On Nov 29, 2004, at 7:42 PM, Dave Land wrote:
On Nov 29, 2004, at 5:19 PM, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
What you probably don't know, because you don't live there (I used to until earlier this year) is that in north/central Wisconsin the Hmong community is facing a lot of problems, not the lest of which is ethnic bias.
Actually, the troubles of the Hmong in the Upper Midwest got quite a bit of national attention some years ago, but especially among those of us in California.
Huh, I must have missed that. It always seemed very regional to me.
So I *can* see how the other hunters could have tossed some slurs around, and that this guy felt -- or was! threatened; contrarily I can also see this guy being somewhat around the bend and simply going on a shooting spree, figuring he'd never get caught.
The part of my brain that still relies on stereotypes has no problem at all imagining a bunch of white hunters brandishing their weapons and shouting racial epithets at this guy, who (my stereotype brain assumes) that they blame for the fact that they can't get good jobs and their taxes are so high.
Yeah, sigh.
Regardless of how mentally stable Chai Soua Vang may have been at the outset, I'm guessing that after having to escape from his home country to California, then moving from one possibly inhospitable place to another, he had had enough, and went (as you say) around the bend out there in the woods.
Or, as Pheng Lo, a social-services director in California's Central valley who knew Vang said, "In the jungle, when people have guns, people have different attitudes."
Yeah, again, sigh.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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