This page was last updated on March 3, 2010.
Thin veneer; Editorial; Beaver County Times; March 3, 2010.
The editorial asserts, “Remember that the people who are doing this are just like you, and that you, in their circumstances, would be just like them.” I really wish the Times would quit projecting what its editorial board believes it would do on the rest of us. Would some small number of us get into “looting and pillaging?” Of course, as we saw by a very small number of New Orleans residents in 2005. Would that behavior be anywhere near typical? I don’t think so, just as it wasn’t typical of New Orleans residents.
Though skin color never crossed my mind while reading the editorial, you may not be surprised to learn a local lefty attempted to turn the editorial’s “looting and pillaging” comment into a skin color issue. In a comment on the Times website, Carl Davidson wrote, “It’s ‘looting and pillaging’ when people of color are dealing with disaster. It’s called ‘foraging for survival’ when whites [sic] folks do the same.” In addition to an apparent preoccupation with skin color, Mr. Davidson’s comment appears to have another problem. According to the CIA’s “World Factbook” (updated 2/4/10), Chile is 95.4% “white and white-Amerindian” based on the 2002 Chile census. Oops.
Why are folks on the left so preoccupied with a person’s skin color? It’s about keeping an “us vs. them” cauldron boiling. The left does the same with age, income, religion, sex, et cetera. As Jed Brandt (“a Brooklyn-based communist and contributing editor of KasamaProject.org”) said while speaking at the Brecht Forum on 9/16/09, “We have to help bring this [U.S.] government down, we have to help destroy this system and that requires increasing the alienation that working class and oppressed people feel.” You can see Mr. Brandt make this comment here. It starts at about 40 seconds in, but I recommend you watch the entire six-minute video. Part 1 of Mr. Brandt’s comments is here.
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