Tag: society

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Dazed and Confused

On Friday, June 2, 2006, a group of us took our co-worker, Monroe, out after work to celebrate his impending nuptials. I stayed with the group for dinner and two bars before deciding to head home at around 9:30. I retrieved my bike from the office and rode off into the Portland night. The feeling of comraderie still rested warmly inside but a surreal air permeated outside. I discovered my headlight was dead, so my short eight block, downhill ride was a paranoid one for I feared both for my safety and the long arm of the law (lighting is required for night riders in Portland). The weird atmosphere did not end once I reached the MAX station, either, because the circus was in town and overflowing onto my MAX platform.

The “circus”, in this case, was the 2006 Rose Festival which started two days before. One of the main Rose Festival attractions is Waterfront Village, which mostly consists of carnival rides, junk food and thousands of people trampling the grass in Waterfront Park. On this Friday evening, the Village was teaming with life and had crept over Front Avenue, past the parking lot and into my MAX station. In addition to the numerous people that crowded the area, the authorities had divided the platform and the sidewalk with steel barriers. There were gaps between the barriers so it was easy to walk through them. Still, their presence put me in a police state frame of mind as I rolled up to the station, hopped off my bike and leaned it against the garbage can.

As I waited for the arrival of the next train, I hoped for a Blue one because the Blue line passes closer to our house. Unfortunately, a Red train pulled up a few minutes later and I resigned myself to a longer bike ride home. I entered the train at the front of the first car, hung my bike on the supplied hook and sat in the side-mounted seat that allows me an unimpeded view of my bike. I settled in to read my book, which was about basketball on the ghetto playgrounds of 1970’s New York City.

Some time later, I noticed a little white guy in a light blue coat was having an argument with a couple of angry black girls on the other side of the train. The girls were doing most, if not all, of the yelling and doing quite an impressive job of it. If the guy, who was leaning against the plexiglass barrier right by the door, was responding, I could not hear it. At some point, the level of intensity was raised to a point where I considered pushing the call button to let the driver know that there might be trouble brewing. For whatever reason, I decided to let it go. By the time we reached Lloyd Center (the last stop in “fareless square” and the site of a popular mall), the yelling and screaming had not abated.

I glanced over at them again just in time to see an average-sized, light-skinned black man set one foot inside the car as he threw a roundhouse right that laid out the little dude in the blue jacket. And I don’t mean just knocked him down – I mean that the guy laid on the floor for almost 30 seconds before even moving after he got punched. I have never in my life seen someone hit with such ferocity and violence outside of television and the movies. When he finally stirred, he immediately tried to get to his feet but fell to his knees. For the next few minutes, he stumbled around trying in vain to stand. Each time his knees would give out and he would fall back to the floor. The prodigious amount of blood coming from his mouth also made the scene seem movie-like in it’s violence and gore.

By this time everyone on the train had noticed what was going on and several people were telling the guy to stay down for a bit. Both the puncher and the girls had long since disappeared but I think everyone was worried for the poor dude’s well-being. After watching him try to get up for about the fifth time, I walked across the car to try to help. I told him to just sit down for a bit but he wasn’t having any of that. Each time he stood, he would stagger to the side like he was drunk but there was no hint of alcohol on his breath. Finally, he fell into me and I maneuvered him into a nearby seat and implored him to rest a few minutes. He cursed a few times but did stay there for several minutes, so I retreated back to my seat.

Sometime during the aftermath of the punch, the driver had been called but concluded that there was nothing he could do and returned to his cab. As a result, however, we were still sitting in the Lloyd Center station and several more people had boarded. One of those passengers was a tall, skinny, dark-skinned black kid in his late teens. He happened to sit a few seats away from the punch-drunk kid, who noticed after a few minutes and started yelling at him. After he started moving toward the kid while continuing his verbal barrage, another passenger stepped between them and tried to convince Mr. Bloody Mouth that this kid had not been the one who had punched him. He wouldn’t listen to reason, though, and continued his tirade against the tall kid. Eventually his remarks turned racial which was too much for the tall, black kid who began threatening the little guy. As I write about it now, it seems like a scene from Crash, but the mix of misunderstanding and racism leading to angry and violent reaction was as real as anything I’ve ever seen.

Soon the police arrived and the tension quickly subsided. The guy in the blue coat refused their assistance and just walked away while the doors to the train closed. As we left the station I tried to explain to the tall kid what had happened and why the white guy reacted the way he had, but it was futile. He didn’t want to hear any excuses for some guy who had called him a “nigger”. It didn’t matter what had happened before he got there. There was no excuse for it in his mind. And he was right. There is no excuse. I supposed I should have felt that I had a greater perspective on race as I settled back into my book in which race and economic class are big factors, but I didn’t. I felt shocked to have witnessed such raw physical and social brutality.

When the train arrived at Gateway Transit Center, I was not really in the mood to bike the rest of the way home. Besides, I knew that a Blue Line train couldn’t be far behind since we had been delayed for so long at Lloyd Center. As I looked to the west for that Blue train, fireworks lit up the sky over downtown Portland signaling the official start of Portland’s 2006 Rose Festival. A tiny bit of hope crept back inside me as I watched the fireworks and waited for that train.

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Geraldine Ferraro Is A Racist

Last week Clinton supporter and former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro said this about Barack Obama:

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Of course, there is outrage in the Obama camp and with many others. I was struck my how remarkably close her remarks were to something Isiah Thomas‘ said in 1987:

”Larry Bird is a very, very good basketball player,” he said. ”But if he was black he’d be just another guy.”

It’s clear that Ferraro was echoing the Clinton campaign’s recent criticism of Obama, namely that he doesn’t have enough experience to be President. If you read her Wikipedia entry, you’ll see that she started serving in the House of Representatives in 1978. By my math, that means that she served less than six years in what is generally considered to be the lesser House in Washington when she accepted the nomination to be Vice President of the United States. In other words, her experience then was comparable to Obama’s experience now, making her a hypocrite. Or a liar.

Today, instead of apologizing or attempting to clarify her statements, she said:

“”Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world, you’re accused of being racist, so you have to shut up.”

Again her logic reminded me of another “great” thinker, Ann Coulter. After slandering a group of 9/11 widows for being vocal activists, Coulter said:

“To speak out using the fact that they’re widows. This is the Left’s doctrine of infallibility. If they have a point to make about the 9-11 Commission, about how to fight the war on terrorism, how about sending in somebody we’re allowed to respond to? No, no, no, we always have to respond to someone who just had a family member die.”

Of course, Coulter was essentially saying that she can’t feel free to slander and sling mud because she will appear heartless. Ferraro is making a similar argument, claiming that she will be called a racist for merely criticizing. She’s missing the point. She brought race into the argument and used it negatively against Mr. Obama. Just like Isiah Thomas, it was a racist statement, even if she doesn’t know or acknowledge it. In the process, she has put herself into the company of Thomas and Coulter. She should be ashamed.

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Illegal Immigration

We’re having immigration demonstrations in downtown Portland today and we had an impromptu debate about it in my office. I think people are resentful of illegal immigrants and fear that they are taking part of America from each of us, whether it be jobs, services, etc. I think those are valid concerns if those things are being taken away. I’m actually not sure that is the case. Don’t most government services require some sort of proof of citizenship? For example, when I recently renewed my license, I had to have two different pieces of citizenship proof. And doesn’t everybody agree that most of the jobs in question are low-paying jobs that most Americans don’t really want?

Here’s a couple of things to think about:

  • Jon Stewart joked about how he was going to have a hard time telling his son that he wouldn’t be able to live out his lifelong dream of becoming a hedge-trimmer or the guy who hands out towels in the men’s bathroom.
  • The local news interviewed a couple of illegal immigrants at a rally in Salem. One had been here for 25 years and the other had been here for 18. They have tried for years to become citizens.
  • When we talk about building a wall along 700 miles of the Mexican border, do we consider whether the cost of building/maintaining that wall is roughly equal to however much illegal immigrants are costing us in government services now?
  • Although illegal immigrants don’t always pay income taxes, they definitely pay other taxes like sales and property taxes. Also, those who are paid by legitimate employers put in social security and medicaid money that is a gift to us – they will never collect.
  • There are approximately 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. today. Does anybody deny that most of them are among the hardest working, yet lowest paid people in our country? Does anybody consider the economic impact of removing these people from the economy? What if lettuce farmers and meat packers and landscapers had to start paying real wages? Higher prices is what it means.
  • Without a local and cheap workforce, I’m pretty sure that more jobs would be moved overseas. While the loss of those jobs doesn’t directly impact American workers (since the jobs are currently occupied by illegal immigrants), there is an ancilliary economic impact.
  • Liberals tend to throw out the racism accusations a bit too easily. While I think there is an undercurrent of that, I don’t think wanting to limit immigration automatically makes you a racist.
  • WWJD?