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.

Freedom of Speech

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

~ E.M. Forster 

And that's it right there isn't it? Freedom, not much spoken of these days, like liberty, they seem to be antiquated ideas that are today replaced with a priority on safety, security, and other issues that aren't high-minded at all... Me? I'd choose liberty & freedom over security or safety any time. Very few people are as safe as those in solitary confinement behind prison walls... but I'm not interested in living in a prison of my own making or of my government building one around us to keep everyone they don't like out without realizing they're keeping us in as well.

I don't like the way the things are going right now. I don't like the drones. I don't like the Carnivore that snoops all your e-mails. I don't like the police's "right" to serve a warrant after the search has been completed. I don't like the lifting of habeus corpus. I don't like the government, a bigger pack of criminals and thieves you'd be hard pressed to find, thinking they have some sort of right to restrict our freedoms & our liberty for our own good.

Telling me I have nothing to worry about if I have nothing to hide is ridiculous. I have nothing to worry about when I shower either, but I don't do it outside in the rain. I should be able to decide what information is public and what isn't. And once a government agency has it, it's public. Who do you think makes up the government? Public officials. Yeah. I'm not a fan.

I heard someone say the other day, and he was being melodramatic, that he wants to watch the world burn. I don't. I like the world I live in. I love the potential it has for greatness and progress like we've never seen. I don't want it to burn, but I do want the top 5 layers of government dismantled and started over again before it's too late. The government we have now has so little to do with what we had before the towers fell...

Today I can still say this, but God knows what sort of flag is going up in a computer some where. An LED lights up and a notation is made in my file somewhere that I spoke out against the government. I'm able to say it today. But I wouldn't bet money I'll be able to say it as freely in 40 years.