tDoI, Part Two

I'll come right out with it - I have been accused of being a racist. Rather than defend myself against this woeful injustice, I have chosen to respond in a far superior manner - attacking the person who accused me.

As someone who grew up in the age of computers, I spend a decent portion of time "on-line." This necessarily involves some degree of interaction with other people who spend time "on-line," and, of course, when people come together under condition of anonymity, disagreements must necessarily arise (The folks over at Penny Arcade lend their insight to this issue here, if you are interested). During one of these interactions, it seems that I fell victim to Mr. Gabriel's theory and said something that came off the wrong way. Frankly I don't see the offensive quality of my comment - I said "peace niggas!" before going "off-line" one day - and if anyone is really offended by that, they have much bigger problems than my racism to deal with. But anyway, that is actually not my point.

I was later contacted by someone who had heard of the incident. The first thing he asked me - and I laughed about this for quite some time afterwards - was "are u black?" Despite the aforementioned warm blanket of anonymity, I chose to tell this man the truth (if some random blogger is reading this, I'm about as white as it gets), after which he proceeded to chew me out and inform me that I should never say anything like that.

I have been waiting to see this person - who, I'm told, is black himself - again, so that I can ask him this question: "What would you have done if I had lied and said that I was black?"

The Definition of Irony

One of the interesting things about riding the subway or the bus around here is the newspapers people always leave in their chairs. Today, on my ride home, I picked up one of these papers and saw a story about the trial of two men for a shooting four years ago. Apparently, they were aiming for a man on the train, missed, and ended up - accidentally - shooting a pregnant woman in the stomach, killing the unborn baby.

They have both been convicted of first-degree murder and now face life sentences.

I don't think I really need to draw the comparison here, but allow me to quote a statistic from Wikipedia to make it painfully clear what I'm getting at: "According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 854,122 legal induced abortions in the US in 2003." Of the people who - purposefully - performed this near to a million abortions, how many do you suppose are now in prison for life?