Is America Safe, Or Not?

[WiseOne]

I didn't register curlew's comment as a joke, which is a risk of typing something into an online forum. You're skimming or jumping through conversations and maybe not catching all the nuances. Still, even rereading the post with that in mind, it remained cringe-worthy to me even though I thought I was relatively immune to the "PC" issues. I guess I'm not.

There's also the factor of living in a large East Coast city, as opposed to a small town, and working at a large university with many international faculty & students where the "melting pot" is real. When there is a shared culture, these racial/ethnic issues just don't come up, and I've gotten used to that. In my laboratory currently there is a Mormon, a UK citizen, a Taiwanese student, a black resident, a Canadian, and a resident who (now that I think about it) is probably Jewish. The shared culture is key here...the problem, to me, are groups who don't want to join our culture, but want to create their own subculture (including language) and then require us to adapt to it and even offer special privileges. It's "PC" to go along with this unstable arrangement - at great cost and inconvenience to the rest of us, and at the price of blocking these groups from most of the American opportunities they could otherwise participate in.

Somehow I'm walking this tightrope between the "dark side" of PC (above), and the good side, where you try to be just a bit sensitive to people who have a different heritage.

[dualstow]

WiseOne, you said it better than I know how.

[I Shrugged]

deleted by poster.

[Libertarian666]

I'm ethnically Jewish and I didn't find curlew's comment personally offensive. I didn't find it particularly funny either, but so what?

And for the record, I live in a VERY small town and feel quite safe, much safer in fact than in my mother's neighborhood in Philadelphia. Somehow the sirens I hear every time I visit her don't make me feel any safer.

[dualstow]

For the record, I did not at any time state that Jews are unsafe in small towns in the U.S. Those were words that were put in my mouth and then called "ridiculous" which is fine, because it is was never my statement anyway.

Clearly, I made a mistake by being too concise and also by wrapping my first comment with the reference to violence in a fictional novel.

I did not feel unsafe growing up in my hometown, which was smaller in population than many universities. I could probably live in most dense urban areas in the U.S., no matter the location, but I don't think that I would feel as comfortable in small towns in any location.
There's a reason for that. For example, as middle school student, I didn't quite know what to make of it when I was in the bathroom and I overheard a guy say to his friend, "I want to kill some Jews because a Jew stole my girlfriend." My first thought was, There's another Jew within 10 miles of here? Does this guy know I'm Jewish?/ Is he saying it for me to overhear? Or is it just a colossal coincidence?
(When I got older I thought, why not go after a guy with orange Nike sneakers b/c a guy with orange Nikes stole your girlfriend?)

At the same time, if I returned to the same hometown that I know so well, even though it has changed drastically and become something of a drug- and crime-ridden area, I would feel fairly safe. None of my issues with it would be racial.

I could go on, but lest further clarifications come off as backpedaling, I will just say that it was my own perception, just like my reaction to the casual reference here to the camps was my own. I don't claim to speak on anyone else's behalf.