Shocking news! Lisa Wong is Asian!

I don't generally read the Save Fitchburg blog these days. While it does seem to have a lively community of commenters, most of them strike me as being clinically insane.

However, I do read (or at least skim) the Fitchburg Pride and stumbled across its "Save Fitchburg Roundup" (Jason Lefferts of the FP also founded Save Fitchburg). The last time I looked at Save Fitchburg was shortly after Lisa Wong announced her candidacy for mayor, at which point commenting was moderated due to racist dipshits making idiotic remarks because she's Asian.

Good move on the part of the Save Fitchburg guys to go to moderating, but it didn't do much to make me think their commenters have improved any...

However, I was glad to see there was a pretty coherent comment by "Howdy's" which was quoted in part in the Fitchburg Pride:

[G]ender, ethnicity, age, etc SHOULD not be an issue with this election, but I believe it still will.

Yes, this is the 21st century….in Fitchburg.

I am 100% on board with Lisa. I am excited about the opportunity she brings, but…

There are many Fitchburg voters that will have a hard time getting beyond what they see.
I’m glad Lisa will make her “first” appearance in a “safe” environment. It will take a very polished Lisa to make many similar appearances all around the city to overcome the familiarity Mylott and Donnelly already have with the voting base. Change is hard, especially in Fitchburg. Lisa will need to make people comfortable with her while she is touting her credentials and vision

The "safe" environment mentioned is Wong's speech to an "Asian Pacific Islander even at the Statehouse". I don't know any more about that, but it's not really germane to what I'm talking about right now anyway. It does seem weird that it would be called "safe" just because of a shared heritage, but no matter...

Lisa Wong is a woman of Asian heritage. So fucking what?

Are people in Fitchburg that big a bunch of morons that they actually care one bit what ancestry a person has when choosing who to vote for as mayor? Some would apparently say yes, but oddly enough I seem to have a higher opinion of the voters of Fitchburg.

While "Howdy's" up there is well spoken, I actually totally disagree that Wong's racial heritage will matter one bit.

Who would it matter to, after all? Obviously it doesn't matter to me, it probably doesn't matter to you if you're reading this blog, and frankly I don't know a lot of people in general who actually have a problem with Asian people. Sure, the dicks who comment on Save Fitchburg (and get deleted) are racist, but they're hardly the voting majority. One or two morons don't speak for the masses. And while racism is definitely out there, I don't think it generally takes a form that would hurt Wong's mayoral campaign.

If her name was Lisa Al-Masri or something then maybe that would matter, because people actually feel quite comfortable being openly racist against Arabs these days, but who the hell hates Asians? A few crazed WWII veterans who wish we could go back to the days of internment camps for the Japanese, and that's about it. Most of the racism actually manifests in thinking that Asians are smarter than white folks, which I don't see as hurting Wong's chances. (It also manifests in a belief that Asian men have small penises, but again that shouldn't affect Miss Wong one bit.)

Perhaps there are reasons to vote against Wong. But her age, gender, or ethnicity aren't among them.

This post actually comes from a bigger frustration, which is the idiotic "Is America ready for a black/female president?" bullshit you see in polls dealing with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Now it's represented on the local level as "Is Fitchburg ready for an Asian female mayor?"

The only people who seem to not be ready are the fucktards asking the question in the first place.

The rest of us have been ready for some time.