An American Selfie
Smile America. The world is watching.
What did they expect the response would be? This is America. We celebrate our birthday by replicating war, for crissakes, proud of the fact that throughout the 20th century, we didn’t start fights, but we did finish them. We only used force, or so the fable goes, when left no other choice. It’s a culture, a mindset. A way of thinking. It’s in our bones, a mentality that’s seeped into our DNA and been nurtured in every history class we’ve ever taken. It’s who we are, yet we act surprised when we see our own reflection on days like today because what we see staring back at us is far uglier and more grotesque than our bumper stickers told us it’d be.
People cling to the Second Amendment, citing the need to protect ourselves from our own government. A government that becomes abusive and restrictive of liberty when it should instead be fostering it, they argue, must be held accountable, costs be damned. A government that takes lives when it should be protecting them, they say, must be kept in check by force if necessary. Just as our forefathers planned it.
The problem is, we’ve all drawn lines in the sand at different places. Lines that, we say once crossed will trigger something inside of us to react accordingly. We each have a different boiling point, which is determined by our own unique life experience, dictating where, exactly, that line in the sand is drawn, what crossing that line even looks like, and what the appropriate response should be if someone steps across.
I hate this. I despise violence. I deplore killing in all forms. But then again, I’m not seeing videos of the government shooting unarmed 36- year-old white male fathers of two. I’m no psychologist but I imagine being bombarded with those images starts to fuck with your head after a while. It probably makes one start to question things. Reality, for instance. Or that huge gap that exists between the America they were taught about and promised growing up, and the America they currently see with their own two eyes. Day in, day out. Rinse, repeat. Nothing to see here, move along, and remember: no questions. I’d imagine a nation’s refusal to admit that this gap even exists would make someone feel like they’re going crazy. Seeing something while being told it’s not true breeds cynicism. Being convinced your reality is an anomaly, an outlier, a glitch in the seems-to-be-working-splendidly-for-everyone-else Star Spangled Matrix, I’m gonna guess, breeds contempt. Sorry kid, bad break. For democracy to function and capitalism to flourish, the rest of us need to start up here. You’ll understand some day.
I am not seeing men to whom I can relate, who look like me, who walk, talk, and act like me, who live where I live, my friends or my brothers or my son or my daughter… I don’t see them being gunned down live on Facebook for no reason. That video never seems to make its way to my news feed, sponsored by a media that feigns sympathy while promising to finally deliver on the overdue attention the story truly deserves until some Kardashian posts a half naked pic on Instagram and alters the universe, rendering previous stories irrelevant and lost lives forgotten. I don’t live with that daily. I don’t exist in a state of constant anxiety, afraid of what might happen if my tail light goes out. I just don’t, man. That’s the god’s honest truth. That’s just not my reality. So when someone living in that reality, a reality far different than my own, who’s drawn his own line in the sand, and reacts the way he sees fit, based off how he’s been conditioned to respond in America… As an American… The way he was taught in school… These colors don’t run, don’t tread on me, bombs bursting in air, blah, blah, blah,ya feel me?
This is what that looks like. This is that utopia. Or dystopia. Toe-may-toe, Toe-maw-toe.
This is what utilization of the Second Amendment for the purpose of protecting ourselves from our own government looks like.
It’s ugly and it’s brutal and it’s disturbing and it’s tragic. It’s disgusting. It’s confusing, much more complex than the AM radio hosts will acknowledge in the morning. But this is it. This is the personification of that ethos, of that hysteria. Take a good, long look at the mirror, America, splashed in HD and 4k with subtitles across televisions and smart phones and tablets around the world. Get mad, America. Seriously man, fuck that mirror. Scream at it. Cry, curse, cringe, whatever makes us feel a little less bad. But it won’t change anything. It won’t change anything because the mirror isn’t the problem. It never was, just like it wasn’t the dress that made us look fat, or the haircut that made us look bald, or whatever else bullshit, straw-man scapegoat we manufactured to deflect away from the real problem, which was staring right back at us the entire time.
But let’s be honest. Deep down, we knew this.
Were this a ranch in Nevada or a compound in Idaho, and agents with the Federal Bureau of Land management or whatever the fuck they’re called, were being picked off, accused of being agents of tyrannical, federal overreach of something super important like where cows can walk, then those condemning now would then be rationalizing. Those rationalizing now would then be condemning. We’ve heard that song.
If we ever want to get to the root of how or why this happened — which will never happen because the race for politicization by both sides began within seconds of the first shot and, well shit, the race to the bottom ain’t gonna run itself — then we have to ask ourselves how we let it get this bad. Why we pretend to be born into social equality when everything we see, hear, and feel says the complete and total opposite. If commercial breaks were just a tad bit longer, perhaps we’d wonder how the same act, being committed by two different groups, by two different generations, and let’s call it like it is — by two different races and socioeconomic classes… How these are viewed so differently, so often, by these two sides?
Maybe we’ll even ask why we have sides in the first place.
I feel sick. May God be with the families of officers who had nothing to do with the killings earlier this week. May they eventually find peace and solace in the pride of knowing that those officers died protecting us. I ache for their families.
May the young men killed for reaching for their wallets, by instruction, be remembered and their lives celebrated and given the due respect they each deserve as human beings. May their memories live with more dignity than we allowed them to live in while they were here.
And may the officers currently on administrative leave, or who’ve murdered innocent civilians in the past, who are currently out on bail or on house arrest or behind bars or who’ve served their time, caught only because they had the misfortune of being an officer during the cell-phone-with-camera era with an inability to tell the difference between a taser and a semi automatic pistol… Those officers who’ve injected hate where there should have been protection, live-on-Periscope while the planet watched them needlessly pull the trigger and take a life they at one point swore to protect — may they see their role in all of this. May they comprehend how much more dangerous and more difficult they’ve made the lives of the 99% of cops who are good, decent, hard working people with no desire but to protect and serve, forced to hear idiots like us tell them that as taxpayers, we pay their salaries, goddam it, so they need to hit the breaks on that speeding ticket they’re writing. These are the ones left to deal with this shit storm. May those guilty of abusing their trusted positions of state authority — may they realize that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, expanding culpability for bloodshed into whatever convenient reality they’ve constructed for themselves, where the murder they committed is justified and their actions rationalized and where their guilt is denied and where it is actually they who are the real victims — may all of this leave the appropriate tastes on the backs of their tongues and haunt them until the day they die, leaving our kids to pick up the pieces and try to make sense of this nonsense many years from now.
My head hurts. My heart hurts. Something inside me just feels lost and broken.
Today we pose for our very own selfie, America. Take a good look. This is us. Who we are, what we are. Duck lips, stumbling home with smeared make up, a t-shirt from some dude whose name we can’t remember because we never knew it in the first place, posed carefully against the backdrop of our own complicated history, which we’ll undoubtedly whitewash with an overpriced filter that puts the whole fucking thing so out of focus and so out of context that future generations will wear it on T-shirts. Nobody will remember the names of the dead, but it’ll sure piss off their parents.
I don’t want to think anymore, man. It’s too hard. Too depressing.
I think I’m starting to finally get it.
Fuck it, man. Where’s that naked Kardashian.
