Illegal appointment will cost Oceano

Ochilski was just chosen by the OCSD to represent it before LAFCO. Everyone followed Angello’s suggestion, who in turn, got the idea from Jim Hill, I believe, when he was still on the board.

Director Searcy stated that he liked Shell Beach attorney/resident Brian Kreowski, who has served on the Avila Beach Harbor Commission. That Searcy would chose Kreowski is ironic.

Once, when I was in Kreowski’s office, I noticed a picture of King Leopold II on his wall.

Kreowski extolled the political acumen of this man, who historians consider the most brutal ruler of the Belgian Congo “Free State,” in the early 1900’s.

Leopold II routinely ordered his native police force to massacre defenseless and peaceful tribal communities whose only crime was to protest the taking of their crops, lands and people as slave laborers under punishing conditions. As Kreowski proudly stated, “both he and Leopold are Dutch.”

Then Kreowski went on to observe that “Mexicans” were just as racist as the next group, pointing out that Mexico has a hierarchy of bias based upon race and economic class.

This was a disagreeable extrapolation, or misinterpretation, of my reason to visit him in the first place, which was to discuss a real estate dispute over title ownership to land caused by the seller’s failure to disclose a defective condition of the property.

Both the buyer and seller were “white.” The most harassing neighbors were not. The harassment was directly related to, and exacerbated by, the seller’s failure to disclose the neighbor’s claim of interest in the “defective condition.” (If I tried to explain the legalities of the “defective condition,” I could put you into a coma, so I won’t go there….)

The types of behavior I reported to Kreowski concerned gender hate speech, physical threats and assault, vandalism and race-based insults. These neighbors, who happened to be Latino, were also confirmed alcoholics and glue sniffers. Therefore, the issue of racial bias was indeed relevant, but it was by no means the only explanation for their tortious conduct. The addictions, which finally took their toll, were more relevant to the issue of why they behaved as they did.

And if there was an identifiable “cause of compaint” it must be laid at the feet of the seller, who knew exactly what she had done by knowingly hiding the condition of the property from the buyer, and previous disputes with the neighbors about which of them had to fix the defective condition.

I left Kreowski’s office with the impression that he needed to understand one very important point when it comes to talking about race relations in the context of real estate disputes:

Rather than focus on the race of the negotiator, and blame his or her transgressions on race, it is better to identify the individual act that is offensive or injurious, rather than attributing the act of one individual to an entire race or culture.

This is a very hard rule to follow when one is confronted with the tortious conduct previously described. But in the end, you have to ask yourself, what kind of world you would like to have, and then, try to act accordingly.

In my own experience, I find it easy to lump people together based upon one negative experience with one individual. So, I try to train myself out of this habit. I try to verbalize the act that offends me rather than to presume that the act “was motivated by” the individual’s race or ethnicity, even when the person states that “they hate white people.” They, too, mistake the acts of individuals to be the acts of an entire group of people who are, in fact, not involved at all.