If you’re looking for a post that has a strong and cohesive thesis with supporting paragraphs and all that, this isn’t that post. (You may well be at the wrong blog, for that matter.)

Late lest week, the law office of one Collier & Radcliff was bombed in Mocum, Deseret. This was relevant to me because Edmund Collier was the chief legal counsel at Falstaff, where I worked when Hit Coffee was started. Edmund is one of three lawyers at Falstaff I remember and he is the only one I remember particularly warmly. Eldon Cooper (no relation) was okay, I guess, but I remember him more as being my boss’s boss by the time I left. Eric Forrester, The Coffee Shop Cowboy, was rather snooty.

Forester was also gay. And he was fired for it, when it came to light. This was just after Collier and almost all of the rest of the legal staff (except Cooper) was let go, leaving a real shortage of legal talent in a business that was very law-oriented.

Whatever role Collier may have played in that firing, though, I still remember him warmly. He was a pretty big deal, and really nice to everybody including me when I had just been hired.

What’s interesting to think about is if it had been the law offices of Forester that had been bombed, I’d be wondering if it was some anti-gay hate crime or something. In fact, there’s a decent chance that would be the assumption. It might even be in the national news. Except, of course, that it wasn’t because Forester wasn’t the target.

It’s something that comes to mind with the coverage of black church fires. There was the immediate assumption that it was related to Dylann Roof and the Confederate Flag. That was my assumption until some scrutiny was applied. I’m old enough to remember the alleged rash of black church fires back in the 90’s that also turned out to be less than meets the eye. Something grabs the attention of the media, and then each one gets coverage. It was actually during that spell that my own church (largely white) was burned to the ground. Little news coverage of that. Which isn’t a complaint (absent a larger trend, why would it get coverage) but probably feeding in to the perception that it was specifically black churches being burned down.

The number of racially-motivated burnings in both cases were, as I understand it, non-zero. And any time that happens – whether racially-motivated or not but especially when it is – it’s a tragedy. Though relatively a minor thing, it’s kind of frustrating that it gets hard to view except in a dichotomy where a segment of the population believes that none of it is racial and another side is irate that race is not applied to every instance until demonstrated otherwise.

Anyway, hopefully they will find whoever it is that bombed Edmund’s office. If they find them and report why, I’ll relay that information to you. Maybe it’s like a similar bombing in Winnipeg where it was an ugly divorce case. And two is a trend…