Thursday, December 01, 2016

"...what it is ain't exactly clear...."


Something happening here:

The shopper at one point brings up politics again, seemingly without prompting.

“You are not going to tell me who I can vote for and who I can’t vote for,” she yells, sparking laughter around her.

I linked to the original story in comments below.  The video is available on YouTube.  It opens with the woman yelling:  "And I voted for Trump, and you want to throw me out for that?  And look who won!  And look who won!"  It goes downhill from there, as she claims the store staff want to "napalm" her and discriminate against her.  It's quite a tirade, apparently prompted because the store was out of large bags, or something.  I'm not even sure how Trump entered the conversation, except that she offers that information (it doesn't seem likely anyone in the store mentioned it first).

But then, there's this guy:

Earlier this month, a white man in Miami was also filmed causing a scene at a business while citing Trump and race. The customer was caught on video screaming at a black Starbucks employee after he accused her of denying him service for supporting the president-elect and claimed he was “racially discriminated against.”

“Because I voted for Trump. Trump. You lost,” that man told the employee before calling her “garbage” and “complete trash.”
It's not coincidental that the people screaming are white, and the people being screamed at are African-Americans.

As Charlie Pierce says, sardonically: "Economic anxiety takes many forms."  Me, I think it's Trump's childish displays of anger (literally childish), that seems to be giving others license to throw temper tantrums in public.  Well, that and racism.

I guess the problem is identity politics, huh?  Or maybe it's that the tirades common to the internet are finally spilling over into the "real world."  Because this is the statement posted at that YouTube video:

Comments were disabled on this video. Hate and violence are not acceptable in any situation. This woman needs to apologize and take responsibility for her actions, but hatred is not welcome here. If you are outraged by this video, PLEASE use this rage to stand up against hatred and racism. This one woman is not the problem. This is a MUCH BIGGER problem.
I'm sure the comments were mostly directed at the screaming woman, but the statement is right:  this is a much bigger problem, and we don't have to act like the woman in the video.  But we do have to bear witness against hatred and racism.  And against making this kind of behavior socially normative.

Nobody should act like this in public.

3 comments:

  1. More than ten minutes she went on like that? I'd have called the cops and had her arrested.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Apparently the store called the police, and the woman ranting claimed she did, too.
    It took the police 45 minutes to show up (no surprise, really), and by then the ranter had left the store.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The woman has Trump's hand and finger movements down pat. It may get to be a thing. The irony here is that the woman worked in Human Resources in a hospital. You can't make this stuff up.

    ReplyDelete