Race in 2020 - RIP George Floyd

The country is on fire right now and...

We need to be part of something that happens, something that changes... there's something sick out there. There's something broken. There's something WRONG.

It's... I'm trying to figure out how to say it while I'm writing it instead of planning this out like I usually do. I'm sorry. (Also: Warning... will contain adult language and a link to a video that is definitely difficult to watch)

I grew up in the South. For my first few years of school, I was a minority, little toe-headed white boy. My best friend was Irna. She was black (I imagine she still is actually... it's not something that goes away). We moved to Germany and I went to High School on an army base there. The army is more racially diverse than a lot of America is, and less important than your color is your rank. Yeah, I know, it's elitist. But, hey, the Officer's Club had better video games. My best friend through high school was biracial, in Germany that definitely counted as black. It was pretty white over there then. I haven't been back for a while so I don't know what it's like now. Back in the thirties and forties they sort of got rid of the ones who didn't fit their interior decorating palette...

I went back to Alabama to go to college and Mom remembers me saying early in going back an observation about the cafeteria at the university. I was disappointed to note that there were clusters of colors. There wasn't a lot of mixing going on. That was in 1986. Everybody was self-segregating into black and white tables.

I got to be Supervisor down in Memphis years later, and I had no white employees for years. None, every employee I had was black. For about four hours I had a white lady working for me, but she went to lunch and never came back.

Something I've learned in all that time is that there are two worlds out there. There are two Americas. There's the one I live in where I and another white male middle-aged friend of mine can trespass, park a truck on someone's business property at night and watch fireworks and not get the cops called on us... and then there's the one where I could be on the news being killed because of what I look like.

That's not political. It's not hippie leftist thinking. It's a fact. And it's hard to watch. It's hard to see over and over again. And it doesn't have to be that way. It's a choice. It's a choice for those people who are doing the killing.

I see people saying, "BLUE LIVES MATTER!" during the conversation and I close my eyes and I close my mouth because there are no blue lives. Blue is a job. If you take off your blue shirt and go to the mall you're not blue anymore. You can live your life without being blue if you want to. You can't take off black. It's there. And it is such a different experience from being white.

Yes. It's better than it was. But that doesn't mean it's good. Better doesn't mean right. If you haven't eaten in 20 days and someone gives you a teaspoon of oatmeal a day, that's better... but it's not good. It's not enough.

Just because things are better doesn't mean it's good enough.

I KNOW you would never do something like this. If you would, you wouldn't be reading my blog. But there's more to it than that. I'm not telling myself "Well, I'd never do that so let's talk about the riots."

Fuck the riots. I could give two shits about the riots in this conversation. That's exactly what keeps happening. The trigger gets drowned out by the noise of what follows and we don't address the trigger. We address the noise.

What else can I do? What else can WE do, to help things continue to get better? Just waiting for the old racists who were raised to think "negro" was the good word so let's all just use that one and they can't complain to die isn't working. Our health care is getting too good. They're living too long. We can't wait for all the racists to die for things to get better. Because they're like gay people. Nobody knows why they keep happening but dammit! Every time I turn around there's another homo or racist sitting on the corner with some cause or another. What the hell man? Gimme a break. I just want to go to work, go to a restaurant once in a while, and go home and watch Survivor with my gay husband. Is that too much to ask? (He's the gay one, not me! Straight as hell! LoL)

The thing is, that's all the people who keep getting killed want. Maybe they want Skittles. Maybe they want help when their car breaks down. Maybe they want to go for a walk. Maybe they want to go for a jog. What they don't want is to live in fear of the police. They don't want to teach their kids to be afraid of the police. They don't want to be afraid they're going to be shot if they have a tail light out that they haven't fixed yet.

They don't want to lay on the ground while a police dog chews on them, LITERALLY CHEWS on them so afraid if they move at all WHILE THE DOG CHEWS THEM that they'll be shot. What world is it that we, you and I, have allowed to exist that they overcome literally every instinct to NOT BE EATEN because their fear of the police is worse than their fear of the dog that is literally chewing on them right then? How have you allowed that to happen? How have I? How have we? Because that's the reality for a black person in today's America.

So, what can we do to fix it? Literally, anybody who isn't trying to help in this situation, anybody who says, "Well, they just need to learn patience. Change takes time..." they're part of the problem.

If two poufs can get married when that was UNIMAGINABLE 30 years ago, then a black man should be able to interact with a law enforcement officer without being afraid he's going to die.

That's all I want. I want our police officers to be the good guys for ALL of us. Not just for my Aryan ass. ALL of us. Including my friends who have more melanin and less skin cancer than me and my family.

If you disagree with anything I've said, please unfollow me. I'm really distressed by all of this, more than I should be for as often as it happens. I should be numb to it by now but I'm not getting desensitized to it for some reason. I guess it's because I think it's important. I think it matters and I can't stop thinking about it.

Mourning has to end at some point.

September 11, 2001, just over 7 years ago last week, the United States was attacked by radical Islamic terrorists associated with al-Qaeda  using airplanes as weapons. They crashed several planes into the World Trade Center in New York, bringing the twin towers crashing to the ground. Another plane slammed into the side of the Pentagon, and a fourth plane targeting a location in Washington DC was brought down in Pennsylvania by the passengers of the plane.


I recently bought a new car (much love) and needed to test out the CD player (Your mental transmission fall out from the change of gears? Don’t worry. We’re still on the same road, just in a different lane.) so I went to Best Buy and grabbed Pearl Jam’s Pearl Jam. So far I’m liking it, and to answer the burning question in everyone’s mind: yes. the CD player worked quite nicely. When I got home and was reading the review on Amazon, mainly to see if this was their most current album or not I found this line from the review incredibly annoying, and the progenitor of this post.

On its eighth studio release–and first since 2002–the band socks away the adventurous experimentation that dogged some of its most recent records to investigate a post-September 11, war-ravaged world overflowing with urgency and significance.

It’s been 7 years now. I feel like our period of national mourning should be over. We have to stop living in the horrific images of 7 years ago. We have to be the country that existed on September 10th. A line I hear over and over again is that since September 11th the world has changed. That’s a lie. The world has not changed. There are still people who like us and people who don’t. There are oceans full of fish and creatures who have no concept we exist. There are families out there making a living in countries all over the world who have no concept of whether or not we were attacked or not. Mind-boggling, but all true. The world didn’t change. We allowed ourselves to change. We haven’t acted to counter terrorist attacks. We have reacted to them. Initially that was fine. How could we not, after being hit so staggeringly, so abruptly, so blindingly? We were hurt and angry and the most armed and dangerous country in the world. SOMEBODY was going to get hurt back. And they did… they have.

Seven years though. Seven years later our system of spying on our own citizens in the name of national security continues and increases unabated. Our internment camp, sorry, too loaded a word, concentration camp, no… that’s too loaded too… Our detention of people against whom charges have not been proffered, and convictions have not been obtained continues. Perhaps some of those hundreds who have been held there without charges were anti-American before and willing to do horrific crimes against us. But now… after being locked up for years with no charges and no trial… My guess is we’re doing a damned fine job of recruiting for the other side when we trample people’s rights.

We spy on our citizens, we suspend or ignore, the Fourth Amendment in ever widening circles of exceptions all in the name of National Security. Somehow we have, as a nation, decided that we are willing to give up a little liberty for a little security over and over again. We continue to give up our liberties with no real prove we have gained any security at all. Benjamin Franklin would be appalled. Our forefathers would be appalled. Yes. There is a risk involved in freedom. I would, like Thomas Jefferson, “rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” Absolute peace and security is China’s goal as well. Do we want to model ourselves after their methods of achieving it?

Music’s job isn’t to “overflowing with urgency and significance” which probably explains the lackluster success of the albums released during that phase of Pearl Jam’s career. We need to get our head space out of the day we were attacked. We need to move our psyche forward. We can’t continue to live in the horrific images of jumpers and collapsing buildings. We as a people and a country didn’t die in those attacks. We should mourn those who did but we MUST go on living our lives and cannot let our lives be defined by the bad things that happen to us any more than any other victim of a violent crime can do that.

We’re a world super-power. As such we must focus on that. We must have goals, ideals, visions that are inspirational to others. We can’t live in that horrible morning 7 years ago. We’ll be nothing but a super-victim if we do. The American Dream wasn’t to be the biggest bully on the block or the most secure country or the country with the biggest walls or most metal detectors. We have GOT to focus on our future with an eye towards making the country a free country. There are no guarantees of safety in the Constitution. Safety is China’s goal… Freedom should be ours.

Yes. September 11, 2001 was a horrible day for our country because of the actions of foreign terrorists on our soil. So many more horrible days have passed since then though as we do to ourselves things that the terrorists could never accomplish, with a fleet of airplanes. Our losses of freedoms are our fault. They took lives. We’re surrendering our freedoms, our liberties, and the very ideals that made this country the greatest country in the world.