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Well, I think we can all rest assured that these guys won't be set free, so all you alarmists can sleep easy tonight knowing that they will be tried and convicted of something. Hopefully, thanks to people giving a shit about justice, it will be comensurate with what they actually did - beat on a kid who got up and went to a school function later that night.
I'm not at all surprised that this is happening in 2007. I've lived in a small town in Louisiana and I've seen the slow boiling racial hatred first hand. Lots and lots of white folks in Louisiana and other southern states have not greatly changed their attitude towards black people. What they have done is suppress it in public as much as possible, but it boils over again and again because the children are also being taught to carry a bias that can't be spoken of in public. What the fuck else can we expect to happen? It's going to boil over eventually, just like it has in Jena.
What I saw was more insidious than the open racism of the pre-civil rights era, but nevertheless harmful to race relations. The antagonism coming from both sides was palpable. This was my observation as a person moving into it from an entirely different, more tolerant, social framework.
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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce
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