I spent today with my uncle, he was visiting my dad in sunny Florida for a week or two. They live in Chicago, so the heat here is absolutely intolerable for him, even though us Floridians are used to the scorching sun...

I find it amazing what men will say when inside their comfort zone (riding in the car with my dad and I). My uncle had had some encounters with the local population in south Florida, and he has become very bitter because of it. He described, in colorful terms, how minorities were ruing this country. Now, he never said anything that I viewed as an elaborate or fantastical lie, all of his rhetoric lay carefully bound in the realm of simple observation and plain old experience. As much as a rally behind his concerns, at the same time I know that generalizing is undoubtedly ignorant. Not all African-Americans are savages, in fact I can point to my many friends as examples of minorities that contradict every ethnic and racial stereotype that "white people" have cooked up about them.

Throughout his speeches, I would insert myself from time to time, and bring the conversations back to reality, and make him see that he is being far to harsh on the minority communities. Despite this, I couldn't help but feel that his antics were not induced by white-supremacy mind control but by legitimate, thought out concerns....

He described an ordeal in which he was in a public restroom, and a child was running around slamming the stall doors. This child was black (gasp). My uncle took this the wrong way. The child was not misbehaving because he was black, but because his guardian did not keep track of him. This points to a bigger problem in our society, as I also notice smaller children acting with more selfishness and disregard for others than ever before.

Obviously, the solution is tighter discipline in schools and homes.

My own views are a little deeper, as I feel that we need to drastically tighten the discipline in all walks of American life. It is time for us to mature, both as a people and as a nation. We fall behind in science, education, and cultural appeal, and I at this point I am no longer proud of the country I live in. the moral decay is alarming, and there seems to be, at this point, no simple way to reverse it. I'm optimostic that things will sort themselves out eventually, but we may not have that long.