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Monday, July 22, 2013

In A Nation of 300 Million+ People

... if you can only get a few tens or even hundreds for your marches, you might not be representative of the general population.

Last week, I worked downtown distributing food to the needy. It was after the Zimmerman verdict and after the protests had begun. We had clients of all races, some who were homeless, some who were struggling and some who just had too much month for their refrigerator. Everyone got along and chatted as they waited to be seen. They were all grateful and reasonably happy, considering the circumstances.

In the larger world, the press was spinning like a top over the Zimmerman thing. It was the Center of the World and You Needed to Be Concerned! It had Big Implications for race relations! Articles were written, editorials were penned, talking heads argued, photos were taken of protesters.

Meanwhile, we all got along just fine.

On Twitter, the racial-obsessives attacked blacks who wondered if maybe the whole thing wasn't being blown out of proportion as "tokens" who "weren't in touch with the street." Where I was working, the people were in touch with the street, many of them quite literally. None of them cared about melanin, or if they did, they weren't fussing about it with each other.

Dean from Beers with Demo, chatted with me on Twitter and said that at the shipyard where he worked it was the same thing. Everyone was just getting on with life.

So what we had were two semi-random samples where no one seemed bothered by the whole thing. These went unreported. On the other hand, the self-selecting groups of agitators got front-page coverage.

If I didn't know better, I'd say someone had an agenda to push.

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