The Pnyx: On hate crimes
Michael McShane
News Editor
No one should be targeted because of who they are.
That should be a basic, understood belief that we all should know and follow, but we aren’t living in a world where everyone is respected even if they didn’t deserve to be disrespected.
Instead, we are living in a world where we constantly see news stories about people being yelled at, assaulted and even murdered, because they were different. But what is different, is it even there and even if it is why is it so bad?
When I look at someone of Somali or Mexican decent, I don’t view them as being different from me. Just because we’re from a different culture or region doesn’t mean we’re necessarily different. That is what baffles me so much when I hear people get so aggressive about immigrants or minorities.
Nobody is stealing anybody’s job. It’s a crazy accusation that has no merit. To those who do accuse immigrants that they’re stealing your job, you’re not mad that they have a job and are generally being successful. You’re mad that they are being successful and aren’t the same as you.
When I see a person of color get attacked, it infuriates me when the motive is based around racism and discrimination. The latest high-profile case of a man getting battery acid thrown at him seconds after being asked why he invaded his (the assaulter’s) land highlights all of this.
Immigrants are not invaders. Immigrants do not deserve to have battery acid thrown in their face, ruining their lives forever. There is nothing this man did that called for this to happen to him, the only reason it happened – was because he was Hispanic.
Hate crimes are especially violent and horrific because it involves one of humanities most primal fault – we hate what is different and we are very, very territorial.
So, because of that, we must fully prosecute hate crimes. Because they are senseless, needless and leaves the victim with the question nobody should have to answer – did this happen because of who I am?
Who would disagree with this? No risk to this moral stance, though, if you were gay at MSU back in the early nineties you were full game for even the multiculturalists who were much more into preserving their extreme Abrahamic beliefs than the rights of gays, including gay war veterans. But I have heard that things have changed back there. Not sure I want to find out.
I have entered Mexico illegally a number of times, having swum across the Rio Grande back in the eighties while living in Mission, Texas, and one time, after crossing at Matamorros from Brownsville, I forgot to stamp into the country. I forgot to stamp in because I had run back and forth across the river a number of times in one day and just got confused. Somehow I felt that I was more at home in Mexico than in the USA. (That is true of a lot of countries including the one I am living in, Cambodia.) So I bussed it all the way to the Usumacita River in Chiapas separating Mexico and Guatemala only to discover at Mexican Immigration that I had forgotten to stamp in. “Eight dollars,” said the Immigration officer. And, as I crossed the river by boat, I mentioned to the Frenchman next to me that I only had to pay an eight dollar fine for not stamping in. “I paid eight dollars, too,” he said.
Years ago, back when Americans weren’t required to have passports to travel in Mexico when I was coming up from Tapachula down on the Guatemala border–I hadn’t actually entered Guatemala on that trip– I was stopped by Mexican Federalis who thought I was a Guatemalan trying to sneak into the country. “Yo soy Estadounidense,” I said, showing them my little paper. They waved me through.
Last summer when I was coming up from Guatemala on a first class bus in the State of Tabasco, I woke up and noticed that a dozen children from out of nowhere were on the bus. They were sitting on the laps of the women on the bus and were busy being mesmerized by some silly American dance movie. The bus stopped, and the Federalis came onto the bus. The children were removed. Twenty kilometers down the road the adults were removed and I had the bus to Veracruz for myself.
So I guess the Mexicans are doing their jobs keeping the Central Americans out.
Mexico is a rich country. it is the thirteenth largest economy in the world, and, despite its problems with the drug cartels, despite our problems also with mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, the trash spread out over northern Mexico back in the eighties when I lived there is no longer there. The chicken buses of the eighties with the dragon diesel smoke pouring out of their exhaust pipes are no longer there. I don’t think the Mexicans are coming. It is the Central Americans who are coming up from Honduras due to Hillary Clinton overthrowing their socialist president allowing corporations to buy up the land and enslave the people. These people are running from fascism
Why be racists? If you are going to build a wall across Mexico, then build another one across Canada
We should let all Muslims into the country. We owe them ours after having destroyed so many of theirs. In 2,009, while living and teaching in Salalah, Oman down on the Indian Ocean with its beaches clad with Swedes and Norwegians in bikinis and g strings, both male and female, I tried to enter the state of Hadromoat (Death Comes) in Yemen by bus, but wasn’t allowed to cross the border because I was told it was too dangerous for westerners to enter. So I flew up to Dubai and spent a few days on the beaches there where Russian men and women were sunbathing in their g strings on Jumeira Beach. (Oddly, Afghan male slave workers were being arrested for indecent exposure for wearing their long underwear on the beach.)
At any rate, I purchased a plane ticket to Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. Its ancient gingerbread old city was still there at that time, but now has been mostly obliterated by American supported Saudi bombings to get rid of the allegedly evil socialist Shiites.
From Sanaa, I thought I had bought another ticket to the city of Tarime, but the plane landed down on the south coast, so I took a shared taxi north and was stopped by the Yemen Army which insisted I had to have an armed guard with me in the taxi, so I spent the rest of my journey with this little mustachioed guy snoring next to me as I stared down the barrel of his AK 47. But the roads were smooth and I made it to Tarime at sunset only to have the police tell me I had to have an armed guard for the rest of my visit. I didn’t bother with that and visited the ancient “Manhatten of the desert” city of Shabbome with its mud skyscrapers and silly fetid little children running around pushing bicycle tires with sticks and showing off to me how they could walk around standing on their hands, both of these skills a long lost art back in America, the land of computers and cell phones.
I also travelled Syria in 2004, having photographed most of its Roman and Byzantine sites now destroyed by ISIS which was being supported by the US Government to fight against Syrian President, Basheer Al Assad. ISIS was formed due to our 2,003 invasion of Iraq from us abolishing Saddam’s army, some of its men joining together to form ISIS to attack the Shiites of Iraq and Syria to wipe them out, including the Allowite Shiite Syrian president, Basheer Al Assad.
At any rate, hundreds of thousands have died in Yemen with many more hundreds of thousands yet to die from starvation and cholera. Hundreds of thousands have died in Iraq and Syria America’s support ISIS, and millions have fled to Jordan and Turkey. We owe these people our country. What difference does it make if we let in a few terrorists? We have plenty of home-grown good Christian terrorists in the USA. Some of us have served in these wars in the Middle East.
Daniel Sebold,
MSU English/Spanish Alumnus
Former US Navy Arabic linguist and ’91 Gulf War veteran
We should let all Muslims into the country. We owe them ours after having destroyed so many of theirs. In 2,009, while living and teaching in Salalah, Oman down on the Indian Ocean with its beaches clad with Swedes and Norwegians in bikinis and g strings, both male and female, I tried to enter the state of Hadromoat (Death Comes) in Yemen by bus, but wasn’t allowed to cross the border because I was told it was too dangerous for westerners to enter. So I flew up to Dubai and spent a few days on the beaches there where Russian men and women were sunbathing in their g strings on Jumeira Beach. (Oddly, Afghan male slave workers were being arrested for indecent exposure for wearing their long underwear on the beach.)
At any rate, I purchased a plane ticket to Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. Its ancient gingerbread old city was still there at that time, but now has been mostly obliterated by American supported Saudi bombings to get rid of the allegedly evil socialist Shiites.
From Sanaa, I thought I had bought another ticket to the city of Tarime, but the plane landed down on the south coast, so I took a shared taxi north and was stopped by the Yemen Army which insisted I had to have an armed guard with me in the taxi, so I spent the rest of my journey with this little mustachioed guy snoring next to me as I stared down the barrel of his AK 47. But the roads were smooth and I made it to Tarime at sunset only to have the police tell me I had to have an armed guard for the rest of my visit. I didn’t bother with that and visited the ancient “Manhatten of the desert” city of Shabbome with its mud skyscrapers and silly fetid little children running around pushing bicycle tires with sticks and showing off to me how they could walk around standing on their hands, both of these skills a long lost art back in America, the land of computers and cell phones.
I also travelled Syria in 2004, having photographed most of its Roman and Byzantine sites now destroyed by ISIS which was being supported by the US Government to fight against Syrian President, Basheer Al Assad. ISIS was formed due to our 2,003 invasion of Iraq from us abolishing Saddam’s army, some of its men joining together to form ISIS to attack the Shiites of Iraq and Syria to wipe them out, including the Allowite Shiite Syrian president, Basheer Al Assad.
At any rate, hundreds of thousands have died in Yemen with many more hundreds of thousands yet to die from starvation and cholera. Hundreds of thousands have died in Iraq and Syria due to America’s support ISIS, and millions have fled to Jordan and Turkey. We owe these people our country. What difference does it make if we let in a few terrorists? We have plenty of home-grown good Christian terrorists in the USA. Some of us have served in these wars in the Middle East.
Daniel Sebold,
MSU English/Spanish Alumnus
Former US Navy Arabic linguist and ’91 Gulf War veteran