I've had all I can stands...

...i can't stands no more....

I really wish I had the impetus to write when all is well. I mean my life clearly isn't shit in a bucket, because I seem only to write in this when I'm at a loss for words in other formats. In all honesty, i keep most of this stuff to myself, feeling that burdening all the baggage that life drops off on me expected and unexpected simultaneously, feeling the burden of all this would be too overwhelming for one person to be able to handle it all. The part I forget sometimes is this: if the weight I carry is too burdensome for me to give to others, how am I to be expected to reasonably deal with that weight myself? How can I carry the weight i'm unwilling to share with my friends and loved ones, even though they want to help me carry that weight? Hence...the blog...it's only frustrating because I love writing and I'm STILL salty at my honors English 2 teacher in HS making me believe that my voice had to be filtered through their lens for me to write- she made me believe my voice wasn't worth being heard, which I should actually thank her for: it's her voice I hear that's driving me to be 1000x the teacher that piece of shit ever was- but that's one of those tangents she always felt were useless but we're critical in my line of thinking- and I didn't do it in essays, my grammar and writing Black Fascists of parents made sure of that. But I digress...

...I went out and listened to some Jazz/Blues with some of my friends last night, but at some time Daddy got old and went home. Got back to the hotel, and the day was on point. Meetings over and they didn't kill me, the kids I was coaching were out which sucked but the dinner with the Filet and Chicken Fried Lobster made everything a little better- top it off with live blues and I'm about where I could ask to be- last thing I see on TV is a shooting at a church...I decide to look it up in the AM...I'm glad I did- would have gotten no sleep if I had. By now you know the details, but summarized- guy goes to church, sits for an hour, and afterward kills 9, wounds 3 and tells the rest to tell what he did.

When I read that, my first thought was "well here comes the playbook"- except there are issues this time: the normal answer of "X wasn't racist" ain't gonna fly, he SAID so when he talked about rape and taking over of society. The back up plan ALSO doesn't work, to just go all-in on the action being racist. But the statements bring pause to that as well. So you can't say it's not racist? What's a racist to  do?

This is when the resourceful racist goes into the playbook: mental illness. The fallback of white privilege to explain abhorrent behavior by whites you don't want applied to all white people. Let's not get it twisted: I believe that mental illness exists. And it's a fucking massive problem. But the idea that EVERY white person that's involved in a school shooting, church shooting, child molestation master, they're ALL mentally ill. Maybe it's just the skeptic in me, but it seems really unlikely. Couple the fact that the last time I can remember a black dude getting access to the mental health claim was the DC Sniper, and he was given that BEFORE he ended up being black (to really everyone's surprise), and it begins to look like he'll be white, the playbook was laid out early, and can't really be rolled back without looking like racist d-bags (well more like but...semantics). The selective application of the mentally ill label and the paper bag test (darker than the bag no access) with which selection is used only serves to sever any possibility of mental illness being the actual issue, as opposed to the thing you say so you don't have to ask hard questions...

...it's even more frustrating when you see people towing the party line- despite the evidence to the contrary. I was told that Roof MUST be mentally ill because he did it and you'd HAVE to be mentally ill to be able to do those kinds of things. This allows one to assume racist actions aren't normal or typical, but instead an anomaly, something that is the exception to the rule. This allows people to put a cloak over the racism, to say that it's not a societal claim, it's merely the result of one racist person who we remove, and thus the racism is gone. This ain't the way things happen.

POTUS even seems to miss the boat with regard to this. He comes on today and says we need to have a conversation about guns. Once again, don't get it twisted: guns ARE a problem and we do need to have a REAL conversation about guns. That being said: that's NOT the conversation we need to have.  And to pretend that the guns conversation should happen IN REPLACEMENT of the conversion that needs to happen. which has much less to do with HOW the people were killed, but WHY someone would go to a church, sit for an hour, and then kill 9 and injure 3 while telling survivors to tell his story. The degree of depravity is alarming to some but not surprising to me: I've been seeing outlandish shit my whole life: being at the house of a friend, who happened to have servants, who happened to be black, to watch them be called nigger by my friends parents, and their claim when I asked them was "you're different than them"- the degree of dismissiveness applied to black and brown people would be mind numbing to all of those not black and brown to whom this treatment is not just standard but expected.

Makes me think that Carl T. Rowan may be right: The Race War may be coming...but hopefully not for a few hours because i need some sleep...