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Hi. I'm trying to think of another description to put here. Any ideas? I'll try again at 420.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Dear Meg,

"....so don't you think that the woman was asking for trouble?...since she was stripping and men are known to be visual creatures...she never should have been taking her clothes of in front of the students. Now the lives of those men are totally ruined..."

Yikes! No, I don't think anyone ever asks for trouble by dressing in any certain way or undressing. Yeah, the lives of the men from Duke's La Crosse team are pretty much never going to be the same. Neither will the woman's. I don't know what happened, if anything, so I would hesitate before I even commented. If the woman was assaulted, she'll never be the same and if she wasn't assaulted, she obviously has some serious issues so she has my sympathy one way or another.

You say that the woman was "asking for trouble" by putting herself in that postition...I could say the same thing about the guys. If a man doesn't want to be falsely accused of something by a woman, he should stay away from the same things that women should stay away from. Drinking too much is never good and when you have a LOT of people drinking too much, there will be trouble of some sort. If no one had hired a stripper in the first place, no one would have been arrested for a sex crime. It's a dreadful situation to say the least. I don't think that anyone was behaving in an exemplary manner that night. As I told my son while he and I were driving home from the emergency room after he got into a fight for the third time in a few months, there were several opportunities for people to make decisions and those decisions put them where they are now.

Unfortunately, we're going to be hearing a lot about this case in the months to come. I'm already sick of hearing about it. One of the worst things about the entire situation is that so many people are using it for their own purposes and to advance their own political agenda's. The prosecutor alone is suspect as relates to motive. He's in the final heat of a campaign for re-election and this is a great case for him to get his name in the news. I think that it's a conflict of interests to have the person who prosecutes the citizens depend upon them to vote for them.

I also think that it's awful that race has been brought into this quagmire. It's a shame that people don't ever try to find the similarities between each other. It's commonalities that bring people together. We become close based on the things that we have in common. At every level, from the bond between 2 people to the bond between 2 nations, it's the things that we share that brings us together.

The things that we share, we share at every level as well. The melting pot aspect of our country is possible because when certain groups of people arrived, they easily blended in. Most early arrivals shared things like skin color and physical features so it was easy for them to mix in. They didn't make things tough for themselves by trying to stand out as something different. They adopted the culture of the people who were already here and they just blended in with everyone else. So, before long, Americans were just Americans, not Irish or German, just Americans.

It's tougher when you don't look the same as the people that came first. But it can be done. Mediterranean people did it. Asian people did it. But those groups didn't have leaders who constantly pointed out the differences. They didn't have people like Sharpton who can only stay in front of the camera if there's something to bitch about. He can't POSSIBLY say that things are fine...EVER...because then he would serve no purpose.

Wouldn't it be refreshing to see someone use a situation like this mess at Duke to actually bring people together? That would be so healing. We need to concentrate on our similarities instead of dwelling on our differences. The bottom line is that you can't bring people together successfully unless you bring out their shared attributes. It's the things that we have in common that hold us together yet so many people refuse to look at the things that we share, preferring instead to do see the differences. As long as people refuse to celebrate our unity as Americans, there will always be a major schism.

Oh! Did you see the idiot who shot himself in front of a classroom full of children? He was a DEA agent and he was showing the kids how to properly use a firearm and he shot himself in the thigh. If that isn't stupid enough, now he's sueing the DEA because the video tape of him shooting himself in the leg got out. Isn't that ridiculous?

OK, I'm going to go to bed now. I've been washing towels all night after using them to soak up the flood in my living room. I've washed the last load and now I'm going to lie down on the couch and fall asleep.

See ya!

Meg

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