Comrades. D.H. Lawrence wrote once that a sign of insanity in a man isn´t all the crazy shit that he knows. But all the normal stuff he doesn´t know makes him insane. The stuff he misses. Like, the stuff everyone else sees but he himself misses – makes him insane.
I´ve been told lately that I´m awful bitter and cynical. Or I come across that way in my essays. A person can deny it only so many times, and from so many people, before he, if he´s smart, hears some grains of truth in the words.
So, I´ll get personal here for a second. Even though you guys probably don´t want to hear me pooh poohing, I´ll share some words I wrote to my grandma. The context is how I´ve done ten years thus far for non-violent drug charges. And I got four or five more years to go before parole because Utah considers me a “threat to the community.”
Keep in mind, here in Backwards Reactionary Utah, not paying your tithing is a capital offense. So they frown on stoned atheists threatening their bourgeois polygamist community´s mellow degeneracy.
Pardon the bitter cynicism. Couldn´t help it.
I remember as a boy my Navajo Indian friend ´Mickey´ told me that owls are a sign of death in the family. If you see or hear an owl it´s bad luck. After grandmother Norma died of cancer I shot this owl with my 22 caliber rifle. I shot it several times before it fell to the ground out of the cottonwood tree it was porched in. I was out behind grandma´s house beside the main ´North Creek´ river.
I came upon this owl, still alive, looking at me with its big yellow and black eyes. I felt so bad. I was angry shooting it, thinking I was “getting-even” with it for making my Grandma Norma die. That´s what I felt – at first. But then I came upon it laying on the creek-bed. Looking at me like: “Why, what did I do to you?” I felt real bad. But it was dying. And I had to finish it off. So I did.
But I´ll never forget that owl´s eyes, Gran, asking: “Why, why?”
I don´t know if I´m maybe insane – but when I look into the mirror into my own eyes – my eyes question just the same way as that owl´s “why, what did I do?”
I didn´t do nothing. Neither of us did. Me. The owl. It´s just sometimes people (and systems) get angry and confused and react without thinking. They believe they are helping or “getting even,” shooting people out of their life´s trees because of some silly “belief.”
The belief that I´m a “sinner” or “criminal” and a threat to them. To something? To what? I can´t barely… - There´s nothing even left in me to hurt with. I´m just ´me´ now. A person. Alone. I´m like a ten year old!!
I´m just an owl in a tree getting shot at by some confused angry boy/system. I didn´t kill their grandma. I´m not bad luck.
But damned if I´m going to end up in the creek bed! Damned if! I got stuff to do, one day I hopefully…
So I´ll flutter from tree to tree, day to day, dodging the 22 bullets. And cross my feathers / fingers…”
2.4 million of us / 7.4 million if you count parolees and probationers – flutter from tree to tree dodging society´s hate of us. So yes, I am bitter and cynical. But it´s because I can be. Thus far I don´t have to worry about censors. Or if what I write will mess up my death row appeals. I´m not in the creek-bed. I ´may´ go home one day.
But I´m damned aware of all these that won´t.
I´m sickly aware of my nation rounding up thousands of Mexicans and “detaining” them. Deporting them. Gunning them down like dogs. All in an effort to protect their jobs. (Jobs they´re losing because of capitalism´s unstable nature, not a brown people´s hated persevering human nature).
I´m intelligent enough to make the mental leap that if my fellow countrymen act this way towards innocent outsiders, not a fucking thing´s stopping them acting that way toward hated native-born felons.
I know I´m not here to be corrected. I understand the percentages – 79% recidivism rate, 6 out of 7 junkies return to the junk – if there´s not room for a handful of Mexicans in our society where do we 7.4 million Amerikkkans go? How long until you just throw on the old grand dragon sheets and start picking off parolees like you do Mexicans? Like you do Palestinians and Afghans?
Put yourself in our shoes for a minute. It is one of the world´s greatest “mind-fucks= which we sit in the very center of. The majority of Amerikkkans are so mind-washed sitting in front of their television believing all the bourgeois bullshit propaganda that they don´t realize (or they actually do and applaud it) it´s their very own taxes, their own 22 rifles, picking us off. – my countrymen.
D.H. Lawrence. His definition of insanity perfectly, almost frighteningly, explains the U$ of A. to a tee.
The world looks on, as uncle $am slobbers on himself, rocking back and forth in the gutter. The man has lost it, grabbing and snatching everything in sight. And twisting it. Shoving it. “Correcting” and “rehabilitating” it. Sanctioning and globalizing it. Bending it into something whiter; something cheaper; something less bitter; less cynical.
“Who” does he think he is?
“Why” doesn´t someone stop him? --------
I just wish I was still a boy up North Creek. And I´d of paid that damn Mormon tithing on time. --------
In strength (“who who” – “why why”) and struggle,
B.
27th of January 2011
