Shut the fuck up, I'm not going to hurt you-- lines I have to live with the rest of my life
My sin, such as it is, a skim of the jeremiad written by John Lewis for The Atlantic. With the latest tally in Peshawar being 141 killed by the Taliban, initially supported by ISI, as I need not remind you, African Americans seem to have it pretty good these days, despite their own predation among themselves, and what their social dysfunction has inflicted on me. I have seen what local police experience daily, indigent minorities engaging in systemic violence among themselves with impunity, in some of the poorest urban environments. Danieal Kelly wasn't killed because my Italian father fled South Philadelphia, or because a cop shot first and assessed later. Despite the fact that this child was case managed by city services, she was an embarrassment to her mother, who ignored her daughter's pleading for water. Lewis might rebut me that police aggression is different in kind from racial shame, and my response?
Oh please. Poverty and wealth are not entirely about the luck of distribution. Inner city entitlement breeds its own myopia, among blacks, among certain classes of disenfranchised homosexuals, among disabled individuals like myself. I am overweight, and it is hard to knock those extra pounds off with one good arm, but I have made an effort, in maturity, giving up ice cream, eating at least two salads a week. I saw a new tenant get on the elevator as I was coming in, and she easily doubled me for obesity, probably due to soda, which I swore off a long time ago. The woman probably doesn't care, given her age-- you have to be 62 to live here--I, and a few other crippled sots, were let in younger because we're exactly that--the tarts-- I just have the misfortune to have a genius IQ battered by my own obstinacy-- and that indifference to her health isn't socio-economic. Poor people are either brutal or fatalistic; if they are white like me with a useless humanist education stuffed into them beaten down by the procedure, then they are angry and pissed off.
Lewis fears for the country. Christ. I don't get stoned, don't drink, don't have a criminal record. and my life is on the margin. Because of predatory lending? Hardly. My mother was a fucking nut case and I couldn't get what I wanted as an undergraduate, trotted off to live life in an urban liberal dictatorship, and got screwed by activist collusion at the end of the day-- with the Matrix Research Institute's Pew grant funding being a noble experiment pitted against an entitlement system designed to ration and penalize incentives. Once an individual gets on disability, getting off is life threatening, barring the relative security of civil service, or tenure, and I am too old to aspire to that now. Ambulatory minorities don't have that excuse; they have chips on their shoulders, or dream of professional sports, but none of us have equal worth, regardless of which nation we inhabit. The Scandinavians, maybe the Japanese, have the closest thing to a classless society, but there is hardly any nirvana in that when these nations depend on China or Russia being placid, or on America power maintaining a certain status quo for Europe and the Pacific.
Progressive idealism is noble? Fine. Move in with me and see what life is like in North Philadelphia or Kensington for two years. I'm done beating my breast over officers who profile on the basis of ethnicity or criminalizing on the basis of a chronic condition. I spent my whole life trying to be decent, as a case manager or otherwise, and certain situations are irredeemable.
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