Black lives matter?

He wears the names of all the black men cops shot on his back like a target, a member of an exclusive club he uses as an excuse not to do what other people are required to do, or do what he thinks is due him, boasting about how he is a freedom fighter for those 400 years when he people were chained as the cash register camera at the local drug store catches him pocketing cookies he thinks he doesn’t have to pay for as one small reparation, then accused the guard who confronts him of racial profiling when both of them are black – a rebel with a cause so oblique as to seem transparent, a me-too like warrior determined to get his because other got theirs, and he thinking that they got theirs on the backs of people like him, and so he will get his regardless of the facts or reality that he is a target because he so desperately thinks he needs to be, aches to be, doing all he can to provide those he hates, doing anything to prove he has been right all along, attributing their reaction to his color rather than how he acts, refusing to remove his hat or even stand during the Pledge of Allegiance to a country that gave him birth, but not the yellow brick road he expects.

He wears the names of the black men cops shot on his back like a target, leaving space at the bottom where someone else can jot down his name, too, a member of a still-more exclusive club nobody in their right wants to be a member of, except him or the masked idiots he’s too intimidated to join up with, except remotely, the unmasked avenger who weeps over Charlottesville, or all those other places of conflict, as if each victim was his immediate kin, half hoping he has courage enough to provoke real racists in places like those, when all he can do is strut about in his own neck of the woods, crowing like a headless chicken, painting anyone who disagrees with him as a racist even when they are not.

When he came into the office and said he’d been “racially profiled” at the local drug store, nearly all the liberal-minded kumbaya staff took him at his word.

He claimed he had gone into the store to buy a drink and a package of cookies, and the security guard (who I later learned was black) had followed him around just because he was black.

Our guy usually wore a black lives matter t-shirt with the names of the victims of police brutality on it.

Perhaps the guard or the clerk didn’t trust him because of that.

Then at the check out counter, the guard asked him to empty his pockets, claiming that he had shoplifted a second package of cookies.

Indignant, our friend refused, and left the store, leaving his drink and the package of cookies on the counter, and a guard shaking his head.

I filed a complaint with the corporate offices of the drug store and a few days later the head of security for the company called me, telling me he had reviewed the tapes – and that video supported the guard’s claim, and also showed that our guy apparently threatened the guard when confronted.

“Your friend walked out of the store leaving behind those things he actually paid for,” the security man said. “We didn’t pursue this legally.”