This is not an upbeat post

I stopped at the store on the way home from work today.

The guards in the parking lot were being nice to a developmentally disabled man they seemed to know. The young woman who gave me a receipt for my returnable beer bottles gave me an exceptionally friendly smile. An older woman was singing as she mopped the floor, the woman at the checkout was not only agreeable but appeared downright happy to pack some of my purchases in my cloth bag, and I ran into a friend and chatted for a while.

Golden hour was coming on as I drove the rest of the way home and a view I've always liked turned out to be a great sunset vantage point as well. There were even a couple of angles along the way where the view could pass for Italian or Greek hillsides.

I got back to the house in time for this:




...All very nice.

And yet, when I got home, this was still the world, and a point in time, when two white supremacists allegedly plotted to go on a national killing spree, shooting and decapitating black people and ultimately targeting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Shooting and decapitating black people. They wanted to kill 88 black people in all, beheading 14 of them. They were going to start at a high school.

The fact that they may well be a pair of incompetent assholes who wouldn't have managed to commit even the first heinous crime without being caught and/or killed doesn't ... well, yes. It does make it better because, well duh.

But even if they were incapable of bringing their desires to fruition, this is still the world, and a point in time, where it is conceivable to a couple of kids that this is somehow the right thing to do. And they didn't come up with it in a vacuum.

Sure, they're shocking. But they're hardly the first or the only ones to hold that kind of hate, are they? That kind of thing is Learned. From. Others.



...I read the news about those ones before leaving work today.

Thousands of miles away from the United States, I shut down the computer, locked up the office, got in my car, and drove to the grocery store.

Ahead of me on the road was a Ford that looked like a cross between a Land Rover and a Humvee. Along with a morass of stickers representing the vehicle owner's deeply held beliefs and preferences regarding brands of surf gear and Costa Rican soccer teams, it sported a confederate flag and a "United States Terrorist Hunting Permit" sticker.