For anyone who doesn't know, Puerto Rico is a US territory, but not a state. So they are citizens, but residents of PR lack some representation in a lot of things in the US.
Edit: As others have said, Puerto Rico is a US territory rather than a state, and they don't have representation in Congress, but in all other aspects (and as far as "papers, please" goes), they are 100% US citizens.
Persons born in Puerto Rico on or after April 11, 1899
All persons born in Puerto Rico on or after April 11, 1899, and prior to January 13, 1941, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, residing on January 13, 1941, in Puerto Rico or other territory over which the United States exercises rights of sovereignty and not citizens of the United States under any other Act, are declared to be citizens of the United States as of January 13, 1941. All persons born in Puerto Rico on or after January 13, 1941, and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are citizens of the United States at birth.
This is it. If we still had Jim Crow laws, this would be one of the people screaming about how we need to laws to keep them separate. They get off on the heirarchy and believing that they're higher up the ladder than someone else.
I remember in school the teacher trying to explain it wasn't just Hitler and a bunch of generals, it was a majority of a population, it's so hard to get your head around so many people behaving so badly. Still a part of me thinks this is a joke or a fake image before my rational thinking kicks in.
I know these numbers, rationally this is not news, but emotional I just can't believe this is true. Would I also be one of those supporters if I were born somewhere else? Are these people really like you and me?
In high school, I thought that this stuff couldn’t happen here, not anymore, at least not at such a scale, and I was amazed that it had happened at all in the first place.
This common attitude of "we're better than that" towards historical fascism is one of the reasons countries like the USA became so ready to succumb to it. If you assume it can't happen to you, you'll miss all the signs when it starts. We all need to recognize that Nazism is how ordinary people like ourselves can get when the conditions are conducive to it. Germans in the 1930s and 1940s were not uniquely evil; they were like us. No person or society is immune, and resisting Nazism starts with resisting it in yourself and your community.
I never understood how fascism worked until recently. It's not the top dictator giving orders, it's everyone that wants to give him their power and act on his behalf without orders.
Dear Leader gives the people a boogeyman to blame for all of their fears. Dear Leader and his cronies spout lies upon lies about their boogeyman to keep the people scared and in line.
In essence, Dear Leader creates a problem, then sells a solution.
It wasn't even necessarily the majority. Not back then, and not now. What happens is that normalcy bias stops even people who oppose the regime from acting against it until it's already too late:
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
— Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
I too quoted the article. My statement was more general rather than just "this one racist couple should have been charged more." Of course they paid in cash, likely with pennies to cent to ensure that their racism didn't allow the server to get a dime.
Planet Hollywood in the Tom Bradley Terminal is set to permanently close on Saturday, leaving Ortiz unemployed.
Way to kick someone when they are already down. There is simply no reason to treat people this way. Treat people with respect and kindness. Treat them how you yourself would like to be treated.