The racial tension in this country has gone beyond troubling. Riots all over after officer-involved shootings of black suspects hasn’t exactly given folks a warm, tingly feeling about race relations in the Obama era.
However, now those relations have gone beyond tension and have entered a new zone of stupid. You see, in Alabama, a city councilwoman tried to argue that a proposed Holocaust memorial is … you guessed it. Racist!
An Alabama city councilwoman made a series of outrageous — and mostly inaccurate — arguments in her attempt to claim a proposal to honor victims of the Holocaust was racist against black people.
Sheila Tyson doesn’t want the city to pay $45,500 to remove existing buildings on the site of the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center, which has raised about $500,000 to build a memorial park alongside a 9/11 memorial, reported AL.com.
“Dead is dead,” Tyson argued.
Tyson, who has previously asked the city to pay for repairs at the historically black Shadow Lawn Cemetery, said she didn’t understand why the city should help the privately funded memorial project.
“Isn’t it still for dead people,” Tyson said. “It is for dead people. Aren’t the people they are memorializing deceased?”
The city attorney, whose parents are buried at Shadow Lawn cemetery, tried to explain the difference between a publicly funded memorial and a private cemetery.
Not that it really mattered to Tyson, who then bizarrely claimed that the Shadow Lawn cemetery is the oldest in the world, and that because Michelle Obama’s great-great grandfather is buried there, it’s some kind of a tourist spot.
Not even close.
Had Tyson argued simply against taxpayer money being used on the memorial out of a desire to be fiscally responsible, then more power to her. That’s not what she had in mind, unfortunately. Instead, she raged because her pet project wasn’t funded — and apparently she lacks the competency to comprehend the difference.
Unfortunately, Tyson’s tantrum was a symptom of a deeper issue. Some people are so wrapped up by the racial tensions in this nation that they can’t comprehend that a disagreement isn’t necessarily racial. Sometimes, it’s just because your ideas are stupid wastes of taxpayer money.
Of course, these days, just staying she was stupid is probably racist.
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