Why Can't You Mind Your Own Business, Berliner?

A couple of weeks ago, I was taken for a late-night drive past Mr. B's Elbow Room and Restaurant, in Gary, Indiana. We didn't have time to step in for a drink, which was disappointing. The next day, I'd said that I would have loved to hang because it's my favorite bar in Gary. My boss said, "Hey, now..." See, he thought I was making a joke out of it, which was the furthest thing from my mind.

The last -- the only -- time I was ever there, maybe six years ago now, everything in the room except the soft-porn videos and the music stopped dead, and every single head turned to look at Jid and me standing in the door. The place was utterly jammed, shoulder-to-shoulder, and we were the only white faces in the room. The pulsing heave of the dance floor stopped in a single settling pause, a bartender stopped in mid-pour, and if there was a dog in the room, then he was standing there with one hind-leg in the air and nothing happening while the look on his face said, "What the fucking fuck?"

It had been a completely innocent mistake that Jid and I had entered the place. Believe it or not, we thought that we had seen someone we knew -- yes; in Gary, Indiana -- running in the door, and since we were tired and irritated, we figured that we would go have a drink. It's a long story. Well, the person who we thought we knew wasn't there, and there we stood in this local joint where it's jumping up & down on the foundations on a Saturday night deep in a black neighborhood. As Jid later put it, "We were way white".

We kinda looked at each other, and one of us said, "Well, there's the bar..." We just sort of edged our way along toward the bar as politely as possible. God bless 'em, they let us through, and we were soon parked at the corner of the bar, having a sip and trying to be as cool as we could. I don't know how many white people they get dropping in at The Elbow Room, but they looked at us like we were zoo specimens while they were dancing. Soon enough, we must've bored everybody or something, because it was no big deal and the place was grooving like it must have been before we walked in. A couple of people said "Hi," the bartender was professionally attentive, and we all had a good time.


Comes now some dismal little potted-brain able to type this rubbish:

"Last night, on the Rachel Maddow Show (of all places for this to happen), Rand Paul said that he wasn't necessarily comfortable with the government telling private businesses how to deal with race. Specifically, he didn't seem particularly favorable to desegregating lunch counters.

Pretty much everyone is rightfully offended by this sentiment. The question of whether or not it is an overreach of government to desegregate lunch counters is long settled."

How can this be "settled"? Who the hell settled it, and how?

I'm here to tell this creep, Berliner, that if the owner of The Elbow Room had ordered my friend and me to leave his (get it?) establishment that night, we would have had no choice but to obey instantly, because we understand and respect private property, and would never go running to the likes of him for a sanction that he had no right to presume.

No matter what you do, creep, you will never peaceably make your way around this principle. You can try all the force you want, but the elements of peoples' heart & mind character in which matters like racism abide are not available to your steel-patchouli do-goodery. You might think that you're doing "the good of society" (third paragraph) by stripping others of their right to decide on their own associations (whether you like them or not, or whether they're even rational or not), but you're not. All you're doing is feeding the hate with your obdurate refusal to grasp elemental facts of reality, to wit:

• Private property is a requisite element of human efficacy, and...
  
• Racism has never been destroyed by the force of law, and it never will be.

Oh, you'll destroy a lot else in the effort. I have every confidence in that. It's just that, knowing that, and seeing how dumb you really are, I only wonder whether you like the idea of all that destruction, you bloody ignorant moron.


(Link: The Liberty Papers)