This Canuck likes to think the CBC still hasn’t gone down any sluice yet.
Quatloos to Timbits that grave’ll be 24/7 CCTV’d.
I’ll pay the fine gladly.
Heh, I thought you were gonna say “I’ll wave, then.”
/ok end of derail.
I went to Walmart today and already encountered a bit of unanticipated verbal racism.
Somehow I got pulled into conversation with one of the people hawking products in an aisle set up (not a Walmart employee - I can’t even recall the product).
I don’t mind having a few minutes of conversation to distract me since I really hate shopping.
I can’t recall the context of the conversation but at one point she was describing one of the Walmart employees as, “the guy with no teeth who looked like he came over the border”.
I was so stunned and my mind was trying to come up with some way to counter her statement such as “What border?” but she was already on another subject. She was talking a mile a minute and it was actually difficult to disengage.
I had seen this young man in the aisles stocking and said something innocuous to him in passing about how crowded the store seemed.
I was finally able to break free but had enough shopping for the day and went home in disgust.
I live in a rural Western PA area with very little diversity.
My heart aches for what this young man might be experiencing.
And if she felt emboldened enough to talk like this to a stranger I can’t even begin to imagine their conversations at home.
I am going to have to beef up my gentle confrontational skills and/or resort to shopping elsewhere or online.
“I presume you mean he came over from Frozen Foods?”
I’m sorry. The unabashedness with which which bigots gonna’ bigot since their fearless leader set the tone … is deeply disturbing and ever-so sad.
“You sound like a real piece of shit.”
Why be clever?
Is there really, I mean really a problem in Pennsylvania with migrants?
I know migrants. They work every year in these parts. (Deep South) I don’t know, don’t need to know about their paperwork or legality.
I know this, there would be no produce that requires hand picking(tomatoes , melons, tree fruit)that would get picked if they didn’t show up.
In Arkansas we welcome them. It’s a huge part of rural economy.
To be sure there’s the odd incident that causes a bit of consternation every year. Usually caused by liquor. But they just put them on a bus to Brownsville. There are approximately 125 there, that want to work, to replace them.
We have a resident Hispanic community. Again, I don’t care to know their immigration status. I assume without asking they are citizens.
They own homes, work, drive. Their kids are in school. They’re no more trouble than any other race around here.
We got our troubles down here. No doubt.
But if I heard a person say, out loud, in public “looks like they just came across the border”
I’d say “what racist idiot hole did you crawl out of, check yourself, lady”
She wouldn’t have time for a come back. I’d be gone.
I wasn’t prepared and I wish I had said something. I will gird my loins for battle next shopping trip.
As for the migrant population in western PA - it has definitely increased in the last several years but it’s nothing like your area or some of the more urban locations in PA. Some of the Pittsburgh neighborhoods are complaining about the influx but I don’t know how valid the actual numbers are.
This was simply a racist jerk spouting off her ignorance.
There will be a problem with not having migrants some parts of Pennsylvania! Adams County is renowned for two things: the most famous battle of the Civil War, and its abundant apple crops, which are picked by migrant workers and their families. There’s gonna be a lot of apples rotting in the fields if those hardworking folks are deported.
I (briefly) had a job picking apples with a crew of Mexican immigrants (because at the age of 13 my mother thought I needed to learn the value of “real work” but whatever). Most of these guys were my size or smaller, but they could climb up on ladders, lift their arms above their head, and quickly but gingerly pluck and bushel apples for hours on end without bruising a single one. I was bushed after 45 minutes and couldn’t even raise my arms after four hours while these guys filled bucket after bucket with only the ripe and undamaged apples. This is work that almost no domestic worker would be willing to take on for any reasonable wage, and they would likely do as shitty of a job as I did even if they tried.
You are goddamn right we need immigrants, and not just to do the hard, dirty, often dangerous jobs with minimal compensation but also to drive our economy and aspire that their children will do better than them…but our economy also needs them to do those hard, dirty, often dangerous jobs for shitty pay because Elon Musk’s dancing androids certainly aren’t going to master that task at speed any time soon.
Stranger
I never understood the people dissing the migrant workers. We all like to eat.
I prefer my fruits and veggies don’t come from some far off country. The closer the better.
We got all this rural land in this country we should grow our food.
Yes @Ellecram , I’m practicing my snappy come backs too.
I have family in Winchester, Virginia and I travel there frequently especially for certain holidays. There are a lot of apple farms there and a lot of migrant workers. I think it is one of the largest apple producing locations in the US (I could be wrong). They would have a significant economic impact without those workers.
I will be working on my Walmart witticisms as well!
An old saying here in the suburbs
“I demand immigration reform. But not until my new roof is finished.”
WTF. Who says shit like this? That’s comic book levels of villainy. What kind of person is not only ready to put kids in cages, but is looking forward to it; and is not only looking forward to it, but brags publicly about how glorious it will be? I wonder if this guy, early on, volunteered at animal shelters so he could happily put down unwanted dogs and cats. What a piece of shit. This is what you voted in, America!
There are child welfare laws that prohibit … oh wait.
Easy; it’s a mix of racism and blaming the victim. Migrant workers are exploited, abused and the “wrong” race, so the people exploiting them like to demonize them to justify themselves. And racists hate them out of racism, although the overlap between exploiters and racists is very large.
I just reported the verbal racism incident to the Walmart Ethics Line. I have a case number and they said they would contact me with an update in 7 - 10 days.
I felt it was a more constructive way to report rather than to go the customer service desk to try to figure things out.
Well, good for you.
That was very proactive.
Thank you @Beckdawrek
It’s people at this nuclear grade level of scum who should be concerned about getting doxxed like Fuentes recently has. Not the best trend, in that, the inverse could happen, with, say, Sotormayor or Jackson becoming targets. I’m just talking in extremes, here, so, I’d have no compunction, then, in seeing whatever future US residence that Andrew Tate will have getting substantially drone-attacked (simply because he’s, well, yanno, evil shit, and everything, while Sotormayor and Jackson, um, aren’t).
Again, I’ll go back to the quite likely retaliation attempts that those on the alt reich would likely resort to, which could lead to myriad, impossible-to-predict escalations, and thus, I’m not trying to offer any bromides, here, just more of a leary observation that the more evil that such scum will try to achieve, the more violence will unquestionably happen.