A Response to Michael Gerson

Michael, the fact that I have adopted the role of a gadfly to mask very deep seated levels of emotional pain sometimes deliberately obfuscates my intent of getting my viewers to think, as well as the price I pay for the struggles I have in my need for legitimacy, desperate to de-marginalize, (un-marginalize?) as I have been for a significant length of time in my uneven bid for matriculation, but let me take on the raw wound of George Zimmerman, not as an adjudicated legal debate, nor even how it is viewed strictly along the lines of ethnic perception, but as a personal narrative that points to the complexity of lack of answers:

At the risk of her sons ostracizing me along with the rest of my family, I know my paternal aunt feels that Zimmerman was justified in murdering Trayvon, and I find her attitude horrific. Diminished as I may be through my admission of bigotry, I do not like stacked decks, and even under my aunt's rationale, if Trayvon was a troubled juvenile, he did not deserve the summary execution that Zimmerman's actions provoked. My aunt's attitude reflects the reality of my family's need for boundaries of the type that existed before Johnson managed to get civil rights legislation passed, reflects the difference between my white Catholic/Methodist/Jewish family and African Americans, even that of my mother's sister, with her PhD in education leadership. Over the dinner table, in her discussion of pedagogy and the Philadelphia school district, she says, "Who wants to deal with that?" As you have a background in speech writing, I am sure you can infer her meaning.

I, as a disabled woman, have had to deal with that, since my parents institutionalized me in Home of the Merciful Savior, from the time I was nine years old: I was sexually abused by minority internees I lived with, and by the orderlies who attended to my personal needs, and then I was assaulted by my mentally ill mother's lovers, was a matriculated out cast in high school, pretty much the same during my active university years, and then exposed myself to a genocidal third world subsistence level of poverty in North Philadelphia, nearly lost my life once to a drug addict there, and what I have sustained in the years since is none the less horrific as the bullet on which Trayvon bled to death. It is even worse for developmentally disabled and black. Danieal is dead despite all the DHS and disability services within Philadephia combined, not only because she was voiceless, but worthless by this city's standards. The fact that I was of an affluent well educated family protected me from Danieal's end of life starvation, but only up to a point.

I hate urban African American norms, and it is a hatred learned through the observation of inner city devaluation of their own lives. I hate the depreciation and the fatalism of those norms, and the bigoted narrow mindedness of the working class who cannot even read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I have had the text thrown back in my face as a near implied accusation because I dared to use great minority achievements in literature as a starting point for discussion. Have you yourself ventured much beyond K street, gotten your hands dirty, ignoring your own affluence and demeanor, waded into the hood so you can be accused of paternalism for trying to reach out to a black boy under threat?

Obama is not a miracle. He is a multi-faceted exception who has the same symbolic level of helplessness as the titular ADAPT activist who has left me hung out to dry because I keep trying to build bridges back to the ambulatory world you inhabit.

Why not Gelato?

The film The Cake Eaters was probably made for various bona fides, feminist and various modes of exploitation, with Kristen Stewart's Goth fragility the modus operandi on forbidden loves that have worn smooth Bram Stoker's headstone. I did not link her from Masterson's quiet slice of life ensemble to the Twilight saga, and I am not sure why this earlier sobering vehicle had to be made. Flawed people coping with loss and absence, chronic conditions that make us lust, invest far too heavily. Running from mortality staring us in the face. Kristen certainly seems to have the genotype to be stricken with a future degenerative unraveling, but she serves Masterson's desire for eye candy over and above the honesty about the human body in its bare essentials, the calluses on our shins and elbows, the shame of obesity and diarrhea. In the notoriety of tradition, the wry British comedy of manner attempts a close scatological scene, but I am not sure how much it contributes to the nuanced wickedness of our pleasure as we engage the characters. We cannot visualize these things on a strip of film that is created with lenses capturing scenes and jump cutting, then lenses again projecting them onto a surface, not without a wince and a strong constitution. All cinematic representation is a lie in this sense, a vanity motivator to defy biology, to enforce self hatred.

I may be old enough to worry about our transformation into a digital world, but not quite old enough to say that the visual medium has had far too much impact on my self image, lacking any telegenic appeal myself. WPVI, ABC's affiliate for my region, did film me for Liberty Resources Inc when I was a fresh face, and it did nothing for me, simply an unremarkable homily face whose eyebrow ridges and grandfather's pudgy nose did no favors. Every year, the cycle of heat waves punishes me more and more, whether or not I engage my creditors, the account holders of my pithy federal debt. Horrible cramps, trots leaking, and I revive long enough to rinse liquid stool, and voila, like magic, the shower pipes for the 14's, the units where Riverside houses most of its wheelchair users, springs a leak into my ex fiance's studio, and the custodial employee who has seen me naked almost as often as Frank, the vilified ex in question, knocks on my door while I am trying to mitigate having soiled myself. These leaks are systemic; if I transfer and shower Frank's drop ceiling saturates and caves in, but we will try it your way, that I have lived in this section 202 senior living facility since I was 34 because I was exposed to systemic trauma in the other one adjacent to Temple's campus, and I am so strong that I have not snapped out yet and deliberately defaced a unit, or in this case, my unit, to get carted off in a facility that would constrain me under lock and key, and haven't quite yet resorted to attempted murder. Edward Snowden and Georgie boy are national bywords, and homosexuals neigh that I should "get help,"  a codex for not seeing that my symptoms require it. I'd love to work, to develop my thesis, to apply for jobs I will not get because my appearance screams that I've been brow beaten by indigence. Only in the United States. Mass murderers and paranoid racial profilers, and paranoid data systems analysts gain instant celebrity. If I advocated for a fascist revival Eric Holder wouldn't bat a damn eyelash. My soul is screaming to run; it wouldn't change a damn thing. 

Black, White, Mestizo, and Coffee

Every time I sit down here in this uncomfortable posture at this ill suited desk that has to be well over thirty years old, it is something. Yesterday, Joey the Beloved knocked my indian lamb curry on the floor, and restraint was difficult just at that moment. I managed, however, with one shout that sent both feline children running for cover, and I felt a hunger pang just now even though I do not want to eat, and spilled coffee creamer on myself, on the outside of twenty minutes, and smell sticky sweet. Had the non-dairy fluid hit my joystick, it is likely I would not be here multi-tasking, and I am probably going to offend you, or incite indignation that will not find its way to my comment section for a variety of reasons, perhaps because I write effectively with blunt force trauma, perhaps because no one wants to take on a misanthropic quadriplegic, or no one with the exception of louise, pays my posts any attention, because I am not fun, or rarely engage in light-hearted taste, although I have, now and again, expressed food or film delight.

No souffle this morning, as it will not please you to know that I did not sign the petition to have George Zimmerman prosecuted for the death of Trayvon Martin, and this is not due to my diffidence over black identity and victimization so much as a glazed ennui. I do not have it in me to feel outraged, even though somethig went terribly wrong here, and I cannot rehash the facts, the police investigation, or the controversial *Stand Your Ground* law, or take issue with Donna Britt over the misapplication of social fear, any better than my salaried colleagues can, but I do know that neighborhood watch is not about proactive interference with a crime in progress, or even suspicion, and Zimmerman's obviously irresponsible aggression is exactly why gun manufacture should not be left to the whim of free market capitalism.

I cannot, however, get involved, though my thoughts, much like WaPo's byline, turns to Zimmerman himself.I wonder if he fears for his life. I wonder if he should fear for it.

I have seen Ms. Britt flit about on American public television, and though I sympathize with the loss of her brother to time immemorial police aggression due to profiling, I take issue with certain of her worldviews, informed, of course, by her identity, much as mine have been. She platforms her comfort in this Liberation Deity that has such depth in black Protestant theology, and I can't take it seriously as a candy coating for grief over historical memory. I lost a brother too, an actual criminal at that, who graduated from petty addict thievery to first degree rape and assault with a deadly weapon, and then conveniently started his AIDS death march. He shamed our family name, embroiled my father in earlier litigation, and I am not sitting here like a weeping willow giving it up to Jesus.

I've had more than my share in this life, and whatever impassioned partisanism I have left, I have none left to spare for the continuation of traditional racial conflict in the United States. We are not basically a good country, and our national identity is one forged in historical and contemporary brutality. Zimmerman will probably be charged, but what is larger than that likely event, is the corporate mindset surrounding the development of lethal weapons and mass producing them like rock candy. This is what allowed Zimmerman to be out there playing rent-a-cop when he had no business doing so.

This country used to be capable of large movements, and it is time for Congress to properly revisit the Second Amendment, and yes, go through the torturously long process of the two-thirds majority ratification by the state legislators. If you believe, like those in Poets & Writers before you, or some members of my family, or Homo Tweets, that mental health treatment would make me more palatable, then you should be concerned that I could more easily visit the hood and buy a 357 magnum with a body on it than be cured by something like Prozac, which given my brain damage and other secondary symptoms, could kill me.

These are not toys, handguns, and all we use this technology for is slaughter of our own species due to superficial characteristics that create real regional conflicts and dehumanization.