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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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I walked out and berated him, calling him a bum, telling him I’ll call the police on him, threatening to wreck his shopping carts and destroy the items inside, etc

I wish I had your fortitude, and I'd appreciate any member of my community who did the same.

My fear with doing something like that is it escalating into physical violence (I'm fit, but pretty short). Did you worry about it escalating? Best case scenario, I end up getting shanked and recovering for a week in the hospital. Worse case, I get killed. Worst case, I kill the homeless person and get my and my family's lives destroyed by my local government and media.

Oh god yes, I was internally terrified. This guy was a bit shorter than me (and I’m a short guy) but could almost certainly have kicked my ass if he’d decided to fight me. (I’ve never been in a fight and have no confidence in my capacity for interpersonal violence.) He was clearly an immigrant, presumably from Central America, and I wonder if fear of deportation was the main thing that caused him not to escalate things to a physical altercation. He got in my face at one point and made a vague physical threat, and that’s when I told him, “You just threatened me? Cool, that’s exactly what I needed in order to get the police involved.” He seemed to immediately regret it, and that’s when he started gathering his shit and preparing to leave.

I have gotten very close to getting beaten up by unstable homeless people, because I am too proud to passively accept their insults or let them colonize public spaces. If a time traveler from the future informed me that my cause of death will be “stabbed by homeless black guy at the trolley station following an avoidable verbal altercation” it would not surprise me in the least.

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