Witch Hunt, 2007

One of the scariest things for The Mob (not organized crime, the neighborhood mob) to handle was the idea that the newest-to-the-neighborhood Sober Homes housed sex offenders. Now, if The Mob did a little simple online sex offender registry research it would've discovered that sex offenders were scattered throughout the neighborhood in places other than the Sober Homes. And had been. And if The Mob had thought even just the littlest bit instead of lashing out blindly, it would've considered that while proximity may exacerbate the problem, sex offenders do travel, so whether he lives next door or not, he can getcha.

But if The Mob had researched and if The Mob had thoughtfully considered before lashing out blindly, it would not have been a mob. And it would not have been as successfully manipulated and played by its elected leader, Diane Wilkerson. I watched, I must admit now with some shame, as part of The Mob. Diane is a master of mob manipulation. If any thoughtful remark was made, she quickly and vigorously fomented fear and hatred to divert attention away from real issues and thus avoid having to address them. She verbally attacked and disparaged the vulnerable people living in the Sober Homes as the problem. She deftly crafted a smokescreen of rage and fear and protected the disrespectful, racist developer and the disbarred lawyer behind it. These two men, in my humble opinion, with the assistance of someone with power at the State level, had created the problem and continue to derive benefit from it at the expense of the men and women they purport to aid and, too, at the expense of The Mob.