The Wrong Lilies

The Wrong Lilies

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Ugly, ugly, ugly


It all goes back so far.  Remember in Los Angeles, when Rodney King was beaten by police and later asked, “Can’t we all get along?”  Or back when the Brits (and I’m an Anglophile) burned the White House for spite.  Or back when the Romans stabbed Caesar.  Then there was probably at least one Cro-Magnon event over a reindeer.

Or flash forward to after the 2008 presidential election.   Two very mature people are in a Walmart parking lot.  They go in to shop, they come out to find that their driver’s side mirror has been smashed, presumably in response to a political decal on the rear car window.  The decal says “We did it.”  Just that.  It is obvious that the damage was done by something like a tire iron; the mirror is neatly smashed, while its holder is not. 

Then there’s Vancouver, where one team won and one team lost.  A hockey game.  As if that weren’t the usual result of any game.  Oh, at least most of the decent Canadian fans presumably didn’t behave badly, and in all likelihood the rioting and car burning and window smashing would have been done by demented thugs even if the Canadian team had won, in a so-called ‘team spirit’ frenzy.

And in Florida outside a courtroom, there were ‘groupies’ who wanted to get into a court so badly to see a sad, painful procedure about a sad, painful child’s death, that they were willing, nay, did commit physical assault, as if that would assure them a place.

The ugly may go back forever, but it doesn’t have to keep going forward forever.  We’d better learn how to stop it.  Fast.  All these millennia, these centuries, these decades, and we still haven’t learned the meaning of one simple word:  COEXIST.  That’s another decal.  Check it out.  Try it out.

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