A white mother and her two sons attacked a 15-year-old black boy while yelling racial slurs at an Illinois campground, police said. Carrie Weller, 42, and her sons Shane, 19, and Corry, 21, are being charged with hate crimes for punching, kicking and throwing the boy into Canton Lake on Sunday, according to court documents. Weller egged on her kids during the beating, records showed.

I can just hear them: "We hates those black folks. They steal our jobs, our women and all them government benefits while we white folks who love America are struggling to pay our bills." (Yeah, like their meth bill.)

My first response is to be astounded by these clowns who somehow feel high enough on the social pecking order to feel justified bringing injury to another for looking different. But in my moment of condemnation, I thought I could see the precursive forces whose interactions with these particular people led to this event.

My flippant distain at an imagined meth bill contains within it my fear that some day I too could surrender to the allure of changing a reality I hated for one in which I am someone special. Drugs offer alternate realities when people cannot cope with the realities they perceive before usage. No education, no jobs, no future, no hope. 

The reality in which I perceive myself to be has failed these people. (Not without their own complicity and poor choices in life.)