EDITORS COMMENT: Sometimes the greatest blessings come from the most unexpected places. What I am about to share is one of those unexpected blessings for me. This Op/Ed piece was written by my nephew Paul Timmins. Since Paul was young he has often looked up to me and I proudly mentored him. I consider him a fine example of a Husband, Father, and Friend. If the world had more people like Paul we could all sleep a lot better at night. Paul, I am PROUD of you!
Today, while eating at one of my favorite restaurants, Idle Hour in Spring Lake, MI (I’ve literally been eating there since I was able to eat solid food) I found some printouts on the lazy susan on the middle of the table.
Naturally, I picked them up, and one set of them was filled with a printed email containing a racist “joke” about painting a golf caddy robot black and having it fail to show up for work, apply for welfare, or become president, or something along those lines. Someone has reproduced this “joke” here.
It was prefaced with the words:
“IT MAY NOT BE POLITICALLY INCORRECT
BUT IT’S TRUE!”
I corrected this with my sharpie to then read:
“IT MAY NOT BE POLITICALLY INCORRECT RACIST
BUT ITS TRUE! FIXED THAT FOR YOU”
I think it’s important to call a spade a spade, and let other people figure it out. You can’t hide behind blatant racism with wimpy claims of “political correctness”. This isn’t someone saying “A black man” rather than “A man of African American decent”. It’s a straight up racist joke. If you think it’s funny, that’s fine, as long as you realize it’s actually racist, not just some stupid jab in the culture wars.
I then set it back in its place. Found another email printout, this time some email forward talking about how Obama is screwing old people by putting a 3.8% sales tax on all home sales. I got the correct information from factcheck.org stating that there is such a tax, but you have to have more than $200k a year in income, and it taxed the sale in excess of $250k for single people, and $500k for married filing jointly, and only to the extent that it exceeded those values would it be taxed (a sale of a home for $501k would only have $38 in additional taxes, as long as the person had $200k in income that year, otherwise it’d still be not taxed). So I made massive corrections to that email and put it back as well.
I don’t think the owners were involved, or possibly even aware. But I won’t allow racism or disinformation to go unchallenged.
[warning]EDITOR NOTE: Visit Paul’s website at http://www.timmins.net[/warning]
