Racial drift

"Manners are more important than morals", said Oscar Wilde.

"Karma simply means that a good action has a positive result and a bad action has a negative result", said a Tibetan wanker.

I smelled shit.
I was forced to.
For a good 20 minutes the vilest miasma wafted from a steaming pile of excrement and up my lamentable nostrils.
And there I was, stuck in the seat of an overcrowded bus that was making its way through Chicago’s congested streets, with no alternative but to endure the stench.

I was motivated to write this mainly because I had a thought, or rather, a visceral reaction, the sort of which is usually expressed by folks who are quite far to the political right of me.

I have always known that there are at least two Americas; the one in which I live and one in which a great portion of America’s blacks live.
In Chicago, these two worlds are very much separated.

I live North of down-town in a neighborhood called Lake View, and the people there are almost uniformly pleasant and polite.
Even though there is a large baseball stadium here, surrounded by a great many bars where large amounts of alcohol are consumed regardless whether the Cubs win or lose, there are hardly ever any fights and the only clear signs of the indelible stamp of our lowly origin are the usual honks and extended middle fingers of the motorists.

In Chicago’s vast black ghettos in the West and the South things are quite different. To illustrate; the vast majority of Chicago’s annual 600-or-so murder victims (and perpetrators)are young black men.

The two black women entering the bus are young. I estimate they are around 18 years old. One has what appears to be a shower cap on her head so I suspect that she has just received some form of hair treatment, or otherwise fashion has ,once again, taken a harsh turn without anyone notifying me about it.
She also has a tattoo on her cheek.

Upon entering the crowded bus the girl with the shower cap on bumps into a gentleman, who, according to shower cap, doesn’t apologize authentically enough for her bumping into him and a torrent of abusive language,which goes on for a full 2 minutes,is his punishment.

After this incident the young ladies sit down in the seats behind my girlfriend and me, and for the next 20 minutes they regale us with the wondrous tale of another maiden called Takisha.

Now, I wish I could tell you in detail what their discussion was all about, but since their accent was quite alien to me I could only make out the general plot line of their story.

The original thesis, proposed by shower cap, stated that Miss Takisha was both a motherfucker and a ho.
She was very adamant about her position as she repeated the words ‘motherfucker’ and ‘ho’ multiple times in each sentence.

The rebuttal from her interlocutor centered around the proposition that she was convinced that Takisha was both a bitch and a motherfucker.

Though their lack of enunciation was at times confusing, we were all fortunate that they made up for this slight deficiency by speaking so loudly that all of us on the bus could enjoy their spirited conversation.

My girlfriend, tormented by the endless stream of obscenities, suggested to me (in Dutch) that what these ladies were producing was verbal diarrhea.

The people on the bus, mainly white and Asian, were all thinking what I was thinking. Of this I am convinced.
And this thought is what surprised me and prompted me to write this entry.

It goes like this: wherever shower cap and her companion go is a place where I don’t want to be.

I was horrified by the idea that these people would move into the apartment across from me with their hostile, vulgar and ignorant ways.

And then another thought made its questionable appearance.
I remembered how police forces in cities across America are accused of ‘escorting’ young black or Latino people out of white neighborhoods when they are found walking or driving around there, and I was shocked to find myself thinking that I would have no problem at all with the Lakeview police escorting shower cap and co. out of my neighborhood.

I know myself fairly well and I know I am not a particularly bigoted person.
I also know that no amount of public money will ever close the racial divide in our country if people keep behaving like shower cap.