Posted On: Monday - June 19th 2017 7:12PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Race/Genetics
This is only the 2nd post with the Race/Genetics topic key. I don't like to write about this stuff because people get to fuming about this truth, and I've got plenty of other stuff to write about. However, this was just today, so hopefully I can put another post above it that I've been intending to write.
Where I live there is a fairly large percentage of black people in general, maybe 30% on a 5-mile scale (zooming in too much or out too much skews results) - this is the scale one's local places, say the stores and bike rides, etc. It is a generally friendly part of the country, if one would compare it to say, Massachusetts (home of the Massholes, so that is the other end of the scale, I suppose). In the past, it seems that black or white, people would still say hello to people walking on the street or start a short conversation at the store randomly and that sort of thing.
Well, it's getting hard to do that in some ways, or at least between me and black guys. I don't mean a whole group of them, usually worth avoiding, but just a one guy. At the stoplight, I saw this old black guy look at me when crossing the street between my truck and the one in front of me at the read light. He was taking a slight shortcut off of crossing at the walk, and I'd have looked at the driver too. With everyone all on the electronics these days, cars randomly accelerate or at least let off the brake and roll without any reason and all sorts of things. You SHOULD look the driver in the eye. I waved back as in "I see ya, no problem". That guy got about 2 ft. past me, onto a piece of the median, than sure enough "Hey, you got a buck?" (my window was rolled down). I did see that coming, but was still hoping this one guy might be the 1 in 10 nowadays that didn't have to take advantage of a guy just being friendly.
It wasn't like I was in a BMW X-5 either, this was a 25 year-old truck that badly needs a paint job. What, every white guy feels guilty because one of your ancestors you never heard about 155 years ago was a slave? (I figure about every one of us has got ancestors like that, if you go back far enough.) Hey, buddy, I'm not that guy! I just told him "Hell no, I was just letting you know I had you in sight." Why would he get perturbed by that, I don't know, but he seemed a bit perturbed. Me too, now, you can't even be friendly to some people - may as well live in Massachusetts if it's gonna be like this. Oh, except the Massholes are worse - forget I said that.
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