Democracy for Vancouver

I was eating in my favorite Indian restaurant this weekend, when three forty-ish men took the booth behind me.
After ordering beer and pondering the menu, one of them started talking about the Jena 6 rally.
“It’s a powderkeg, I heard there were 250 buses coming in, with everyone on them black!”, he said.
Another said, “Yeah, I hear that Jesse Jackson, and - what’s that other one? Sharpton? Of course HE’S gonna be there”.

The rest of their conversation was recounting the story - as they understood it - to the third who had only just heard about it this week.

They more or less got it right. They forgot the part about the all-white jury, but my social boundaries being what they are, I wasn’t about to join in.
They also seemed somewhat sympathetic to the Jena 6. I was simply irritated by the tone of menace that a gathering of African Americans represented to them.

To them, wherever “the blacks” congregate, there’s bound to be trouble.

It reminds me of living in good old Battleground in the early nineties.
I used to be somewhat of a shooting enthusiast back then, so often Saturdays I would go to the local gun store to stock up on rifle or pistol ammunition and ogle the latest hardware.

One particular weekend, the store was filled to the capacity with people, many of them suburban-looking couples, rather than the usual hunter, hillbilly crowd. Many were looking at shotguns, handguns and small carbines and the overwrought staff were trying to explain the particular merits of each style of weapon. These were first-time gun buyers, clearly.
I asked the owner about the sudden surge in business and he told me nearly everyone was there because of the Rodney King riots, nearly 800 miles away. He said he’s been doing record business all week. Even he seemed pretty nonplussed by it all.
I just shook my head and left with my little box of .44 S&W Specials.

I also remember seeing a picture of a large group of armed white guys sitting at a barricade, with a sign that said “Try Looting Here”, or some similar sentiment, during Katrina and seeing it make the rounds on the internet back then.

There’s still such an ugly, unconsciously racist side to this country that bubbles to the surface at such tragedies.
The ignorant, hateful racism doesn’t particularly surprise me, it’s just the everyday, unconscious racism that shocks me at times.