Done any o’ that stuff lately? Oh, I know, it’s too expensive these days. (Snort snort snort…)

Friday night raucousness at the Oscar Tango tonight. Legal stuff abounds. A co-worker recently finished her tenure as the jury foreman on a high profile case in the Daytwa area. It’s none of my business to provide the details. I’ll just say that when the local news stations played the audio of her reading the jury’s verdict, everyone at work knew exactly who it was. I didn’t hear it. I was in the yooperland, where there’s no TV except in the Lockview Laundromat and Woldemort. I listen to National Petroleum Radio at the moomincabin and they didn’t play the audio. All I have to say is that this jury had a horrendous decision to make and I do NOT envy them.

Then there was the 30-something guy who ran away with his 13-year-old female “friend”. It’s complicated. He was a “family friend” and therefore her mother didn’t discourage the relationship. Did mom know how “serious” the relationship was? Who knows. If one of my beeyootiffel beach urchins had been hanging out with an icky 30-something guy at 13, family friend or not, I think I would have gone into big-time Mama Bear mode. Fortunately, my daughters seem to have inherited their baggy old mother’s sniff test. Yuck yuck yuck. The young woman is now 16 and has his baby. The guy is sentenced to a good long term in prison. I’m not sure if I agree with how long. As icky as this all was, it is far from black and white, at least in my mind.

Which gets me back to deoxyribonucleic acid. I am sick to death of the word “race”. What? We are the HOMO SAPIENS SPECIES. The homo sapiens species comes in all different shapes, sizes, and COLORS! Kind of like dogs, cats, horses, guinea pigs, you name it. Who knows who the heck we all share DNA with. Any one of us WASPy-type folks could have a scrap of DNA straight out of “deepest darkest” Africa. How the hell would we know?

Now. Do I ever get a little nervous when I see a black male in a hoodie or a do rag sauntering along toward me on the sidewalk? I will NOT deny that I do. But you have to know that 98% of the time, when I make eye contact with a person of that description, we end up SMILING at each other and maybe even interacting a bit: “Hello!” or “Howya doin'”. Another 1% of the time, he’s a person having a bad day and doesn’t want to interact with a baggy old kayak woman (or vice versa!). The other 1%? ONCE in the last eight years or so, I encountered a black kid in a hoodie who made me a little nervous. Afterward, I observed him walking down my street peering into every car parked in the street (including mine). Was he up to no good? Probably. Guess what? I have encountered people who look like me (aka, they have “white” skin) who make me nervous too.

Maybe you’ve guessed I’m now talking about #FERGUSON. I dunno what’s really going on over there in Ferguson. Although I’ve been to St. Louis a few times, I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of Ferguson before. I don’t think any of us have anywhere near a full set of details about what happened there but it sounds like serious overkill to me. We have somehow *got* to put “race” aside, not to mention “terrorism”, and pull together because the po-leese should not be treating ANYONE like that anywhere and weeeeee should not put up with it whatever color our skin presents to the world.

G’night, KW

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