Will they never learn? The pattern remains the same. In this instance, a single Starbucks employee called the cops to remove two black men whom she suspected were loitering or doing other things she felt questionable. In any event, the employee no longer works for the apologetic company.
But was that enough? Noooooooooooo. Instead, Starbucks wimped out and lifted the old diversity training chestnut high, promising to close all of its stores for a day later in May to conduct diversity sessions.
Nobody gets it. "Diversity" training means, and has long meant, if you're white you're guilty, and somehow "they" plan to instill warm and loving diversity emotions into you in a manner gentler but similar to a North Korean re-education class. By the time class ends, yep, you'll graduate as tolerant, and if you're not it'll go very badly for you next time something, anything happens which seems remotely offensive, racist, anything-o-phobic or (God help you!) wrongly or unfortunately worded.
Starbucks -- three words for your corporate butts: Go to hell. You caved, just as Laura Ingraham's radio show sponsors took off on a run and didn't look back when intimidated by a nasty, foul-mouthed teenager and his fanatical little friends who apparently live their days accompanied by a tall cup of, not coffee, but hatred for everybody who disagrees with them.
Okay, racism is bad, bad, bad -- but to force hundreds or thousands of innocent Starbucks employees to undergo the undeserved punishment of diversity training when they have violated nobody's sensibilities is just plain insulting. Further, diversity training can tend to make one less, not more tolerant of racial differences, from my observations.
How much longer U.S. interests and corporations can be held hostage within minutes via the weapon of instant messaging and the flash mob mentality is a question that must be addressed before we're destroyed as a society, and be assured that not even diversity training will put that egg back together again.
A date with Kim: As members of Congress seethe over not being informed of Pompeo's secret meeting with North Korea's Kim Jung Un, we suspect that Trump's people realized the usual blabbers would leak the event's existence enough to drown it into oblivion before it even happened. Oh, the times in which we live.
