As long as you’re complaining
— about ANY THING —
you’re not doing what you can.
As remarked recently, I am almost never verbally insulted for being homeless.
The insults that do come are events at the clothes window, in the shower room at the shelter.
Jack is a short, skinny, old white man with short, wiry gray hair and a short, wiry gray beard. He uses a walker. He’s been with us about three weeks.
Every day, he gets more irritable, more combative and more obscene.
Q. What’s up with this?
A. It’s so nice here, he can’t stand it.
Related: Learning curve
Been there, done that. I had a temp assignment at yet another major, prestigious law firm. The atmosphere here was unlike that at any other law firm where I’d worked. No cursing. No stress. On this one lawyer’s birthday, his secretary baked him a big cake, that he shared with staff, including people he didn’t even know. Some unknown person paid my way to the offsite office Christmas party.
I didn’t know how to act. I began to act like it. They kept me on for six months, but I’m not welcome back.
Some months ago, riding a bus northbound on York Road, I gazed out the window wistfully as we passed Towson State University. That campus: the vast, manicured lawns; neatly trimmed shrubbery; stately buildings; utter tranquility. Young people of one background can be utterly happy there. Young people of a different background might can’t.
It’s a question of how much malice pervades the world in which one grew up.
The reality is that some grow up in a world where one must be eternally vigilant for one’s own personal safety. Where walking down the street, one may meet intense hostility at any time, and must be ready to answer that with hostility of one’s own in order to survive. Where “watch your back” isn’t a metaphor: one turns one’s head slightly with every step, right and left, so that with every step one’s peripheral vision takes in 360° — lest some predator be stalking who means you bodily harm.
For such a person to be thrust into a world where none of that is necessary, can be unsettling.
Perhaps the pent-up hostility, previously essential to survive, may begin to come out. Certainly the former real threats and danger can be succeeded by new, imagined ones. One persists in feeling that the whole environment is hostile.
And one may want to respond in kind.
I have no solutions. It may only help, to understand where some of these folk come from.
Henry Vincent was a burglar. An elderly man whose house he broke into, killed him. The funeral is somehow estimated to have cost £100,000.
The funeral procession became an “uprising.” The police were ready. They had had intelligence about it. This was planned.
Vincent was a Traveler. More about them shortly. If you Google “Henry Vincent traveler,” you’ll come up with a lot about him. He and accomplices were predatory.
I suspect the film At Close Range deals with Travelers. It proves to be a true story, and very sad and grim. Continue reading The Travelers
Three clips from the WBFF Fox 45 newscast of 5:00 p.m. Tuesday, May 1:
I may no longer believe a word they say, but I can take great comfort in the hymns I learned in childhood.
My hope is built on nothing less
than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.
No merit of my own I claim,
but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.
On what is my hope built?
Friday, November 3, 2017
This message is principally addressed to me, myself. After a couple weeks of doing pretty well at The Way of Peace, I’ve come again to a juncture where I seem to have tired of being happy, and am inclined to let go of this Way and return to, frankly, the way most people live.
Related: Learning curve
I may need to reason with myself, to persuade myself that self-management (1) is really worth the effort and (2) deserves to be a “First Thing” — a concern to be given priority, and to be held more important than other concerns.
Racism
Continue reading Conclusion
5 Teenagers in Michigan Charged With Murder
Man tortured girlfriend’s son to death because he thought he was gay: prosecutor
Images released of teen who sucker punched man, breaking his jaw
Parents charged in death of infant found rotting in swing
Man found guilty in death of girl locked in box
Related: Wikipedia: Ame Deal
Related: Arizona woman becomes 55th sent to death row in US
Later news: Death sentence upheld in death of Arizona girl locked in box | AP News
Related: Tag: Names
Manhunt under way for parents accused of torturing, killing daughter
Mother of Livermore murder suspect says girlfriend talked about it days prior
Father pleads guilty to avoid death row after rape, murder of teen daughter
“Mesiti had hundreds of thousands of images involving child pornography. Hundreds of those images showed Mesiti’s daughter being sexually assaulted while she was obviously unconscious. Videos also showed the defendant setting up a hidden camera in the bedroom of an 8-year-old girl who lived in the apartment with him and his girlfriend in Los Angeles County at the time. Other videos and images showed a 16-year-old female Mesiti had befriended being sexually assaulted.”
Are the white people who go to jail different from those who don’t? Are the black people who go to jail different from those who don’t?
“Generations of slavery and discrimination make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower classes.”
Do you agree with that statement? If not, you harbor resentment toward blacks.
That is the premise, not the conclusion, of a recent study by three political scientists. As reported by James Goodman in the October 6, 2013 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the study’s conclusions seem indisputable. I question its premise. I ask whether “resentment” was the best or right thing to measure; whether this criterion statement was the best or right way to measure it; whether the criterion statement is factual, and if so, whether it matters.
Continue reading My homeless self: White “resentment” and black power
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