Okay, just fuck you, like, as a state.
Seriously, just fuck this. I’m done. It’s been a whole week of nonstop bullshit, between the Israeli clusterfuck and the weather see-sawing between OMGHELLFIRE and SHUTTHEWINDOWI’MFREEZING, the entire Gulf of Mexico is turning into sludgy quicksand, my neighbor’s kids are shouting Black Eyed Peas lyrics in the yard at 8 a.m., people in the world today think “raghead” is a serious thing you should still say, and now fucking THIS. I am done. I am taking this jug of wine, and this bendy straw, and I am going to bed, and I am not coming out until Ceiling Cat has this shit handled.
A fucking mural. That’s the hill ignorant pigfuckers have decided to die on today. Every day, another hill for the racists, each one stupider than the last, but you gotta admit this one’s a pretty stupid hill. A mural. The very existence of a depiction of a Hispanic kid recycling or whatever is a threat to these people’s way of life? Really? I mean, is there a way you can say this so it gets less dumb? And then they literally want to paint over the KID’S FACE TO MAKE HIM LIGHTER SKINNED. And they drive by the mural yelling “nigger” and “spic” at the artists. That’s actually what they’re doing right now?
I do not get this. I really don’t. You know, I get not everybody wanting to live in a United Nations neighborhood for whatever reason (I think it’s awesome, but hey, to each his own) or feeling uncomfortable or what have you. I’d be lying if, as a middle-class white girl, I wasn’t intimately familiar with the feelings of discomfort that come from confronting societal change. What I aggressively do not get is indulging those feelings to the point … I mean, it’s a MURAL, that’s how persecuted you are, that a mural is a bridge too far?
So if they don’t paint Hispanic kids conserving the environment, we’ll all go back to the good old days when everybody was white and daddy didn’t hit us and mommy didn’t drink and you were guaranteed a job at the factory until you died and nobody would ever raise your taxes? Because if there’s one thing I think the long curving arc of justice has taught us, it’s that you can oppress people all you want by making them invisible in art and culture, by making what they see around them empty of their own images. In the long run? It won’t work, for the very simple reason that it is stupid, and pointless, and people are stronger than that.
We seem to be in the midst of a very, very, very dumb period in our history, a period in which racist fuckholes pop up every day saying things that leave the rest of us just standing here with our mouths open like, “Did you just say that out loud and then wait for me to praise you for it? Really? In 20fucking10?” And it seems unreasonably glib to say this will end, and we will get better, and no matter how you whitewash the pictures, the truth will out because it always does, but that’s the sort of thing I have to believe in order to keep getting up in the morning. Because goddamn, we are a stupid fucking country right now.
A.