Two From the Baytown Sun

In celebration of my upcoming holiday return to my home town (Highlands), here are two impecibly combined quotes from the Baytown Sun website's front page today:

Civic leader honored for service to Baytown

The distinguished guests – state and local elected officials and leaders of the Baytown community – rose to their feet Tuesday night to salute the 2007 Exxon Mobil Refiner of the Year, and everyone agreed no one was more deserving than Doug Huddle.

[...]

Huddle [...] said Exxon Mobil taught him what it meant to be a volunteer.

and

Nooses get noticed

[...] two nooses were found hanging from scaffolding at the Exxon Mobil refinery.

(My emphasis), with all due respect to Doug Huddle, this was just too funny of a coincidence not to point out, given Baytown's reputation as a generally bigoted city.

It's become a joke in itself to have "sensitivity training" meetings at the workplace. I've overheard sarcastic remarks about such meetings at the power plant I used to work at (and will probably work at again) in Pasadena, TX. A common phrase used is "I'm okay-you're okay PC bullshit." Political correctness has become kind of an offensive term in itself, yet it's clear that some men in the professional realm do need schooling in racial sensitivity, or maybe just an ass-kicking for being racist assholes.

I know for sure that there are plenty of white people in Baytown who just do not care about racism.