I occasionally read The Commonwealth Times to make fun of it. Like the comments saying that cartoons of the ’80’s were better than modern ones. G.I. Joe sucked! You’ll have a fond memory of any cartoon you grew up with, regardless of quality. But for the first time ever a newspaper has scared me. The comments made last week were just plain ignorant. After reading them I tried to conceive of how any marginally intelligent adult could believe that tripe. The only conclusion I can think of is that Richmond’s water has lead in it.
Only a mentally challenged person could argue in favor of affirmative action ,and anyone who defends affirmative action is an idiot, regardless of skin color. To give one group of people preference over another is unfair and should not be accepted, yet that’s exactly what affirmative action does. I’m sure that anyone who defends affirmative action would feel fine if they weren’t accepted into law school while another student with a lower LSAT score than theirs was (see the case of Hopwood v. Texas.) This discriminatory act happens regularly in schools all over the U.S. and similar situations happen frequently in the job world as well. It’s not “reverse-racism” – it’s racism. It’s real, and there is no excuse for it.
The comments about hate crimes clearly come from a person who has not lifted a finger to do any sort of research. Determining a hate crime is not a science, it’s usually a judgment call, which allows prejudice and political correctness to enter into the equation. When three white men chained a black man to a truck and dragged him to his death, the incident was classified as a hate crime, which it undoubtedly was. However, when Colin Ferguson, a black man, got onto a Long Island train and murdered six white (editor’s note: five were white and one was Asian) people and wounded another 19, it was not classified as a hate crime, despite Ferguson’s long history of anti-white outbursts and his admission that he chose that Long Island train because of the large amount of white passengers.
In 2001, the FBI recorded almost 2 million acts of interracial violent crime. Of that figure, about half were cases of blacks committing violent crimes against whites. Despite this, the FBI finds that blacks suffer several times as many hate crimes as whites. It seems that the entire FBI has clairvoyance and read the minds of the black people who committed the acts of crime against white people, and determined conclusively that there was no racial motivation behind them. About a million crimes and hardly any of them a hate crime, who really believes that? On top of that, only approximately 15 percent were robberies, so it’s not just an economic issue. The remaining 85 percent were violent assault and rape. Every violent crime is a hate crime,.If you brutally assault someone you obviously aren’t too fond of them – so it’s a hate crime.
The little observation about female run countries was an amusing piece of classic feminist propaganda. Once again, the person who made those comments clearly has read nothing, at least nothing intelligent. Israel, Rwanda, Pakistan, Ireland, India and Turkey have all had female prime ministers and all of these countries are strife with terror. Ireland is a complete mess, and Israel is the terror capital of the world. Even countries with many female parliament members, like Germany, France and the U.K. suffer from terrorism. Sweden, where the government is nearly 50/50 male/female, has had some very recent terrorist threats. Feminists have been making this farce of a claim since the ’60s and it wasn’t even true then. Some light reading by a person of average intelligence can clearly see that it isn’t true now.
I don’t care what the writer of last week’s comments political standings are, they really don’t matter. The writer needs to open her eyes. I sincerely hope that the comments made last week were a joke, because if they weren’t I’m going to have to start drinking bottled water.
Curtis Proctor
Please do not regard this letter as threatening or demeaning in any way. I write this to you to let you know that some of us that you ask for change understand the situation you are in. I have been homeless before; I have felt the stabbing hunger in my stomach for months on end; I have walked the streets in search of warmth on a cold winter night. But I have not solicited myself to those I walk by on the streets. My dignity would go out the window if I ever did that.
There are other options. If you truly are in need of any assistance such as obtaining food, warmth and shelter, there are ways you can go about doing this rather than asking college students for change. Some college students are just as poor as you are and are just trying to get an education to further themselves as people to someday have a career. I feel it is a violation of my privacy when I am walking to class and the same person asks me, several times a day even, if I can spare some money. No, I can’t. Most people these days do not carry money on their person, especially in a place like Richmond. Doing so is just asking to get mugged.
“But I have not solicited myself to those I walk by on the streets. My dignity would go out the window if I ever did that.”
With the time you spend every day sitting on this corner, you could be looking for a job. Pizza Hut right down the street is hiring, and there are several places up Broad Street that are hiring as well. If you are the type of person that has the mindset that you will not bring yourself down to the level of working a service job, look at your current situation. You are begging on the street. I believe that’s below service work.
If you truly need money to keep yourself alive and warm, take action and go job searching. There’s also an unemployment place right here on Grace Street where you can usually get work the next day. So please do yourself a favor and look into it. On another note, I’m sure you already know that being homeless and having a pet is not the best thing to put on anyone, let alone your pet. You have to take care of yourself and your dog.
Here are some resources around Richmond that can help you, if you wish to seek help. This is right down the street from where you are sitting. You can find food and shelter at the Salvation Army at 2 W. Grace St, 225-7470, and www.craigslist.org has many job postings, new ones daily. If you do not have access to a computer, there are computers with Internet access in the VCU Cabell Library approximately two blocks down Shafer Street. Dixie, next to Vito’s on the 900 block of Grace Street, is a great place to find work quickly. Have a good day and please take this into consideration.
Megan Osborn
While I am a white male, it does not take being one to realize that affirmative action is indeed state-sponsored racism.