Reply #7: Way to paint a target on your back [View All]

Having a cultural value that it is good to cheat, swindle, and steal from people not in your tribe is one way. Another way is to label yourself "God's chosen people" and have little social interaction. Is it any wonder that when right-wingers look around for something to focus their hate on, they pick the people who wear these self-made targets?

It's hard enough to get people to act civilized when they have the tendency to form cliques and gangs based on skin tone, language, myths, and dozens of other goofy identifiers let alone when one group decides that they don't have to try to get along with other groups. During the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, foreigners who visited had trouble telling the Catholics from the Protestants, since by superficial outward appearance they all looked and sounded the same. But the locals had no trouble in spotting the difference from a hundred yards away. You can't expect people to ignore differences when evolution has programmed them to ask "my tribe or other?" What you can do is civilize people into tolerance and maybe even more, into acceptance of others. But it does go both ways.

The Roma have two choices: (1) give up fortune-telling, house painting scams, pickpocketing and learn to fit in with the culture of the country they live in or (2) extinction.