>To all my black neighbors.
>
>I saw two of your kids steal my bicycles. I saw them through the fence as they were approaching, one had a white T-shirt, didn't quite notice the other's garments. I thought they may be up to something, but then I gave them the benefit of the doubt - they may have been playing and lost the ball somewhere behind our car, or something, so I didn't get up to check.
>
>Well, too bad. The bicycles were the cheap Walmart stuff - too bad for the $20 seats we added - and I don't care for whatever value they may still have. I may even buy a bicycle on a yard sale... or buy my own bicycle back, whatever.
>
>It's just that you have lost my respect, pretty much forever. Unless the bicycles are back by tomorrow morning, when parents return, which I doubt. I am not giving a dime, ever again, for any of your charities, I'm not putting up a light on Halloween, and I will most probably find it in me to yell at any kids playing too close to our roses. I had all the good will to be a good neighbor, but this takes the cake. Shove the bicycles where the sun don't shine.
>
>To my fellow UTers, sorry if I'm grumpy more than usual today.
Dragan,
Sorry for your loss. But I am wondering, would you write the same message if the two kids were white? Would you stop giving to white charities if the kids were white? You see what I am saying?
"The creative process is nothing but a series of crises." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all." Oscar Wilde
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W.Somerset Maugham