Those who already hate and believe racist attitudes will, of course, deny such connections.
-Bill D

The fact that the person who killed those police officers and believed in such conspiracy theories, and hated Jews and hated people of color lived five minutes from my home is really depressing me. This is not the American South. This is Pennsylvania.Pennslyvania considers itself to be a Northern state. Not that any of that matters.

I think that the climate that is being built by Fox News and Glen Beck and Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, and others makes it much more acceptable to believe this poison than it would otherwise be.

Fwiw, the neighborhood where Polowski lived (and his mother presumbably still lives) is about 60% Black and 40% White though it was probably less than 40% Black when I first came to Pittsburgh 40 years ago. I've read reports from Polowski's best friend that allege that Polowski's mother shared his racist and anti-semitic attitudes-as does that best friend. I wonder if his mother expressed any "there goes the neighborhood" resentment about "the property value of the houses declining" and worse statements as a result of this population shift. Of course, this is not to say that the homes in that neighborhood have declined in value-they haven't. And not that the neighborhood has gone bad-it hasn't.

But then again that's all in the eyes of the beholders. And as long as people keep denying that there's no such thing as race, we'll never have those badly needed conversations about that subject that Attorney General Holder got raked over the coals about. And if we don't improve the schools curriculum to be less Anglo-centric, and if we don't teach people to reach across barriers of differences and if we don't teach children and youth and adults how to deal with their anger, and if we do continue to have Fox news type, Sarah Palin type, Glen Beck type, Rush Limbaugh type dog whistle messages that stroke the fire next time and the time after that then we'll continue to have tragedies like this one-and worse.