Hurry, before I die.

God forbid I died today and my last blog post was about mulch. I feel some incentive to update.

As some of you know, a Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed last week during a robbery by three men. As usual, I choose to focus on the minutiae, and I focused on this paragraph that appeared in the Inquirer's story on Thursday:

Floyd arrived at Police Headquarters at 12:20 a.m. inside a van from the 24th Police District, the dead officer's station. Mayor Nutter and his security detail arrived at the same time.
The van then backed into a loading bay, and Floyd and his girlfriend were whisked into an elevator, away from the view of the public and the many reporters who had gathered there. The entire episode was a somber, businesslike affair, without any reaction from the officers there.
"The one emotion that everybody shared was relief," [Philadelphia Police Chief] Ramsey later said.
Afterward, the mayor told reporters said he got within two feet of Floyd.
"I looked him dead in the eye when he came in, and I told him how disappointed I was in him," Nutter said. There was no response from the suspect, the mayor added.

The reason Nutter was disappointed in him is because both Nutter and the suspect are black. The mayor obviously felt that Floyd was letting down their race by committing a crime. I found that an odd response.

Being white and kind of dopey from time to time, I've never been told by another white person that I have let down my race and disappointed people of the white race by my dopey actions. I don’t know where that feeling comes from. Perhaps it’s because black men still feel out of place socially or that they feel that they constantly have to prove their self-worth and their worth to society? I don’t know.

Maybe it's that same feeling that other blond-haired women get when another blond does something stupid and it's blamed on them being blond? I know I feel disappointed in other men when I find out that they don't know how to work the washing machine or can't figure out how to clean a toilet, but I chalk that up to bad upbringing and not the fact that they happen to be men.

I like Mayor Nutter. He seems like he'll be good for the city, but I don't like him any more or less because he is black. If he is going to be disappointed in someone, he should be disappointed in them because they shot a cop, not because of the color of their skin.

It's hard to break away from stereotypes and even harder to stop holding people responsible for the progress of some race or hair color because of their individual actions. If Michael Nutter is a horrible mayor it won't be because he is black. We went through 8 years of a horrible mayor named John Street who happens to be black.

I was very disappointed in him.