HoustonSaint68 said

Wow, talk about irony.

I think you know that I respect you and your points of view but sometimes it seems that you're completely unwilling to even try to share the real-life point of view of someone else if that pov is distasteful or repugnant to your own current worldview. I'm sure that you believe in the effect of the Stockholm Syndrome on the human mind. Are you suggesting that its impact is limited only to those in the human race that you empathize with?

What about a person of color who grows up in abject poverty, in a community horribly impacted by systemic racism, with terrible parental influences (who themselves were so impacted), who gets in trouble with the law at 17? I know you don't support putting that kid in jail and throwing away the key. Why? And how, purely as a function of the working of the human mind, is that so different than a young person indoctrinated in racism with no external influence providing a different view?

And then making the leap that everyone who upvoted a particular post would also have been blocking the entrance to a school advancing through desegregation in 1957? For myself, I don't know how I would have reacted because I didn't live that life. Looking back on my own life in racial terms, there are some moments at which I shake my head thinking that I should have known better -- and others of which I am proud that I was ahead of the curve and took the right stance at some personal cost. But those decisions, good and bad, were the cumulative result of the events of every day that I lived before that. No one else lived that life but me, and so no one else really can know the amount of blame or credit I deserve for those decisions. Others can certainly make a judgment on the actions themselves, but the level of my true culpability is unknowable to others who didn't live my life. Hell, it's difficult enough for me to get a good gauge on how much I should excoriate my younger self.

And can we please stop with the misleading posts suggesting that anyone is "excusing" Jerry Jones' repugnant actions? I think I've read every post in this thread and I haven't seen anyone doing that. What's (largely) being objected to is the holier-than-thou rush to judgment by those who are so convinced that no amount of racial indoctrination, quite literally from birth, would have stopped them from doing the right thing. If you haven't actually lived it, you really don't know what you would have done.

So you tell me: what's the universal age at which each and every human, regardless of experience and personal makeup, doesn't deserve context to be understood for making repugnant decisions that negatively impact others? And, more frighteningly, who gets to decide that? You? The mob? While you're at it, you can also tell me the universal age at which every kid is an idiotic moron for still believing in Santa Claus. Not a perfect analogy for sure, but not a really bad one either.

With that, and perhaps also somewhat ironically, it's off to Thanksgiving so I won't be ignoring responses...just not having time to deal with them.

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