Greensboro flash mobs

Interesting how things come together sometimes. I was looking up the website of a local church and mistakenly found myself linked to a church with a very similar name in far away Greensboro, North Carolina.

The homepage of this Catholic church features a mission statement, one which is desperately committed to diversity:

We, the parishioners of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church, are uniquely diverse, both ethnically and culturally, with varied economic, social and spiritual experiences. This uniqueness of diversity strengthens our unified bond

They're not just diverse, they're "uniquely diverse". Odd how liberals in so many places like to claim the same thing, that diversity somehow marks them out and makes them special, even though it's something that exists in many places in the Western world.

Anyway, it turns out that the town of Greensboro is connected in a number of ways to the history of race relations in the US, so maybe that helps to explain the particular slant of the parish mission statement.

As for the claim that diversity creates a "unified bond", that doesn't seem true of Greensboro as a town. By coincidence I came across a news report about "flash mobs" operating there. These are groups of young black Americans who use social media to suddenly gather together and cause mayhem, for instance by raiding a shop or beating up pedestrians:

Greensboro police say mobs of violent teens are meeting up on the weekends and wreaking havoc downtown. Police say it's getting worse each weekend.

This past weekend, a former mayor had his business vandalized and another community leader got beat up in Center City Park.

"One of the teenagers came up from behind and just punched me in the back and kicked me and knocked me to the floor. Then, he just continued to kick me, punch me, step on me. People were screaming," Mitchel Sommers, executive director of the Community Theatre of Greensboro said.

The swarm came from nowhere and the beating lasted seconds.

"Within a minute, I'd say, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds...I'm not being dramatic...hundreds of young people...just came descending upon this area," he said. "There were so many young people. I would say all the way from across Elm Street all the way to the park. You couldn't even get out of the swarm of young people."

...While Mitchel's story sounds unusual. It isn't.

Every weekend in July, Greensboro police have battled large, flash-mob beatings and vandalism

Lt. Cranford says police know these gatherings are a problem. "It's a significant issue for us because more often than not, we're vastly outnumbered by the kinds of crowds we're trying to deal with," he said.

Downtown leaders say they don't want to discourage people from visiting downtown, but they want everyone to be careful.

Pity because Greensboro seems to have some attractive features. The picture on the right, for instance, shows one of the buildings of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro.