Starbuck's Unstaged

 Get it out of your head all you conspiracy theorists that the Starbucks situation was something an Obamian community organizer would have staged. All it did was point out the uncontestable irrefutable truth of uncompassionate/undiverse/intolerant Trumpian America. It was a Rosa Parks moment. How can one doubt it when two men of color walk in to a Starbucks (which after all is on our side in all our social justice) and, ask politely or beseech humbly (can there be any doubt how they asked?) to use the restroom? It just so happened that they were refused by the manager in a flagrantly intolerant, perhaps even belligerent, tone (can anyone doubt the rudeness of her tone?), as they hadn't bought anything (how fascist can a store manager be that she demand a purchase, even a cup of coffee---which at Starbucks, by the way, isn't so an inconsequential a purchase?)? And further, it just so happened they both wanted to use the restroom (certainly this liberty must be granted in the dynamic-equivalence reading of the Constitution)---and not only was this intolerance suffered but it just so happened that a man of non color just happened to be leaving the restroom and just so happened to say that he was given the restroom code and hadn't bought anything either---not so much as a cup of coffee---I ask you, isn't this what people of non-color say to people of color when they just so happen to leave the restroom and the others seek to enter it?

And then the men of color had the police called upon them for simply staying and refusing to leave---certainly a prime example of intolerance and bigotry and lack of diversity sensitivity. The two men later claimed they were waiting for their friend to perform a real estate deal. Of course the Starbuck's manager must have had in her mind more the scenario of a drug deal given her proneness to stereotyping. (How narrow minded can you be in the city of brotherly love that drugs and deals would ever happen together.) Much more realistic to take their word for it, to be sensitive to real estate transactions when a cup of coffee isn't even purchased and the bathroom is sought to be used. Well, of course the friend did arrive and just so happened to have a camera---they are quite handy documentors these days to enforce all the social justice we seek to accomplish. And of course it just so happened there was already a sensitivity training for the police officers that came to arrest the victimized and traumatized men as well as the Starbuck's employees who sought to exercise such a response to those who would resist a purchase. And it just so happened that the mayor came out to mandate the use of sensitivity training for all those who participated in this outrage of social justice and the ludicrous infringement of anyone's rights to loiter.

Eventually everything will work out I hope. We'll have to have more "NO PLACE FOR HATE" signs picketing the lawns of those of us who know we are the socially just and the tolerant and compassionate. We really have to seek to have such signs to lecture those who pass by so that their hateful right wing agenda of "Making America Great Again" will have no place in our borderless globe. And certainly we must be grateful for this really remarkable event that it brings to light what our schools have been teaching us about America for a couple of generations now. And may we be grateful too to the mainstream media and their truth telling---of course this story is supremely important and we can look to it to be the lead story until some other revealing scandal that places our country and her president in any kind of news worthy calumny---after all such cataclysmic revelations of conservative's deeply entrenched obsessions with race deservedly will enjoy a longer shelf-life than a package of Hostess Twinkies. Yes, certainly no doubt can be entertained as to the fact that this event was not staged but was completely unarranged in an America that is being continually revealed to us by the truth/compassion/diversity/tolerance-tellers. But a question still nags me: given such an uncompassionate/non-diverse/intolerant country one wonders why we are having anyone who wishes to immigrate here? That certainly is a conundrum that seems to need a social justice warrior to figure out. One must wonder too how such a compassionate/diverse/tolerant cooperation as Starbucks is not immune from the virulent epidemic white privilege that plagues this Caucasian country? At least we have the curricula nowadays at places of higher and lower learning seeking to get us thinking broadmindedly. And also, these sensitivity sessions will transform us to be at last truly tolerant of everything, and assuage our ancestral guilt that seems especially to burden us as the years go on.

No, such a choreography couldn't have been staged. I look at the news cycles and I don't see any precedents to such Tony Award stagings. It certainly, without an iota of deplorable doubt must have arisen organically from the toxic ground of Trump's White House lawn.