I got tired of that girly-girl color scheme. so here I am in peach/orange/whatever.
I'm sitting here watching "Bowling for Columbine" again--we're back at the Marilyn Manson sequence. As much as I hate MM's music, I would LOVE to be that same kind of lightning-rod for conservative outrage. I would love to say something--anything--and mean it, and have my words resonate with those people enough to SCARE them and make them speak out against me.
One thing Michael Moore didn't exactly cover (not exactly) during the discussion of "why is America so much more violent than other countries?" is this: the gap between the richest and poorest is so freakin' HUGE. When the whole goal of the society is to accumulate and keep as much as possible, the people who have >whatever< are going to be constantly afraid of those who DON'T have it--or the resources to get it. And those who don't have the valued things, when they've been constantly imbued with the notion that their own value as a human being depends on GETTING those things--they often WILL do anything to get them!
What kills me, though, is that people (of ALL races) make it out to be SOLELY a race thing. I'm not saying that it has nothing to do with race--but I think it has a hell of a lot more to do with socioeconomics. I think of Lou (my old redneck roomie/lover/drug-buddy) and Jay (my plumber's kid). They're white, young, male--and poor. And both of them are resolutely criminal. Not large-scale, not murder or violent crimes--but crimes which, at their core, were geared towards getting the material things they didn't have. Lou's dad was the same way, and I get the impression that Jay's dad used to be semi-criminal before he got his shit together. Does that make them bad people? Not to me--hell, I like all of 'em (except Lou's dad, and that was only because he called me a n****r-lover).
That's why I don't have a problem with the guys who work the dope spot from out in front of the Catastrophe. They're just doing what everybody else is doing--trying to get ahead, trying to get the things they haven't got. If their last name was Bush and they lived in Texas, or Kennedy and they lived in Massachusetts, they wouldn't have to struggle for the things they want--shit would be handed to them, and to their children in perpetuity. If their last name was Cortez and they came from a one-child family on the Southwest Side, and had parents who waited til late in life to marry and have kids, and who thus got sent to private school and elite high-schools and had their college paid for--again, if that was the case, they wouldn't have to stand on the corner taking penitentiary chances for the price of a sack of groceries or a pair of Air Forces.
But people make it about something it's not--that they don't care about "right" and "wrong" because they don't KNOW to care--they're just lazy, they don't want to work...all the old stupid backward ideas that always come up along with issues of race.
Tell me this: Given the choice between making money at a job (not burger-flipping or Wal-Mart greeter--I mean a REAL job, where you could make a living wage and be treated with respect). or standing on a corner where at any moment, you could be pounced upon by police and locked up--which would you choose? Do you think that these guys on the corners are so different? Do you think that what they want, what they hope for, what they wish for is so different than what you want?
I don't think so. In fact, I so much don't think so, that I might even go out into the front yard one of these days and ask them.
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