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To put it bluntly, yes.
I've written about it here and there. I'll try to give a concise summary of my grief and sense of loss. Of late I've been stuck on the "Anger" step, and I question whether I'll ever move beyond it and find "Acceptance".
I was born in the 80's. In the late 90's for reasons that are utterly baffling to me, my Virginia town began to get flooded with illegal immigrants. The first impact this had on my life was when two Mexicans with mustaches were put in my middle school classroom. They beat the shit out of us, were totally uncontrollable, and were there about 2 weeks. It was weird. Very weird. It foreshadowed much of what was to come.
By highschool my town was getting a bit of a reputation. Illegals were renting properties, and then cramming them with insane numbers of people who utterly destroyed them. Lower class white areas became even worse ghettos over the course of a few years. Gang activity increased. A curfew on teenagers was instituted county wide. It became dangerous to drive through town. The most common scenario was some unregistered beater an illegal bought second hand would slam into you going the wrong way down a one way street, or blowing through a red light. A half dozen day laborers would flee the vehicle and vanish into the ether, and your car would be totaled. A buddy of mine had a worse experience, and a gang of illegals tried to pull him out of his vehicle at a stop light. As he tells it, he gouged out one of their eyes and sped through the light as quick as he could. He worked as a bouncer at the time, I can believe it.
At some point my town passed some Arizona style immigration crackdown laws, but the courts denied us them. The decision was basically only the feds can enforce immigration law, and if they wanted my town to become a lawless foreign colony, it would. And it did.
I moved away, I started working. A coworker of mine's family (Brother's wife and daughter) were raped and killed by an illegal immigrant house painter when he was left alone with them. I regularly encountered drunk Mexicans in the middle of the road at night, trying to visit friends or just do some late night shopping. They'd just be stumbling down the middle of the damned road on a blind turn, 45 mph speed zone, trying to make a vehicular manslaughterer out of me.
I moved again. Things were OK for a while. The massive unchecked immigration continued. I found my wife, though we weren't married yet. We started finding bullets along the walking trails, and there were increasing reports of B&E's and shots being fired into random homes for gang initiations. One family found their daughter's bedroom window had been shot through, and her pillow had been hit. Luckily she hadn't been in her bed at the time. At some point there was a hostage situation in the house behind us that ended when the retard lit fire to his own home and then charged the police with a knife.
I moved again. Things were OK for a while. Then they got weird again. The gas station on the corner I always filled up at in the morning started getting robbed with some regularity. People started stopping me in the street, yelling at me for money. The last straw was when someone was shot in my town home parking lot, shooter on the loose, and me with a 3 month old baby at home. I arrived home from work to police positively swarming the block, and my wife terrified.
I moved again. Things are OK so far. But my nation is dead and rotting. I know the rot will follow me again. I don't know what to do or where to go to give my children a future anymore. I went back to my home town for a parade at some point. When you have kids anything to do sounds good. The museum to the accomplishments and hardships of my ancestors had been "renovated". It now celebrated the fictitious diversity my town has always had. The paving stones with names of donors, including my grandfather, had been unceremoniously torn up and sent to the dump. The compact with generations past that they would be remembered sent to the dump along with them. So it goes to be conquered.
I do think you have had a uniquely bad experience. I'd maybe have similar views if my experience was at all like yours.
I've generally had a very different experience, and I'll share since you did.
Lived in the suburbs of St Louis for a while where inner city bussing policies made sure that there was at least one or two black kids in each class that were uncontrollable by the teachers and would mercilessly bully everyone else.
At the time I lived in a neighborhood with few kids my age, they were at youngest two years older like my brother, so he had a bunch of friends. I only managed to make friends in school with a nice Indian boy and his immigrant parents had me over for sleepovers.
We then moved to Charlottesville. And I went to a school that was semi infamous for being one of the last holdouts on segregation. That was decades before. By the time I was there it was still mainly two types of people liberals that had left a city and wanted a 'quiet' life in the country. Or rednecks that had been there for dozen generations and couldn't throw a rock on the playground without hitting someone they were related to.
Some of the rednecks bullied me. I made friends with the nerdy liberal's kids. The worst bully that I remember took his dad's gun in middle school and blew his own brains out.
When I was in middle school things didn't change much except I went to the school that was in the suburbs rather than the one that served the rural areas. So the bullies switched to being white jocks and rednecks were a minority, but I'd learned how to have friends at that point and I was no longer the one being bullied. One kid I remember getting bullied was a happy Mexican boy that lived next door in one of the apartment complexes. He eventually punched one of the kids in the nose after the kid took his backpack and that seemed to resolve things.
There were ESL classes in all of my elementary/middle/high schools and they were full and I never knew a single one of these kids.
Most of my friends in middle and highschool were white, because that was about 80-90% of the population. I was on friendly terms with the very few Muslims, Indians, and East Asians that were actually in our school. I teamed up with an Asian kid to represent the libertarians at a school wide political debate.
When I got to college things became way more diverse. I went to George Mason University because they had a reputation for a libertarian friendly economics department. My best friend became a 2nd generation Indian Immigrant. For two years my roommate was a Hispanic of some kind. I made a habit of intentionally forgetting and confusing him with Mexican origins because it annoyed him. He might have been Cuban. His parents were doctors, he eventually became a doctor too.
I graduated college and went to work at a company founded by an Indian entrepreneur. Met my white wife there and we have three beautiful blue eyed daughters.
I still live in Northern Virginia. I live in a predominantly white neighborhood my main encounters with immigrants is when they come to mow my lawn. There has been a homeless problem in the area lately, the worst of them look like drugged out old white people.
Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy. My encounters with immigrants have been almost entirely positive. The race and ethnicity of people I've known has rarely provided me much insight into whether I will like them, get along with them, or find them totally odious. Usually the people that like or dislike me for my race are the people I get along with the least well.
I'm not ashamed of my race or heritage, I'm currently serving on a board for a family heritage organization. They've been here since the 1620's. We often field requests from people looking for more information on slaves that my ancestors once owned.
Why are you assuming that he 've had a uniquely bad experience? I'm not from the US but to me what he's describing seem to be the usual consequences of Mexican or Central American underclass immigrants forming criminal gangs in a town/city where their numbers reach a critical mass. I don't assume that is a unique development, especially not in Virginia which probably attracts a disproportionate number of immigrants due to the vicinity of the Beltway region.
I think bad luck on his part. Or maybe he is just predisposed to noticing a particular type of bad thing in his life.
It's not been my experience or the experience of most people I know.
In other words, he's a racist.
Not what I said and not what I meant. Don't put words in my mouth.
What else does it exactly mean then to you, to be "predisposed to noticing a particular type of bad thing in his life"? Assuming that one needs to be predisposed in such a way in order to notice being beaten up by moustachioed Mexicans in middle school or encountering drunk Mexicans in the middle of the road at night?
My wife's father died of cancer. She tends to notice and react more strongly to stories about cancer in fictional shows, and real cases in people around us. Our brains are not perfect logic engines. Traumatic enough events can have an outsized impact on how we judge and notice other events around us.
I generally reserve usage of the term "racist" to refer to people that hate others because of their race. I know that is not how everyone uses the term, but I'll stick with it. If you feel no hate but you treat other races different that is what I'd call "prejudice". I do not consider it "racist" merely to notice things about the world. I might not agree with what they have noticed, but we can definitely have a discussion about it.
I try to pick my words carefully, and I prefer words that add light not heat to the discussion. The term "racist" usually just adds heat. I would almost always prefer to just write out the whole definition of what I mean rather than use "racist" as a shorthand term. I know its verbose, I don't care. whiningcoil responded to me, and didn't seem to come away with your interpretation. So you are butting you head in and trying to make it look like I picked a fight when no one actually involved seems to have felt that way.
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