by Being Targeted Arguably this is paranoia, but the mayor and police chief of my city do not think so and have officially reacted with a formal response. What a sign that I am an old whatever, praising local law enforcement, but, well…. So the issue is that late last evening a truck full of masked white men, and no, we are not talking health masks but ones that cover ID, with flags waving including the Confederate battle flag, were going up and down our block taking photos of certain houses, including ours. What did these objects of this photographic effort find consistent? We all had posters on our property declaring “Black Live Matters.” Many on our block became upset over this, including my wife, and now the City of Harrisonburg, VA police are
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Being Targeted
Arguably this is paranoia, but the mayor and police chief of my city do not think so and have officially reacted with a formal response. What a sign that I am an old whatever, praising local law enforcement, but, well….
So the issue is that late last evening a truck full of masked white men, and no, we are not talking health masks but ones that cover ID, with flags waving including the Confederate battle flag, were going up and down our block taking photos of certain houses, including ours. What did these objects of this photographic effort find consistent? We all had posters on our property declaring “Black Live Matters.” Many on our block became upset over this, including my wife, and now the City of Harrisonburg, VA police are especially watching our block. I note that both the mayor and police chief of our city happen to be Black, for which at this time I am grateful.
Background here is that I have been living where I am for 32 years with my wife, Marina, in a block in Old Town of Harrisonburg, VA, where most of the houses are somewhat over a century old, and we are five minutes from the central square, as well as being 20 minutes from offices at James Madison University. Where we are is given by the 2004 prez election. There are 5 precincts in Harrisonburg, but ours, closest to JMU, was the only precinct in the entire Shenandoah Valley that went for Kerry over Bush. Yes, we are an island of “liberalism,” with Harrisonburg later in 16 going strongly for Bernie.
So I happen to live on the most publicized block of all of this Old Town, which I note for the record has both Trump supporters in good number as well as Republicans who are not big fans of Trump. There has been a long history of the local newspaper focusing on our block in particular [Daily News Record owned by the family of the late racist Harry Byrd], with even our house appearing twice in stories in this paper representing the neighborhood [we have a nice garden in front]. I note here that our block is a super fave on Halloween for trick or treaters, many hundreds coming from outside the city. We do our best to treat them well.
Our neighborhood, heavily crawling with JMU faculty, is certainly mostly an upper middle class neighborhood, But while being mostly white there are Blacks as well as various people from abroad from all over the world. So we are fairly diverse these days.
Anyway, several weeks ago a friend-neighbor up the street starting putting out these Black Lives Matter signs, costing I think 3 bucks or so, that one could put in one’s yard. They went all over town, but our block got more than anywhere else, with where I live 5 of us in a contiguous row puttng them in our visible front yards. At least one of those in our row is a Republican family..
Barkley Rosser