Archives for April 2012

We’ve all seen something like this in an airport or somewhere else in public. An excited child sees a grandmother and impulsively runs over to hug her. It’s sweet and loving and it makes most of us happy.

For the thuggish bureaucrats of the TSA in Wichita, Kansas, though, it was enough to make a soon-to-be-crying 4-year-old girl into a “suspect,” according to a mother who told her daughter’s story in a poignant and scary Facebook post.

Michelle Brademeyer was traveling with her two children — ages 4 and 6 — from Montana to Kansas for a wedding. Brademeyer’s mother (the children’s grandmother) was on the trip. The kids don’t get to see their grandmother that often, because she lives in California. This was their first time to travel together.

As the family was waiting to leave Wichita on the way back home, they went through security. Brademeyer and the children went through the scanners without problem, but something on the older woman was triggering the scanner, so she was told to sit to the side to wait for a pat-down search.

As the grandmother sat alone, Brademeyer’s 4-year-old daughter saw her sitting and ran over to give her a hug. (That’s her in the blue dress above.) It wasn’t more than a few seconds, but a TSA agent started screaming at the child. Agents wouldn’t allow the girl’s mother to come get her, because they said she must go through a pat-down now, too. They implied that the grandmother might have passed a gun to the now-crying 4-year-old.

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Everybody’s read an obituary from time to time. They generally tell who died and what family the person left behind. Despite how unloving and fractious most families are, most death notices refer to “loving” spouses and children. They’re not the most honest accounts of life.

For one man in a suburb of Denver, that wasn’t good enough. When Michael Blanchard died, he wanted something a bit more truthful to leave behind, so he wrote his own death notice, saying, “Weary of reading obituaries noting someone’s courageous battle with death, Mike wanted it known that he died as a result of being stubborn, refusing to follow doctors’ orders and raising hell for more than six decades. He enjoyed booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died.”

The death notice — complete with a notation about which relative can “kiss his butt” — has become a viral sensation since it was published in the Denver Post nearly two weeks ago. (A Denver television station even did a story about the obit.) Here’s the complete text:

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Is the United States heading for some form of race war? I’m getting more concerned about that. I see the convergence of several trends that mean we need to be thinking seriously about what’s coming.

The old estimate was that white people would be a minority in the country by 2050, but accelerating demographic trends mean that might happen more quickly. Demographers now estimate that it will happen as soon as 2042. Already, white babies are in the minority. Blacks are reproducing at a higher rate than whites, and Hispanics are reproducing at a higher rate than either group.

So what’s it going to mean? Conflict between groups over culture and economic resources. White people have control of a greatly disproportionate amount of the income and wealth. I don’t happen to believe that it’s because of racism, but a high percentage of the non-white groups believe it’s unfair and racist that it’s this way. As whites become a minority, there will be increasing political pressure to take more from “the rich” and give it to “the poor” in one way or other.

Many black and Hispanic politicians are going to enjoy the increasing power that’s going to come from representing more people like them. At the same time, a large proportion of whites are going to feel that their country is “being taken away” from them. It’s going to be a potentially volatile mix.

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