Cautionary Q

I know, I know. First a post about Bed-Stuy, now Ditmas Park. But it's a bit hard not to comment on this piece from the Daily News: The whole headline reads like this:

Two Brooklyn women tired of 'white people moving into the area' force tenants out at gunpoint, then squat in apartment: police

Precious Parker, 30, and Sabrina James, 23, were arrested Saturday after they allegedly kicked two men and a woman out of an Ocean Ave. apartment on Thursday. Authorities say the crime was partly motivated by race and class resentment.

 That's the kind of story that will make great fodder for all kinds of water-cooler and internet-cooler conversation.

My take is that it would be about as useful to draw conclusions from this story as it would be to draw conclusions about "The Knockout Game" purportedly "played" by blacks against Jews. Shitty or criminal behavior is that. There are real resentments out there, to be sure. But these are not the first shots of an all-out war on Jews or white people. But god knows, people will run with it where they will..."Precious" indeed!

I hope they nail them for armed robbery, a dang serious offense. The "race and class" part of it is immaterial as far as I'm concerned, and thrown in the headline to cause an uproar. I'd imagine that a lot of very nasty things get said when someone commits a violent crime. As to the squatting in the apartment after the robbery? That's just plain nuts. Unless it's a form of civil disobedience, you know the armed robbery kind, I would say these ladies were high out of their gourds. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the media, though I'm not hopeful for cool heads. Lest you think I have a problem with the term "hate crime," I don't. But I think it's worth waiting to find out whether these women were out to get whitey, or just out of their frigging gourds and excited to spend the next few years wearing orange - the new black?