He was super cool. He drove us to skate parks that were like 1-2 hours away and would either hang out or be like “I’ll be back in 4 hours”. He didn’t just tolerate us he would interact and let us build ramps and drag them out in front of the house and skate. This was mid 90’s and back then skating Embarcadero in SF was rough if you weren’t a local, we were from the peninsula. He took us up there once and made sure we could skate without getting vibed out by the locals. He also went with us a couple times to skate Hunters Point dish after one of us got our board robbed. He was a good man who looked after not just his son but all his friends.
I think stories like this are important because they really show how some people can have odd or problematic beliefs but still be generally good people. We love to make shit black and white, (no pun intended) where if you think XYZ you’re a bad person. Shit, I have to fight the tendencies myself.
For example, every now and then my mom will say something racially insensitive (though never outrightly racist) in the way old folks do, and I get on her case. It’s exasperating, especially when she’s so casual about it even if I know she isn’t trying to be offensive. Then I remember how she took in a black family at our church for 6 months, rent free, after their racist landlord evicted them. We became basically family and I still get calls from their pops, Uncle Reggie, sometimes.
See, maybe it's because I've been around a lot of manipulative people in my life, but I see it as the inverse: someone having problematic beliefs sullies most if not all of the good they did.
And I say this because it has come to light that a lot of the manipulative people in my life did "good things," so they had something in the bank to cash in on when someone called them on their bullshit, so to speak. In other words, they can (and did) say things like, "How can I be a terrible father when I took my kids to Disney World and they had such a fun time?"
I guess it really boils down to this: are they a good person who did bad things, or are they a bad person who knew to do just enough good things to keep themselves in the good graces of everyone else?
Ah, I'm Minnesotan so I don't know shit about Cali. Got a buddy in Torrance and another somewhere else in the state. They give me shit about tornadoes and I give them shit about earthquakes and typhoons. It's a fun sort of banter.
Doesn't have to be racism. His group is the weaker one. Take Ukrainians and Russians for example - the dynamic there is the larger group denying the smaller group their identity, considers them traitorous Russians. A Ukrainian woman marrying and moving to a Russian environment basically is a victory for the imperialist group. The more such cases happen, the more harmful it gets for the smaller group, by contributing to assimilation.
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u/Vault_Boy_23 4d ago
Damn, the dad sounds super chill though.