Risking Consequences For Bad Behavior

ONE WOULD BE HARD PRESSED to find anyone who could reasonably argue that minorities such as gays, transgenders, and people "of color" have not historically been relegated to second class citizenship in the United States. Far easier to to find folks eager to make the argument unreasonably. Such folks are called "conservatives". When I was a child, long ago, the worst possible insult was "queer" or "nigger". I was called both, neither of which I was or am, before I knew the meaning of either. Ethnic equality and political correctness among the nineteen sixties American white middle class kid community was nonexistent. Among third millennium American conservatives,equality is ubiquitous, smugly, dismissively presumed, feigned, taken for granted. Any legislative initiative designed to ensure minority equality is viewed as discrimination against Caucasian-Americans, creating a special class of pampered, protected queers and niggers, and sex changelings. Some protected class. We solve this problem by enacting a special new class of crime, "hate crimes". The problem is racism and sexism is not so easily solved. Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri at the hands of police two years ago the number of times police stop and question the poor and the black has decreased by seventy five percent in Ferguson, and fewer citations have been written. Public revenue is down, but so are race based street protests, with the exception of the one the other day, on the second anniversary of Brown's shooting, when some idiot drove his car into the crowd, severely injuring a man, and getting shot at. Whether there was a motive other than careless driving has not been told to us by the media. Nationally, the poor and the black are still stopped, questioned, arrested, charged, convicted, and sent up at the same old discriminatory rate, but not in Ferguson, which got a bitter taste of its own medicine. The Ferguson police department and city council have seen a lot of turnover, and is now more racially balanced. The city is still mostly black, and the police are still not, but progress is progress. To be a white cop and to fire a weapon while on duty at an African-American is to risk grave consequences. Perhaps there will come a time when political correctness is accepted as merely a strange name for common courtesy and decency, our conservative colleagues no longer ridicule good behavior, and to think, speak, or act in a discriminatory manner risks grave consequences, deep within the individual mind, if nowhere else.