Friday, July 08, 2005

Life has bumps, no matter your color.

Philocrites has a post from Eric Posa, the staff chaplain the night of YellingGate.

Posa also assumes that the incident was totally about race and his post has your basic "We white people just don't know how clueless we are" tone.

OK, is there something here y'all aren't telling me that makes everybody so convinced that this is totally about race?

Because, hey, if the minister yelled a racial slur, chuck me a torch and I'll be happy to join the lynch mob.

That having been said...

If all we're talking about is a group of teenagers, justly or not, getting into a yelling match with an adult and some other teenagers being mistaken for staff, both of those things happened to me when I was a kid and no national organization felt they owed me an apology or an institutional soul-searching.

Kids get yelled at. Sometimes unfairly. That, my friends, is life. Life is not fair.

Is raising these kids to believe that race is the root of the issue every time they are cut off in traffic, every time the dentist says it won't hurt and it does, every time they get shortchanged at McDonalds, really doing them any favors?

I'm all for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But hearing about these incidents does not afflict me, it irritates me. Our religion is tiny. There are homeless people in every city we could be reaching out to. Kids who can't afford to go to GA and then blow off the closing ceremony who might like tutoring or a nice meal or a scholarship.

And we are wasting our time and outrage on THIS?

CC

6 comments:

Paul Wilczynski said...

We're not wasting our time. Beating our breasts makes us feel so good.

fausto said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
fausto said...

Yeah, it can, but we're old farts, Paul.

We're talking about teenagers here. You have to admit, a teenager who would rather beat his breast than something else in order to feel good (or to feel guilty, for that matter) is a little peculiar.

4:05 PM

Rev NDM said...

“OK, is there something here y'all aren't telling me that makes everybody so convinced that this is totally about race?”

Yeah, count me in the clueless category too.

Chalicechick said...

And WHY would y'all run around beating breats in the first place?

What has a poor breast ever done for you except first feed you and later try to bring you joy?

They're the tribbles of the body part world!

CC

Anonymous said...

where's the description of the original incident? What happened?