I was in downtown Lancaster one day. Things were really hopping: hippies, people playing music, art galleries, happening breakfast spots.

Now, the population here is 39% whites, 13% black and the rest mostly identified as Hispanic, with the majority of those Puerto Rican. But the main street festivities that’s all white people, in their gay, pasty glory, celebrating their decadent inclusivity.

This old black man, eighty if he were a year, was shuffling along speaking on his flip phone and this black kid, a teenager, slim, quick, runs up behind him, snatches that flip phone—and just boogies up the way. With my condition I’m a little slow on the uptake and tend to be the last person to respond to something in my peripheral visions. But I see the kid snap the phone and run off and as that registers the old man starts saying, “My phone, I’m talking to my daughter, my phone,” and I run off after this kid, though my gimp ass has zero chance of catching him. But I had to try. This old man was beside himself with grief. Who knows what the story was. Sure he could go get an Obama phone. But his whole world might have been in that phone. That phone might have held all of his phone contacts.

Of course, the oppressed martyr of the media state gets away—that’s a no brainer and it was what it was, that kid is what he is. What was sobering, astonishing even, was the reaction of the gathered multitude, all white, many on foot, many young, fit men who could have chased this kid, who could have reached out and stopped him, stuck a foot out and tripped him.

But the reaction was…nothing, as if they refused to believe that this had happened. It was like watching a nature documentary in which the herd animals affect this studied indifference to the plight of one of their own who is being eaten by the predator. You have to wonder about these lifeboat towns where whitey goes to hide from what ails him and then refuses to even observe reality—let alone recognize it—when it follows him.

-Nero the Pict

Nice Day for a Funeral