It’s become pretty fashionable to not be a lot of things these days. For instance, it would be considered bad form in modern social climes announce that you were a racist. It might be because the word is so packed full of psychotic hate from generation upon generation of racist bloodlust that we can no longer even hear the term without writhing in disgust. Or it might be that all the cool kids will think you’re an ignorant fuck if you ever said those words out loud. We’re talking about a game ending injury in any hip scene.
That being said, myself being of the school of radical honesty I can’t say “I am not a racist” and not feel like a liar. Between now and the end of this rant I hope to explain why you are too.
Race has become too easy a subject for the American Liberal. Once the rhetoric is learned almost any yokel with a bigoted mind could improv their way into a radical group of friends. Here in the states we have it easy. The racial dialogue here is very black and white. We can put the pin of Not-a-Racist on as long as we can play well with the other races and cultures brought together in our melting pot. It doesn’t matter if we laugh at derogatory jokes when we’re in exclusive groups as long as you treat people of other races the way you think they ought to be treated.
Luckily for us there are several class boundaries which keep the different colors in the pot from truly blending so many of our fanciful notions of our proud fairness are actually ever tested. At a certain point of wealth one can almost entirely opt out of ever making the acquaintance of any person of any race they don’t feel fully comfortable around. These same lucky Liberals will raise liberally minded children who also don’t think they are racist though the multifaceted lives of the multifaceted races are kept from them.
And certainly this country has made great strides in saying that it is not racist.
Yet there are a few things which seem to me almost inherently racist about the very American Way and it really makes me feel like we’re all just a bunch of fucking liars and hypocrites.
Can you, the American reader, remember back to those first days of our great War on Terror? Do you remember how you felt about the sacrifice of those first 3000 some odd American lives, so mostly white? Now, if you will, contrast that for me with all of the feelings you have ever had about the lives of the innocent Iraqi of Afghani bystander wrongly killed or imprisoned by our haywire war. Do you notice any differences?
For me I feel a much greater sense of removal from the lives lost from such a distant culture. I know I should feel for those lives but where that emotion should happen is this vacancy. That is why I am a racist. I don’t have the proper emotions to contextualize both sides of this very race-centric conflict so naturally my emotions differ to the easy, known American Way.
It really pisses me off when people write this off because it is a war (it is not technically a war still btw’s). Civilians are not soldiers. Their deaths are not the same. They had signed no agreements.
You would think of all countries we would still be walking on eggshells after being the first country to use a nuclear strike against civilian targets or at least have learned to have the proper amount of candor about taking innocent lives which never signed up for any war. No, not us. Fuck you. We’ll kill everybody for ten years just to prove a point and we’ll do it in opposition to the desire’s of our own sweet Democratic people and while we do it we’re going to say its not racist the whole time and get away with it because that is the American Fucking Way.
I mean, think how absolutely insane it would sound for a former Nazi soldier to say after the last Great War that they were not a racist and yet now there are whole organizations for the occupational forces to retire into which condone this theory that we were not being racists while we did what we were doing, or that we can wash away those sins now by simply learning the right rhetoric. That’s bullshit. This war is a stain on all of our souls and I’m sick of watching people grasp for quick fixes and telling those of us who know that none of this is worth saving that we’re the ones who are crazy.
If you didn’t jump out of your chair on 9/11 and beg your precious God to spare the innocent children of these countries which were about to pay the price for the transgressions of another rich and powerful political and religious leader than you are a fucking racist and I hope you accept that every day of your life. I hope you quit this very second trying to prove to yourself that you’ve got this figured out because you’ve finally learned that black people and white people aren’t that fucking different. Congratulations. You’ve almost finished processing the emotional toll of the Civil Fucking War and next on your plate is how your very country which is dyed into the very fiber of your soul has used you and all of your family to plunder and kill the people’s of small countries where brown people live to prove to other rich white leaders of the other First World powers that we really good and truly don’t give a fuck.
If we were all sane we would be disgusted with ourselves. We would have killed ourselves to stop the machine which set forward in our name. But we weren’t. We were cowards. And now we survive on psychotropic medication and delusions of the past.
By all means, keep patting yourself on the back because you don’t hate transgendered people. That is very progressive of you. Not hating one of the smallest minority demographics on the long long list. Meanwhile this history books are being written and they will tell of concentration camps under American Flags and pictures of burned civilian corpses piled high and you can try to tell your grandchildren how you were not a racist.
Accept the truth. You don’t want to have the right feelings about these things. You want pleasant happy days with good friends and family and fun times. You want good memories. And who could blame you. It is so easy to deceive yourself with thoughts that you are a good person and you are doing good things here. Maybe, if you work really hard, you can leave some mark on history that stands out more than this disgusting war but chances are it will all get drown out by the waves of sorrow that will wash over generation to generation to come.
The Paper Trail 