[677] Me First

I left my stupid job to come home, take a shit, and write this. Let's hope I don't manage to take another one all over this.

I was listening to the authors of “When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir” on “Democracy Now!” this morning. The stories told involved dealing with a brother's mental illness and incarceration, personally being arrested at a young age, visiting the house of her family's slumlord who couldn't be bothered to provide working appliances, and the difficulties of organizing around an identity that is perpetually vilified by your neighbors, the laws and courts, and devoid of basic needs you're not even aware aren't being met.

Dave Chappelle is full of wise words. He suggested that the “Me Too” movement should perhaps not be conducted within earshot of black people in general. His question, “When has anybody ever given a shit about how you feel?” Minorities and the poor are out-of-hand completely disregarded at every possible level, their outwardly imposed conditions are blamed on them, they're dealing with often literally poisoned living conditions, schools turned prisons, basic help becoming means tested, and completely inadequate access to healthcare. By the numbers, they literally have to work 2 or 3 times harder to get half as much.

Dave Chappelle isn't telling women not to speak up nor is he condoning sexual violence. He's trying to shed light on a pattern across victimhood claims. He wants to address the irony. He wants you to be prepared for the fallout and backlash. He wants to explain something more fundamentally broken about humanity than pay discrepancies. In the spirit of Chappelle, please keep in mind I'm hoping to do the same thing.

I felt an immense solidarity with the author. I didn't grow up that poor. I'm not a minority. I'm not a woman, or gay. In the modern era, I literally have everything working against me, outward identity politic wise, to the point where I'm not even really allowed to use or seek the word “sympathy.” I know this, and it's not what I'm seeking. I'm hoping for you to understand a more broken underlying quirk of humanity that I see happening to me that resonates with hearing what's happening to others. It's a point about identity and people's reticence in hearing it. It's a point about accountability and responsibility. It's deeper than any one claim of personal pain, and it's not meant to be abused in a false comparative narrative of “who's problems are worse.”

Minorities, particularly black people, have been considered default criminals by America's white history. They've been inhuman, animals, work horses, ignorant, and lazy. They have to deal with these labels no matter what evidence exists to the contrary. The statistics don't play. I've had someone literally claim to be a math major who didn't understand proportionality when I showed that as a segment of the population black people were getting shot and killed at double the rate of whites. If white girls smoke weed in the bathroom at school, it's a youthful indiscretion, the black or Latino kid gets their first strike on their way to a life sentence. I read a survey recently that showed Mexicans work the most each week compared to every other ethnicity, and yet there's someone this instant swearing by his “lazy job-stealing wetback” sentiment.

Our identities are this incredibly complex thing. We all grow up with a certain blindness that strikes us when someone new enters our world and makes a comment we've never heard before. For the author, it was, “I didn’t know you lived like this.” She went to a primarily rich white school while residing in the poor neighborhood, and made the mistake of inviting one of her friends over. For the racist making comments about the work ethic or values of a group he’s not familiar, before the internet, he might never have had any real opportunity to have his ideas challenged, and of course as with any tool, could use it to embolden his position and find more like-minded assholes.

Identity is also incredibly fluid. You do the wrong thing around the wrong group of people and you can be forever labeled by that moment. The default and forever criminal defined by an indiscretion in youth. The segment of your identity group that commits violence bleeds onto you. You can grow up and find yourself dealing with new social and sexual dynamics that you find confusing or difficult. You can have a tragedy rip people from your life who you failed to appreciate how much of yourself was rooted in them being there for you.

You have this immensely complex and fluid thing and you’re forced to make decisions with it and assess the moment. You’re put to a vote. You’re meant to pair up and fall in love and pick a direction for your career and future. In the past, where you might be defined by your job and being able to provide for your family, now it’s not just the poor single mothers of four working 3 or 4 jobs, you and everyone you know is “gigging” it while you’re fed platitudes from the owners and managers who profess to care. An identity has been foisted upon you by the era into which you were born. You lean in more or less the direction of the examples you’ve been exposed to or found the most compelling.

There are endless gains that can come from playing along with the narrative prescribed to you. If you accept that you’re a “good and normal” person, you’re particularly blind to the kind of harm you’re causing. You wish to be held-harmless for the endless list of problems in the world. You’re “just doing you,” whether that’s skirting about the country taking in the sights, or keeping your nose buried in the books. You don’t need ambition, to be funny, to challenge the structure, or even really advocate for those less fortunate because, after all, you didn’t do it to them. You’re wrong and have a very small-minded conception of the impact you have, but it’s also the narrative endorsed by the majority, so you win by default.

There’s honestly too many angles that are informing why I needed to get this out right now. I want to pause and dump at the same time. The next few lines will just touch on those angles. I watched “The Fabric of the Cosmos” and got to thinking about all of the social implications of proven mathematical realities. I find myself unable to escape the term “white fragility.” I caught a radio host talking about all of the things “the media doesn’t want you to know and won’t report on,” despite literally opening with the caller talking about what the media had reported on. I’m going to tie the attacks on my character to the larger psychological underbelly that enjoys an easy target and eschews irony. I’m going to talk about how you don’t get more secure and comfortable as time goes on, and it causes the failings of thought and the work that hasn’t been done to corrupt the rest and accelerate your demise.

Let’s see if we can go broad and eventually get specific. According to the science, not a single particle in our body much cares or is aware of the passage of time. Time can, for them, go backward or forward and still make sense. What this means to me is that there’s no time like the present. The past and future existing as a set of probabilities means it behooves you to try and create the conditions that resolve things in your past and tend towards a better future. As such, within those impersonal particles that comprise every ounce of “good” and “bad,” you can figure out a way to observe them in a way that comports with the greatest amount of well-being for all. You can acknowledge an endless amount of experiences that don’t amount to your own, and work until you can lay eyes on why that person’s story was important. You can figure out how to make other people exist in a way the things you’re born of aren’t necessarily concerned with.

In that probabilistic existence, it occurs to people to start saying things like “systemic” problems. You hear a lot about “toxic” cultures at work or between men and women. The way we’re organized, in our language, in our institutions, ensures with a greater probability that disproportionate subjugation and oppression can take place. Part of that is deliberate, like in crafting racist laws, part of that is simply because there are inherent differences in society that are exacerbated or suppressed under different conditions. This is why both old white guys and girls might shrug off an inappropriate, but no more and no less ass pinch, while someone in their 20’s might write a 20 page blog equating it to “rape culture.”

The terms “snowflake” and “white fragility” speak to that asinine blog post. Before we had a concept of “middle class,” life was considerably more death centered. We weren’t entertaining ideas of curing all diseases. You might need a dozen kids to help as labor to live in squalor. While we have some reason to believe “in general” the world is coming out of poverty and conditions are improving, we’ve all but obliterated the “human narrative” about what it means to be always confused, always oppressed, suffering something, and dying with little fanfare or acknowledgment. That’s a burden that, until you’re face to face with you see no practical reality in addressing. For now, the text message to duck and cover from the incoming ballistic missile is a false alarm.

That ignorance, denial, avoidance, excuse making, pawning off of responsibility, and inevitable attack from feeling cornered is why you need The Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter. You are the likely Nazi prison guard, just manning your post and following orders. Your inability to look your prisoners in the eye is not their fault. That you were born predisposed to following orders isn’t yours, but once it’s been pointed out, there is no avoiding your responsibility.

This is what annoys me about people who seem to be pretending on getting immense joy from doing “nothing” but vagabonding around the country or “working their job” as long as the money keeps coming in. I’ve known no greater joy than in feeling responsible for things. Whether it’s the things I create or the relationships I wished to cultivate and celebrate, I’ve persistently spoken against “incidental” friendship because you happened to grow up next to each other or “falling in love” because neither of you is leaving your dead-end job or willing to expand your list of hobbies.

How those avoidance mechanisms manifest are varied, but are most easily seen in “conservative” batshit right-wing media. It’s the inability to, it’s literally a blindness, see irony. The world, while traumatic and offering an array of things to be afraid of, instantly becomes manageable when there’s someone to blame. What they’re guilty of isn’t the point. It doubles as a way to feel “better” about how wise you were in the choices you made. “Hey, I may just be doing my job, climbing rocks, or touring national parks, but I’m not hurting anybody. Maybe if more people could just be as chill as me, things would get better. The world is not something I can fix.”

Here, it’s difficult to want to give inches and avoid conceding miles. No, “the world” will never get fixed. Every day the next baby Hitler is born. What’s the probability you can do more to stop him distracted and denying in your own little world verses paying more attention and getting involved? The best defense at this point is to say you don’t care, you’re selfish, and to please leave you alone. But then you have to stop pretending. You need to shut up about the things you say you care about. You need to admit that your efforts so far have been superficial and you don’t know how to be more effective. Instead, you try to have it both ways. Your contributions, from facebook shares to a small donation, are morality points just like organizers or people who do the work figuring out the details. Your “sacrifices” you believe rise to the level of the occasion.

You become an insecure shell. You attack people who try to speak to larger truths that minimize or negate the comfortable reality you’ve created for yourself. I can’t think of a much better explanation as to why I’m frequently the target of so much bullshit. I write. I write what I’m going through. I qualify my place in the continuum of different experiences. I insist I’m wrong. But, after months of little to no contact, I can get a “I don’t like how you treat women. [blocked from responding] ” message? First I’m hearing of it, but sure. If I bother to say I feel bad about the dying species and futility of my efforts, why shouldn’t the conversation end with me being called generally full of bullshit and told to fuck off? I’ve learned how to actually feel bad and touch the suffering at the center of my being, and the reality of that threatens the act that dictates how “normal” relationships are formed.

Now have it as bad or worse than me. Have it built into your identity culture. Have it legally sanctified. Talk about your suffering to those desperate to protect the facade. March for your rights under the gunfire from those trying to “protect” themselves and “stand their ground” while exercising their “constitutional rights.” My perspective has been forced. I’m open-enough to start the journey, but relative “poverty” was forced upon me. I played by the rules too and still had to find a cheat in taking drugs and getting my spine tapped to get an existence barely resembling what I envisioned for myself. You need to force your own perspective to go farther. You need to be able to empathize without dismissing. You need to be able to hear without accusing. You need to figure out all of the terrible horrible things about yourself that make the world and how you relate to it this general mess that you feel “above” attempting to discuss. I shouldn’t feel that close to my polar opposite example in life but for where the prevailing power structures have put us respectively.

The reason it will never get better and only worse faster is the same reason, if you’ve read this far, you feel exhausted, put-off by something I said earlier that blacked you out until now, or have been hotly disagreeing and tallying the reasons it’s all so much simpler or not as bad as I’m depicting. It will always be easier to “fight” or ignore or pivot. It will always be safe to accept the conclusions you come to about me, about “the other,” or about how just and proper the place you inhabit in life really is. Why adopt the precarious place someone else might inhabit? Life’s too short...but long enough to not want to deal with some things for ANY length of time, let alone in perpetuity, acknowledging the problems never go away.

You can consider me an advocate for myself. I’ll always force the issue. I’ll hand out flyers, in the form of blogs, telling you to vote for thought, for patience, and for the digging up of your buried identity. I’m selfish too. I don’t think I can fix the world. I think I’ve simply adopted tools that have helped me save myself. Your world, your words, and your behavior are the only things that have made me flirt with suicidal ideas. Who wants to live in a world where you’re always denied? Who can live with themselves when nobody finds a reason to listen to or accept who you are? What’s the point of struggling alone? For nothing. For the satisfaction of those who crave your pain. For the sad bullshit story you tell yourself. Is it really that confusing when lone extremists lash out in violence? You think Nazis in the streets and brazen incompetent demagoguery as the president are aberrations? They’re self-destructive tendencies, probabilities, the inevitable consequences of forces we pretend don’t exist within ourselves. I only feel suicidal when you’re proud of how you’re killing yourself. My suffering is yours. I’m just willing to talk about it. I’m willing to try for something better. I seem to learn every day why that something better isn’t you.