Memorial Day.
Mine was spent on the mountain with no phone service. I have spent the greater part of my life surviving by moving seamlessly between groups of people who are, by and large, awful. People who will sit friendly over my gun collection, but would gauge shooting me over queerness. Here is the story of a Memorial Day party on the mountain, and a tale of the world that we live in.
‘They hate us because we’ve always been free’.
The ‘they’ have been used to describe every group of non-American (specifically non-white or non-Capitalist) people on Earth at one time or another. The ‘they’ in this instance, of course, are terrorists. A group that can only, apparently, consist of non-white, non-Christian people. In some cases, can only consist of Muslims. If a white Christian commits what would otherwise be considered an act of terrorism, it’s an ‘isolated incident by a deranged individual’. He probably meant no harm.
Only white people need be afraid.
All of this, and more, spoken in the presence of woman who refer to ‘my husband’ as somebody that must be desperately clung onto, responses gauged, in the proper tone, subserviently. And while ‘my wife’ is a deed, a bill of sale and ownership.
So who are we, who have always been free in America? Who counts as an American, and who counts as a person?
Because ‘we, a former slave nation, have always been free’ is beyond an oxymoron, and it’s no mistake that people think this way. It’s intentional. It’s programmed. If you can say that America has always been free, you must conclude that slavery (of Black folk and Natives) never happened, you must suggest that we came by this land honorably-palms out-with best intentions, and even to suggest that freedom exists in America today you have to pretend that the majority of the history of this nation has simple been forgotten with no residual, no memory, by those who have always, truly, been granted freedom. But more than freedom, freedom with the license to insure that it is granted only to yourself.
And the ‘they’, those that hate us for ‘having always been free’, the people who defeated Russia for us and then were left with a broken country, no schools, no men older than 16 or younger than 60, no roads, no choices, proxy governments put in place by us (with extensive plans to invade since the 70s when the oil became more of an issue), and a nation full of ‘terrorists’ who are mostly farmers who have trouble finding the funding for a plow, let alone a bomb, even if they gave half of a shit about the yonder euphoric paradisiacal freedoms of a slave nation across the world.
‘We have always been free’.
Well, maybe I have, but We haven’t. We’ve never been free. We are a nation living on stolen land, cultivated and built upon by enslaved people, and we continue to fuck with the rest of the world as if fucking with our corner just isn’t enough anymore.
We’re not going to stop until the rest of the world is as free as we are.
And that’s just fucking terrifying.
