Tuesday, March 22, 2005

 

I Don't Like Mondays, Revisited

The news out of the Red Lake (Chippewa) Nation, up in Minnesota, is that yet another picked-upon and misguided young man, Jeff Weise, 16 years old, has decided to act out his feelings, with the result that there's 10 dead (including himself), and 7 wounded. Got up Monday morning, killed his immediate family (what there was left of it: his tribal-policeman grandfather, and the grandfather's lady friend), then drove his grandfather's squad car to his high school, where he shot up more people before turning the gun on himself.

One strange twist: Apparently the kid had skinhead sympathies, calling himself "NativeNazi" and "Todesengel" (German for "Angel of Death") in online chat rooms. Unfortunately, that doesn't make him the first such "unlikely" white supremacist.

No, before Jeff Weise there was Leo Felton. And before him, Daniel Burros.

Hatred begins at home: As comedian and activist Dick Gregory (perhaps apocryphally) once said, when asked why there's so much black-on-black crime, "It's because black people are conditioned to hate the same people that white people are conditioned to hate: Niggers."

posted by Michael 8:08 PM