It’s been a hard several days. Seeing the despicable authoritarian actions committed by heavily-militarized police departments across the country, and the (at best) feckless responses from our elected officials has initiated in my life a certain bipolar existence, wherein I become filled to the brim with emotion, only to become utterly drained of any feeling, just a little while later. Rinse, repeat. And yet, I cannot possibly fathom what black Americans are feeling. And the fact that I can pinpoint my anger to particular inciting incidents is a great luxury. A privilege. I live in a world where I am allowed a neutral default state; relaxation occasionally peppered with hardship. I cannot speak for others concerning their experiences. All I can say is that I acknowledge how easy my life has been in comparison, even if I could never fully understand.
In a recent episode of the podcast “Fatman Beyond,” writer Marc Bernardin said that the fear he has of leaving his house, for any reason, is not something that he is constantly thinking about. It’s more than that. It’s a force of nature. He compares it to gravity; he doesn’t have to remind himself every time he crosses the street not to trip on the curb. That is so ingrained in his understanding of the world that it has become inherent, a program always running in the back of his brain. The knowledge that he can be killed for no reason other than the color of his skin is a crucial part of his identity. This is the way things are, and if you claim to be blind to it, you are either lying, or you are a test-tube baby who was raised in an isolation chamber and only shown episodes of “Happy Days,” until you were finally released into the real world. The truth is, that while many white people do not, cannot, or choose not to comprehend how serious an issue this is for their fellow Americans, they all already know about it. Pleading ignorance, in this case, is merely an attempt to downplay it, so that they can continue to benefit from it. They create fictions that make them feel good, then demand that everyone else join them in their fantasies. In that vein, I understand that maybe the last thing the world needs right now is the opinion of another white male. But I feel a very strong compulsion to put my thoughts into words, a compulsion I don’t think I can fight anymore. And, if I have learned anything growing up in America, it’s that I can usually do what I want.
The next time you feel the urge to type “All Lives Matter,” go ahead and do us all a favor and break both of your index fingers. You might think you’re being some magnanimous voice of compassion, or a spicy troll, trying to stir the pot with your edgelord persona. What you really are is Eric Cartman, demanding that your mother give you gifts for your friend’s birthday. You’re Veruca Salt, making a population of people dig through mountains of garbage in order to find you the golden ticket you already have. “But what about MY LIFE, Daddy? What about me?” You’re not upset that no one respects your right to live, because that’s not the case. You’re upset that black people are getting attention. And that’s the best-case scenario. In actuality, you are diminishing the simple concept that people who don’t look like you are allowed to exist. “All Lives Matter” is the new “All Men are Created Equal.” It is a series of words you say to appear righteous, but that you in fact don’t believe for a second. Both of those phrases have the same footnote, and that footnote is *except for black people.* Whether it makes your insides feel funny when you hear it or not, America is a racist nation founded by multiple people who owned black slaves. People we’ve carved into mountains owned human beings, and they had the audacity to claim to represent the concept of freedom. I’ve heard several defenses for this hypocrisy, and none of them make any sense to me. “Slavery was so integral to the economy that we couldn’t just get rid of it without figuring out how to remain as economically efficient.” Oh, so your ideals will only go as far as your profit margins will allow? Cool. “Many of the founding fathers disagreed with slavery, but they knew there was no way to get the people on board with abolition.” I thought the whole point of America was supposed to be that you were starting a new country, with the chance to re-define what you held dear, in order to be a beacon for the rest of the world. That is an alarmingly hard thing to do, and they only did it part-way. However you decide to spin it, they had the opportunity to abolish slavery, and they chose not to.
The slavery mindset still exists. We are a young country, and while we may think that we have evolved past these archaic notions, we have not. John Tyler was the tenth President of the United States, serving from 1841 to 1845. He was born in 1790, making him just one generation removed from the founding fathers. He owned forty slaves. Two of his grandsons are still alive. Not great-great grandsons. Grandsons, as in, his children’s children. The cops you see in archival footage, spraying people with fire hoses and siccing dogs on innocent protesters? Their children are the nation’s current police commissioners. And it shows. We haven’t learned nearly as much as we like to believe.
And that’s a big part of the problem. We’re not properly educated. The recent HBO series based on the influential “Watchmen” graphic novel began with a depiction of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, where white thugs took to the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, destroying entire city blocks of property and killing somewhere between 36 and 300 black people. When this episode aired, many people refused to believe that it was a real event. Many more people were googling left and right, suddenly interested in this historical fact they should have been taught about in school. We laughed at the Brits when they had to look up what the European Union was after voting for Brexit, but how the hell are we any different?
Watching the footage from many of the protests across the country, seeing cops gassing and shooting peaceful assemblies of people, inciting the violence they claim to be “protecting” us from, my first thought is just how stupid it all is. How many days in a row, in how many cities, will it take for you moronic bastards to get it through your thick, fascist skulls that that tactic isn’t working? If it seems like a strategic error, it’s because that’s partially what it is. This is all they know how to do. It’s all they’ve been trained to do. But that’s not the whole story. Because, in truth, for the vast majority of them, it’s all they want to do. People shrink from statements like that, but that does not make them untrue. Riot gear does not just appear on your body. It is an entire process to go through, and with each boot, each chest pad, and each helmet, you are making a conscious choice to continue. It’s one thing to be inserted into an already chaotic situation and attempt to quell the chaos. It is another thing entirely to stroll up to a group of kneeling people and attack them unprovoked. That’s what’s happening, all over the country. I don’t care what the officials are saying. I don’t care what the man on the T.V. is saying. A huge percentage of the population currently carry around high-definition cameras in their pockets, and they are recording events in real time as they transpire. The fact is, for every instance of a police department “fighting crime” or “restoring order” this past week, there is a shot of them committing crimes and instigating the disorder themselves. Every single police officer who did not immediately quit the force upon being told to shoot unarmed protesters with rubber bullets is a traitor. Every single one. That guy who pulled the pink umbrella away from the lady in Seattle so he could mace her eyes? Traitor. The guy who said, “Light ‘em up,” before assaulting people on their front porch? Traitor. And every one of their colleagues, who have now decided to come out three, four, five days in a row, knowing full well what their presence will entail? Traitors. They don’t deserve the power we have afforded them. They don’t deserve our respect. They don’t deserve the unending litany of movies, television shows, books, and video games elevating them to near godlike status. I don’t know what they are, but they surely are not officers of the law. They are more like an occupying army.
And people are okay with it. Mental health pro tip: stay off of Twitter. At least don’t read the nonsensical, boot-licking replies of people trying to defend what is going on. It is shameful how people who claim to distrust the government, who have constructed their entire being around the concept of defending “the land of the free” from tyranny, are so willing to allow these atrocities to take place right outside their window, without lifting a finger to stop them. I made a comment on Facebook the other day about how many people actually like fascism when it’s not pointed at them. A friend of mine replied with a reminder that the truth is that it is pointed at them, they just don’t realize it. This is dead on. These are people who, for whatever reason, don’t agree with the protests. (I’ll give you a hint: the reason is racism.) These vapid zombies see themselves as on the side of the police, so they think it’s great that they are assaulting innocent people, sweeping residential neighborhoods, and lying directly to our faces about it. But this is not good for them. The second their ideas no longer align with those of the police or the government (a re-adjustment that civilians will have no say in), it will be their eyes burning with pepper spray. What we are seeing is not a reflection of any one political opinion, something that can be debated away, but a power grab. It’s the laying down of a precedent allowing them to crack any skull, at any time, for any reason, probable cause be damned. And while it stems from a wide range of causes larger than any one man, it is only being accelerated by our President.
Donald Trump is many things, literally all of them negative. He is an idiot who has never read a book, unless you count the book he “wrote” but was actually ghost-written for him, or the book of Hitler’s speeches he allegedly used to keep on his nightstand. He is a humorless man who does not understand what a joke is. (Really makes you wonder about all the times he’s “joked” about wanting to bang his daughter.) He looks like the Hamburger Helper Glove’s jaundiced cousin the Tapioca Pudding Condom, yet he has the gall to insult people because of their looks. He’s all this and many, many more bad things (racist, adulterer, idiot again), but what he is most is a coward. He’s very loud and obnoxious about being tough and hating weakness because he is weak. Like a virulently homophobic pastor who you later find out was secretly homosexual, or a person spending their entire life screaming about “liberty, freedom, and justice,” only to later welcome the tanks to their streets with open arms, you have to wonder, when he gets so insufferable, just who he’s trying to convince. Us, or himself? We now have our answer. Well, to be fair, we already had this answer years ago. He dodged the Vietnam draft by getting some greasy doctor to say he had bone spurs, then later went on a radio program and said that avoiding sexually-transmitted-diseases from his many disgusting-to-imagine conquests was like his “own personal Vietnam.” He is a pretender, cosplaying as a tough guy, and he doesn’t like that we know this. When he fled to the underground bunker beneath the White House in order to “escape” a group of protesters, they started calling him “Bunker Boy.” See, Donald, that’s called humor. Enraged that they saw through his hilariously transparent veneer, a couple days later he used gas and “less lethal” weaponry to disperse a group of peacefully-assembled American citizens so he could walk to a church and show the world what a big, strong boy he is. He then held up a bible in a weird way (reinforcing the fact that he’s never read a book) and said some unintelligible words. “You peons like Jesus stuff, right? Didn’t I hear that? You like Jesus? Great guy, Jesus. Beautiful guy. You know, they call him the savior of all mankind, I don’t call him that, but some people are calling him that.” The president of the United States is a fucking clown who has exponentially more in common with Muammar Gaddafi than with Abraham Lincoln. He’s a narcissistic pansy with a lot to prove, and he’s in charge of our military.
And on that note, he threatened to deploy the military to areas within the United States in order to “dominate” any dissent they come across. He even used military police units for his little goose-step to church. Where are all the “Don’t Tread On Me” assholes now? This is it, the moment you’ve been waiting for. It’s your time to shine! Get on out there, bud, and prove to us that all your talk about defending the country you supposedly love wasn’t just ego-boosting bullshit coupled with thinly-veiled racial prejudice. When the military enacted a series of admittedly bizarre training exercises spanning multiple states during the Obama administration, you were ready to believe that it was only the first step on the road to complete governmental takeover. But those were in fact just training exercises. What Trump has proposed is actual deployment. He literally said that if governors don’t get tough and dominate their citizens, he would. I hate to break it to you, but if you claim to oppose tyranny, you don’t get to support tyranny. Seems a little obvious, but I guess it has to be said. You don’t get to pick and choose what battles to fight just because the guy currently destroying democracy has a little “R” next to his name. Or you do, because you never really cared about your “beliefs” to begin with. Your privileged, complacent existence has let you spend your entire life playing a continual game of “what if” concerning events you never actually expected to occur. Like when a cartoon character starts mouthing off about what he would do to the school bully if he had half a chance, just to find that the bully is standing right behind him. Well, your bully has arrived, only he didn’t feel the need to sneak up behind your back. He’s staring you right in the eyes. And guess who blinked first?
There is a large portion of this country who think that any criticism of the government (usually only when a Republican is in office) is unacceptable. Not only are these people hypocrites, as they wouldn’t shut the fuck up for the better part of a decade about what President Barack HUSSEIN Obama was doing, but they are un-American bozos. “If you don’t like it, you can get out,” is precisely what a significant quantity of colonists said when the idea of the Revolution was brought up to them. How about this: if you don’t understand that constantly questioning those in power and demanding that they work for the citizens of this country is the most patriotic thing one can possibly do, you can get out. Go to North Korea. You’ll fit right in. Then we have the slightly less prevalent but equally as idiotic, “Well, what do you suggest we do to fix it? If you don’t have an answer, don’t complain.” If you and I were sitting in an airplane five miles above the Earth’s surface, and one of the plane’s engines exploded, it would be logical for you to call attention to it. What if I responded with, “Well, are you an aviation engineer? What do you suggest we do? Oh, you don’t know how to fix a flaming airplane engine? Then don’t complain.”? Not only would you think I was dismissing an issue likely to kill us both, you’d think there was something wrong with me mentally. And you’d be right. Solving a problem is at least a two step procedure: acknowledge the problem, then fix it. If you don’t know how to fix it, you can still bring it to the attention of someone more well-equipped to do so.
It is hard to think about, though. How do you educate a bunch of people who can’t even understand that FOR FUCK’S SAKE, BOTH OF THE ELASTIC BANDS ON YOUR N95 MASK GO BEHIND YOUR HEAD, NOT FLOPPING DOWN IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE LIKE AN AL DENTE PIECE OF SPAGHETTI, BRENDA? And to that I say….uh….well…shit, I don’t know, man. I don’t have any answers. But there are plenty of people who understand these issues way better than I do, so maybe start by listening to them. Research organizations in your home town and across the county devoted to tackling these issues. Register to vote, and when it comes time to cast your ballot, know about every name on there, not just the “main event” players. Don’t be afraid to speak up, but don’t try to overtake the conversation. Know that there are always going to be people who are smarter than you, who feel these things in a more real and visceral way than you do, and do not allow your ego to keep you from trusting what they say, just because you might not have ever heard it before. Listen to your black friends. Listen to black activists. Read books written by black authors, and any other person whose perspective does not coincide with yours. However angry you feel right now, let this be your new baseline. The next time you hear about an innocent man like George Floyd being executed by scum like the murderers Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao, call them out with equal fervor. Demand justice.
And, again, miss me with your “All Lives Matter” horseshit.
Black Lives Matter. Period.
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