who understood hard work and that it pays off, and that if you apply yourself to it, you can make a comfortable life for yourself.
Our neighborhood was a sort of buffer between the MUCH wealthier households, mostly white, in homes overlooking the Arroyo Seco and the Rose Bowl on one side, and the much harder pressed and problematic ghetto on the other side. The difference between my old neighborhood and the one in the OP's story is one of class (as in lack thereof) and the pressures of poverty and squalor. Those pressures are certainly self-imposed for a large part—because people buy into their victim status when society actually affords them ample opportunity to better themselves—but self imposed or not, it has less to do with race than it does with poverty. It happens that the local population in this story is black, but if you remove them from there, move them to my old neighborhood, and get them a livable income where they can learn that there is a whole lot more to life than the thug culture, and a large part of that racial animus disappears.
I am not suggesting that society
owes these people anything at all. If they're unwilling to take advantage of opportunity to escape stewing in that kind of misery, then let them stew in it. But I am suggesting that—absent the poisonous effects of the democrat entitlement machine—black people are no more likely to be racist than pink people, and that lifestyle has a lot to do with whether or not people are bitter against those who they (wrongly) view as their oppressors. Factually, they oppress themselves, but admitting that and escaping it requires some changes of habits and though patterns, and most people trapped in that simply won't do it. Darwin was right in some regards........at least, that's my experience. But I hesitate to repeat the meme that blacks are more racist than whites, because it just isn't consistent with my own life experience. Does that racism exist? Yes, but it does cut both ways. We whites are sometimes just more sensitive to it because the goobermint empowers the black racists while crapping on everyone else, regardless of their color.
. I am not assuming he did anything. I said "I am curious as to what if any role the victim played in escalating the incident". Because the article says