re: #44 Mattand

My hope is that Americans drop this need to walk around strapped like they fucking living in Tombstone in 1881.

It will never happen.

So I live in a deep southern state. A few months back I was coming back from a family get-together at my aunt’s home, and my vehicle finally gave up the ghost (FORD: Fix Or Replace Daily) and left me on the side of the interstate. Now this particular stretch of interstate is literally right next to where I grew up as a kid, in an area of town I know very well and have walked through many times. After waiting about half an hour or so to see if anyone might stop and let me use their phone (this was the incident that finally convinced me to get a pay-as-you-go mobile, if only to get my parents to finally shut up about it), I started walking for the exit about half a mile back so I could hit up a convenience store and use their phone. Somebody finally did stop once I was walking, borrowed their phone for a moment to call the ‘rents and get them to come take a look at it before calling a wrecker (electrical problems and my father used to be a professional electrician).

The earful I got about how “it wasn’t safe” lasted for literal days. A grown man in what practically used to be his own neighborhood, being told how “that’s not a safe place to be”.

It wasn’t worth getting into the argument at the time, but I knew exactly what they meant by “not safe”. I knew it from years of listening to my grandmother (father’s mother) make casual complaints to the same effect, and my father in like kind.

“Not safe” really means “not white enough”.

And a little under half of the country feels “not safe” practically everywhere in the modern day.