A Comfortable Silence
It is oh so deafening to the ears of those who’ve never been silenced before
There is a rage, a voice, an impotent posturing to fight for a privilege that was never taken away. It echoes silently from the mouths of the misguided as they march past the boys in blue, trampling over the thin blue line that they’ve sworn to uphold, to support. It screams quietly as the heads, decorated in the red, white, and blue of stars and bars, are bashed against concrete. These are the same stars and bars that lasted as long as the charade of decency we used to call our head of state. The stars and bars of a failed nation, hoisted up on a pole held up by spidery, sick fingers infected with an insecurity that has inflamed our country.
Do not read this and think as though you’ve been deaf to this hideous howl for the last four years. Because, you haven’t. You’ve seen it manifest through an objectionable splash of red on the hood of a 2010 gray Challenger in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12th, 2017. You’ve seen it surface on the skin of our nation during the counter protests to the Black Lives Matter pleas for justice, like a hot boil straining against a gangrenous facade. You’ve even seen it spurt out like sweltering, sickeningly sweet pus in the blatant disregard for people’s lives as their faces go unmasked, spreading infection and chaos onto our elderly, our poor, our disenfranchised, all in the name of unjust freedom.
But, what exactly does freedom mean to those whose unabashed sense of self, sense of democracy, and sense of lawfulness only applies to a homogenous group of people and never the people whose broken backs built this very country? And who can we blame for the intense, uneducated masses who believe all is for one but one is not for all?
Only ourselves. Or, rather, the institutional classism, racism, and anti-intellectualism driven by this country’s need to create an autoimmune disorder that poisons the confused, yet proud, hysterical people over a democratic election. While our global rankings in education continue to fall around the world, we’ve got senators who’re pushing tax breaks for race horse owners rather than address the destitute rankings of their own states’ education quality which almost comes dead last in the country. Where are our priorities? When did we start yelling about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ in the faces of those who cry out from the gutters of misinformation and a foul healthcare system, sipping sweetly on the monetary gain of illness?
The confused, the scared, the angry whiteness has been at the helm of this country’s ailment since birth, like a congenital drive of institutionalized actions and violence against our melting pot. But the indignation has been stifled, muzzled with excuses of ignorance. With excuses of ‘well, they’re just from a different time,’ ‘they don’t know any queer people,’ and ‘they have their own issues to worry about.’ All these excuses are just trickling from the sopping gash of callowness that should be cauterized, cut off, and incinerated with the same proficiency that we’ve managed to excuse cops for being afraid of a skin color. These excuses all sputter from the same wound of an America that never was, an America in the ‘good ol’ days.’
These idealized versions of the good ol’ days is when I wouldn’t even be typing this on a machine built by a company who is more willing to outsource jobs to other countries, stepping over the rampant inequity that smiles on every corner of every city and quietly begs for something to eat through the rotted teeth of so-called freedom.
In the good ol’ days, I’d be cleaning your houses like my grandmother did. In the good ol’ days, I’d be on my knees, scrubbing till my hands cracked from the chemicals, leaving ashen, white lines through tired, black hands. I’d be scrubbing and my eyes would be burning as I scraped your baseboards on a stomach weighed only by cheap coffee, stale bread, and the discarded remains of pigs. I’d be scrubbing, burning, scraping, hoping and praying that your husbands don’t take my diligence the wrong way because #MeToo didn’t exist in the good ol’ days. An uncontrollable, unforgiving, unbalanced sense of ‘what is mine is mine and what is yours is also mine’ was the ‘good ol’ days.’
It was unrestrained whiteness in the good ol’ days but don’t worry. It’s still here, bubbling like sepsis in the veins of our country’s body and what we should stand for. It’s still here, defiling the truth and righteousness of equality like a self-induced plague, when the national guard wasn’t called in ahead of the indisputably belligerent that broke into the capitol but they were called for a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest. It’s here, suffocating both the lungs of our people and the air of our legitimacy when a calm, Black reverend gets arrested for praying in the very same building that saw a boy in blue get soaked in red, the hypocritical crushing him under the weight of frustration and a fire hydrant. It’s the same vicious virus that saw the same hands slamming John Lewis, and 200 other people, behind bars for nonviolently protesting immigration laws while quietly escorting a killer after he finished fanatically spreading the seeds of his Glock 41 into the bodies of peacefully praying people who had the audacity to be Black in his world.
It’s his world, his view, his unabashed demand for his type of freedom that taints our system of progress like an untreated cancer, ravaging away at the type of nation that we could be in swift silence. A silence that chokes veracity in the name of benighted ignorance, begging and pleading us to repeat the history of fascism that tastes so appealing to the pulsing sickness of superiority that pretends to be freedom. The cancer has metastasized, spreading in stillness as superiority gets unchecked in continued far right cruelty and takeovers of government institutions like the 40-day occupation of Malheur that happened less than five years ago. Or have you forgotten about that too?
Your forgetfulness is just as loud as the creeping silence of this disease. We can pretend all we want that once the older generation dies out, there will be unjust silence no more. But have you forgotten about the Charlie Kirks and the Candace Owens of this world? Fascism is contagious in the comfortable silence, slipping into the hearts and souls of the vulnerable, the young as much as the old. And, we cannot pretend that the comfortable silence isn’t loud enough to break through the sound minds of logic and reasoning. The sound minds that have been engulfing conspiracy theories and propaganda like decadent, rot slathered in the succulent criteria of what they want to hear until they can’t hear the sound of empathy anymore.
They cannot hear, they cannot see, they cannot feel for their other man. They cannot feel for their poor and they cannot “love their neighbor as [themselves] and that no other commandment is greater than this.” Or did I quote the wrong son of the god you wish to see inseparable from your state, from your government?
The only cure for this silence is a vibration so deep that it shakes up the very foundation that the land of the free and the home of the brave was built on. Then, and only then, when the collective voices shout of freedom for your neighbors, demanding real freedom, demanding equity, and equality. Only when each and every one of you call out for empathy, asking our country and politicians and corporations what they can do for us and not what we can do for them. Only when don’t give up, only when this humane harmony breaks through, then and only then will we share the comforting music of mankind being together again. Until then, sit in your uncomfortable silence if you wish to even be present with us at all.
