Getting ugly.

It may be me, but I have a bad feeling that race relations at present are worst than they have been in decades. I don't know the reason for the decline, besides the obvious answer of many hands reaching for a piece of the same shrinking pie.

I wonder if some people will ever come to grips with the notion of having a black president? Does he engender such anger and distrust merely because some do not agree with his politics or could other factors be in play? An innate suspicion of someone who doesn't resemble us perhaps?

I like to look at a lot of different sources of news. Two places I enjoy going are the CNN and USA Today online comments sections. The sites are both ostensibly non partisan and they get a wide mix of political persuasions, all slugging it out pretty good.

Anyway, we have had a whammy of stories lately, all dealing with an undercurrent of race. Trayvon Williams' shooting first, then Tulsa. A young white man's father had been shot and killed in an argument with a black man and the son sought retribution. A writer for a respected conservative magazine, National Review, writes an incredible indictment of blacks and why we should really be afraid of them. Got him fired. This is on the heels of Buchanan. Fox News interviews the heavily armed Neo Nazis that are marching in Florida to keep the white people safe today and calls them "another civil rights group." Ruben Navarette wrote an article yesterday about minority journalists getting purged in the print shrinkage of the news and print world.

When Williams got shot, the online comments often went something like this; black people shoot white people all the time, what about that?

After the Tulsa shooting and before there were suspects the USA Today rhetoric was also quite colorful: why do you have to say five black people were killed instead of five people? Why do you have to say the black community is worried about continued shootings instead of the community and how do you know the shooter wasn't an angry black man or woman? Now this takes a bit of intuition but there aren't a lot of blacks with vendettas against people with dark skin. These people were targeted. Capiche? But the argument is made every day now that white people are essentially color blind and that minorities are the real racists.

I thought that we were past it but things are getting ugly. Go to USA Today after any story about race and see what I mean.