Ahmoud

Last year the house across the street from me caught fire, and over the summer it was rebuilt.

Something that caught me by surprise was the sheer number of people who wandered through the construction site just to have a look around.  People driving by would stop their cars to get out and satisfy their curiosity.  

I wasn't brought up that way.  Wandering around somebody else's property is completely alien to me.  But apparently here in East Texas it's considered socially acceptable to poke around in somebody else's home.  Nobody tried to hide it, nobody behaved as though they were doing anything out of the ordinary.

When I first read that Ahmaud Arbery was seen looking around a construction site, that seemed a bit off to me.  Now I know that, at least in the South, it's pretty common and not a big deal.

But I did know from the start he hadn't stolen anything.

Almost everything on a construction site is simply too big to steal.  It's not likely anyone is going to wander off with a two-by-four or a piece of sheetrock. Construction workers take their tools home with them at the end of the workday, but even something like a drill or a hammer would have been easily seen in a jogger's hand.

His three killers knew he hadn't taken anything.

This was all about power.

The South, for all it's talk of individual freedom, is extremely authoritarian.  They're anti-union because you're supposed to do what the boss tells you to do.  They're anti-abortion because you're supposed to do what the preacher tells you to do.  When football player Adrian Peterson was charged for whipping his four-year-old child bloody, he had a lot of defenders here because a child is supposed to do what his parents tell him to do.

Ahmoud Arbery was killed because he was supposed to do what the rednecks told him to do-- and disobedience is not tolerated.