Secrets of the City

Or, more properly, at a Jewish Federation.

Seattle was better when Rex was here.

It happened @ the Seattle Jewish Federation. My wife works @ the Minneapolis Jewish Fed., and they’ve had extensive security reviews post and prior to this tragedy. The one that scared me more was the Northridge,CA JCC shooting in 1999….my kids go to day care @ our synagogue, and I occasionally find myself weighing the benefits of faith based day care & school vs. concerns for their physical safety. It would be different if we chose to live in Israel surrounded by hostile enemies, living on constant alert, but I still feel like in America these are isolated incidents and we live in a more reasonably tolerant society outside of some radical goofball wackos.

My wife’s crazy uncle lives in suburban Detroit and claims that he carries a glock in a shoulder holster when he goes to synagogue (I should have patted him down @ his son’s wedding) becuase he worries that, in his words, “some crazy Arab will come in during services and shoot up the place”…I can’t imagine living like that in this country.

“ . . . we live in a more reasonably tolerant society outside of some radical goofball wackos.”

In England, under current law, this is properly categorized as hate speech. You understand that it’s talk like this – language like this – that causes the attacks? Do you still wonder why they hate us?

Radical Goofballs aren’t animals. Their ideas are every bit as valid as yours and mine, simply because . . well, because. To call them “wackos” is insensitive and divisive.

Oh, and, about your wife’s crazy uncle’s gun?

Cheney gave it to him.

Bobby_B: Are you just being sarcastic or are you legally retarded?

Bobby…as I typed my response I realized that you were kidding. If I had continued, it would have started…

“when using those terms, I was referring to individuals who walk into an office or school or community center and start shooting up the place…are you defending them?”

it would have ended…”my wife’s uncle is an a#hole”

I was on a bus heading into downtown Seattle when I heard about the Jewish Fed. shootings just 30 minutes prior. Cops, SWAT teams for blocks, searching building by building for gunmen. Meanwhile, Critical Mass, motivated by a prior police/cyclist incident, was building a group of (in my estimation) 500 to 1,000 cyclists a few blocks away and a pro-Palistinean group waved signs and demanded accountability for “Israeli aggression” and “war crimes”. It was a surreal mess (logistically), not to mention the tragic/religious/cultural mess arching over it all.