"Now isn't that typical"
-The Church Lady-
-The Church Lady-
There are always stories in the local paper that make me
The first story is about an undocumented Guatemalan man who worked for a local gardening service. The truck he was riding in was hit head on by a drunk driver and Luis Jimenez suffered severe and irreversible brain trauma. Having no money, no local family and no insurance the local hospital took him in and over a period of a few years, his bills climbed into the millions. After three years, the hospital was granted a court order allowing them to charter a Medivac jet to send him home to his family, but the bill of course stayed here and will eventually be covered by increased insurance costs to all of us. End of story? No, his family has charged the hospital with kidnapping and is suing for damages.
The second story about a local homeless man caught swiping M&M's, T shirts and other items from a convenience store. He has a history of drug and public intoxication arrests, but he claims that he's entitled to all the M&Ms he can steal -- because he served in Iraq.
So what do these stories have to do with each other? Nothing really, but my reason for comparing them is that while people who write to newspapers use the first to howl and scream about illegal aliens and how this is typical of all of them, nobody uses the second to tell us that all Iraq veterans should be deported.
What makes something "typical" of a group? Usually our prejudices, our hidden fears and our dishonesty. Aren't we typical!
Unfortunately, the reactions are pretty typical. Why we tend to qualify wrongdoing by the circumstances of the perpetrator is beyond me.
ReplyDeleteBut don't our prejudices come shining through when something like these incidents happen!
You know, I blogged the story of Eve Carson who was murdered in Chapel Hill, NC. Beautiful, smart girl, a Moorehead scholar and class president, long blonde hair, white skin, gunned down in a cold cruelness that defies human logic.
She was killed by two black males so, of course, the immediate reaction was they killed her because she was white. Reality is they were opportunistic cowardly toe rags and killed her for sport just because she was there. One of her killers had murdered an Indian male student at Duke several months before.
And then there was handsome, smart Dennis Hayle who attended NC A&T and he was black - a recent arrest in another violent crime leads me to believe his killer will turn out to be a former classmate who is also a black male.
We, as human beings, are never going to progress to the next level until we stop looking for excuses and start dealing with the underlying events that create this disregard for others.
The Guatemalan family - good luck with that!
Ambrose - is obviously a sick man. If he is a vet, the VA needs to step up; if not the state needs to get this guy some help.
"the state needs to get this guy some help"
ReplyDeleteAh, well that would be Communism, you see. . .
Fogg - I'm not sure when we went from "he ain't heavy, he's my brother" to "I'm not my brother's keeper" but we have managed to form all these little individual islands of insulation and expect all the bad stuff to stay off our island.
ReplyDeleteWe've lost the concept of neighborliness.
Maybe even the concept of civilization.
ReplyDelete