68 Years (Fiery The Angels Fell, A Series, Part Five.)

Standing in line, marking time
Waiting for the welfare dime
'Cause they can't buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old ladies' eyes
Just for fun he says, "get a job"

That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
Ah, but don't you believe them

Said, hey little boy you can't go where the others go
'Cause you don't look like they do
Said, hey old man how can you stand
To think that way
Did you really think about it
Before you made the rules?

~Bruce Hornsby and the Range, The Way It Is.

I saw this on my Twitter feed this morning when I got up.

New York Post headline "House Dems hire ex-gang member for top campaign post" with no context, no nothing, that's the only thing that defines this guy, DyJuan Tatro, to them. Well, that, and he's Black.

This isn't a racist dog-whistle, this is the naked guy walking down the street wearing a sandwich board that says "I hate [Racial Expletive Deleted]" painted in big block letters. 

As if this guy would be advising Chuck Schumer how best to carjack a Lexus or sell drugs or something? I mean, sure, that's the stereotype these right-wing assholes say they have, but like everything else with them, that's not really it.

I looked at this guy's Twitter feed. He got his degree in prison, he's a serious dude and he seems to know what he's doing. And if I had to guess he'll have some pretty sound advice on things like criminal justice reform and dealing with racism, which is what really bothers the Murdoch acolytes at the Post.

On his feed I found an article about another guy, Joe Ligon, who just got out of prison after 68 years and he was sentenced as a juvenile offender, for being part of a group that committed a series of robberies and was alleged to have killed two people. Joe admitted to being part of the group, and to doing crimes, but denied that he killed anybody. 

When this dude went to prison in 1953, the Korean War was still raging. My Mom was three years old.

This dude's whole damn life basically got wasted for no damn good reason. For fuck's sake when he went to prison, most of the modern technology we take for granted didn't even exist. He witnessed everything from the beginning of the Civil Rights movement and the Sputnik crisis the Apollo program and the Vietnam War on up to the election of Barack Obama, Black Lives Matter, the Trump years and COVID-19 all from behind bars...for some things that, for most of my life, would have seen him let out of jail with a sealed record by the time he was 22. Think about that for a second.

Dude was in jail for 20 years longer than I've even been alive.

It seems like a huge, senseless waste of a life. The whole damn world as this guy knew it is gone, likely his family and any friends he had before are gone as well, and a vast, unfamiliar technological abomination risen in place of the world he knew. Is it even possible to adjust to that much of a change, in whatever time he has left?

Think about it, I mean, really. For the people who put Joe Ligon in prison, for the system that kept him in there, the cruelty really was the goddamned point. 

And I'll bet you the people at the New York Post don't care, even now.

The other day, I saw this.

Black family puts $400,000 into renovating their house, gets it appraised, and sees no change in its value. Then they get a white woman to pose as the owner, and it's appraised at half a million dollars higher in value then it was before. Is Black people's money and time worth nothing?

The problem here is racism, straight up, there's no better way to put it.

But even more so, the problem is that there's people out there who think they have some kind of a fucking right to inflict these kinds of evil costs and conditions on other human beings for no reason other than they damned well feel like it. If it wasn't Blackness, they'd find some other excuse.

And people, even, perhaps especially privileged people with something to lose, tolerate this horse shit?

Things can always turn around, so it's you that's the target. If January 6th didn't prove that to people I don't know what will. But 43 Republican senators are perfectly willing to rationalize and explain away a mob being sent against them that could have resulted in their own horrible deaths in order to hang on to power and Whiteness just a little longer.

Fuck all that, if somebody sends a mob after my ass I'm going to do what it takes to defend myself and if I get to sit on a jury against the motherfucker you bet I'm gonna vote to convict.

But it'll get worse.

I guarantee you, the people that do this kind of evil shit hare are just fiending for the day when they can do it to whoever they like, and the person doesn't have to be Black or whatever, and they don't have to have even the most twisted of reasons. It's just somebody who crossed the wrong line or came to the attention of the wrong person or got noticed by the mob. If you don't think these fucking people are looking at conspiracy theories as their great bloody-minded hope in these matters you have another thing coming. This is exactly why that scumbag 25% of America looks at Donald Trump as some kind of great liberator. He freed them from having to act like civilized people and hide all this bullshit.

Racism, as an excuse, is fast going out of style. Don't worry, they're already lining up another one, which will be that much harder to combat because it's even more arbitrary and dumb and even less based on reality.

As bad as Trump was, and as bad as Marjorie Taylor Greene is, I guarantee you they can and will find worse.

And in the meantime, I guarantee you, they can and will find people who will try and make it look like these Trump motherfuckers, with their endless disrespect for everyone and everything, were not so bad. It's already started. Don't worry, ABC, the "Liberal Media" and the reality show morons are already on the case.

Discrimination really is these fucking people's god, and they'll find some way to hang onto some aspect of it even if they have to invent whole new worlds of nonsensical bullshit in their own heads to justify it and how dare the rest of us inflict even the most minor consequences on even some of them for being such flaming assholes.

And they'll even promote somebody like Claudia Conway, who made a name for herself posting videos on TikTok railing against Trump and her parents, if it'll help to rehab her Mom's reputation or get her Dad and his fellow Bush 43-era Ghouls at the Lincoln Project a few more consulting gigs.

They'll gladly give out a little vapid celebrity, if it'll maybe buy her off for a little while.

Now that Trump is out of power, all most of these people will want to do is forget, which I suppose would be understandable if even that desire to forget was not held in bad faith.

They don't want to forget because this last five years was painful for them. They want to forget...and they want us to forget as well...because the consequences for it might be painful if they were held to account.

If you don't think any of this is dysfunctional and wrong, I really can't help you, and I'm not sure I want to try.

Part Four.