Man beaten to brain-death in Brooklyn, ostensibly for being Latino and having his arm around another man (actually his brother).
The divide's getting really ugly, and I fear it's going to get worse before it gets better. Bigots are seeing their way of life slip away from them, and they're behaving like cornered animals.
I saw someone comment a few weeks back, in a comments thread about Obama assassination fears, that hey, he's got Secret Service protection, and would-be assassins up to this point have all turned out to be morons; the people who are much more likely to suffer are minorities who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and make convenient targets for aggressive crackers willing to take out their misplaced anger on the first dark-skinned person they see.
Not drawing a direct line between that and this case or anything, I'm just saying things have gotten tense and I fear they're going to get worse. My neighboring city, Mesa, had the dubious honor of being the home of the first post-9/11 hate crime, where a couple of guys killed a Sikh at a convenience store because he was wearing a turban.
