1000 words and such

On August 15, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

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In case anyone was wondering where I stood

On August 14, 2017August 14, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

Punch Nazis.

I don’t care.

Punch them every time they show their faces in public. Chase them away from cameras and microphones. Do whatever the fuck you want to them. If they want these things to not happen, they can stop being Nazis. There’s plenty of room to be an asshole without being a Nazi. Dox them, call their bosses, drive them entirely from public life.

We fought a fucking war over this. Hell, we fought two. We won both. There is no place in civilized society for these fuckers and if I have my way there never will be again.

Tear down monuments to the Confederacy. Vandalism? Fuck vandalism. Every monument to the Confederacy or any Confederate figure on public land in this country should be torn down, melted, refashioned into sewer pipes and sent to Flint.

Never fucking again.

#REVIEW: The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas

On April 27, 2017April 27, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

32075671 One of our local radio stations does a bit called Group Therapy in the morning, which is usually airing just as I’m driving the boy to school. The general pattern is this: they pose a problem, submitted by a listener, that should generally be easily dealt with by anyone with an average middle schooler’s level of sophistication and emotional intelligence. They do not provide enough information about the problem to allow listeners to give useful advice, and people who like hearing their voices or names on the radio submit useless advice on Facebook or on the air so that the person involved can do whatever they were going to do anyway.

I’m going to start listening to Pandora more in the morning, is what I’m saying.

This morning’s problem was as follows: a parent’s 11-year-old has stolen their credit card, for the second time. It wasn’t made perfectly clear, but it seems that as of the time of the advice-asking, the boy still had the card. He had used it to buy $50 worth of drinks and snacks from a local convenience store and not to, say, order hundreds of dollars worth of electronics from somewhere, which is what you’d think most kids would do with a credit card they’d stolen. Anyway, this parent had reported the card stolen, and apparently under the (incorrect) idea that the police would show up if the kid attempted to use the card again– which, yeah, right— was wondering if he/she should just talk to his/her kid or let the police “scare him straight.”

And all I could think of, listening to this, was that the person asking for advice and every single one of the dumb motherfuckers providing (generally approving) advice for the latter piece of advice had to be white. Because every black parent in America knows that you do not let the police anywhere near your child unless someone is guaranteed to die if you don’t. There are no optional encounters with the police. Fuck, I’m white and I live in a nice neighborhood and I’m never calling the police again unless somebody is under serious immediate physical threat. And you’re gonna call the police on your baby because of a $50 credit card bill? Your privilege is not only showing, it’s leaking out of the dashboard of my car, and I ought to be able to charge somebody to clean that shit up.

(Leave aside the ridiculous notions that 1) the police care about a $50 fraudulent credit card charge because they have nothing else to do and 2) they have time to help you with relatively routine parenting decisions.)

Which brings me to Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, or THUG for short. The title of the book is a Tupac reference; Pac was fond of the backronym, explaining, for example, that “nigga” stood for “Never Ignorant, Getting Goals Accomplished.” “Thug Life,” to Tupac, meant “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody,” and the meaning of that phrase is discussed throughout the book.

The story is told through the eyes of Starr Carter, a sixteen-year-old black girl. Starr is the sole witness when a policeman murders one of her oldest friends during a traffic stop. Her friend, Khalil, was unarmed and unresisting when he was shot. The rest of the book spins out from that one moment; the different sections are even dated by it: “Three Weeks After It Happens,” and such.

You can probably predict the overall story beats from the premise, right? America knows this story pretty Goddamn well by now, and the tension here is less from what happens (anybody want to put money down on whether the cop is exonerated by the grand jury or not?) than how the people in the book react to it. Starr herself is a fascinating character; she lives in a rough neighborhood but her parents scrape and save to send her to a private school 45 minutes away, so many of her best friends aren’t black and she thinks of herself as being two different people, one at school and one at home. Her uncle is a police officer, her father a former gang member. Khalil himself has a complicated backstory, and the book dives into the inevitable attempt by the media and the police to slander him and make him responsible for his own murder. For a large portion of the story Starr’s school friends and her (white) boyfriend aren’t aware that she’s the anonymous witness the news keeps referring to, and the way she reacts to their treatment of Khalil’s death is complex and fascinating. Her navigation through the web of relationships and identities she’s struggling with throughout the book is a pleasure to read.

I recommend books here all the time; I rarely bother to review anything I didn’t love unless I think I can hate it in an entertaining way, but it’s not terribly often that I use the word important to describe a book that I’ve read. You need to read THUG, and you need to get THUG into the hands of as many other people as you can, particularly young people. Angie Thomas’ writing is crisp and clear, Starr herself is a wonderful character, and I can’t wait to get my hands on more work by this author. Go read this book. Do it right now.

On schadenfreude and self-improvement

On March 19, 2017March 19, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

So there’s this house I drive past basically every time I have any reason to drive north, and since I live on the south side of town “heading north” happens quite a bit. It’s a shitty house. There’s mold on the siding, visible plant life growing in the gutters, the roof is rotting, and the garage is not anywhere close to plumb. I suspect I could push the thing over if I wanted to, and there have been nights on the way home where I was tempted to get out of my car and do so.

There have also been a couple of prominent Confederate battle flags flying prominently around the house for the last several years. They keep moving them; sometimes they’re on the garage, sometimes by the side door, sometimes in the windows, sometimes just flying off the back of the shitty rusted-out pickup truck that you were already picturing in their side yard even without me telling you it was there.

I have no idea who lives there, but I kind of hate them. I don’t need to see your racist bullshit every time I leave my fucking house, and at this point anyone still willing to fly one of those symbols of treason over their house is pretty clearly signaling they’re not someone I’m going to enjoy associating with at all. These people are almost certainly assholes of some stripe or another and I don’t feel bad about not liking them on reflex.

The last couple of weeks I’ve noticed the flags were gone, and sometime in the last day or two a bunch of bank auction signs have sprouted up around the house. So it looks like the bank foreclosed on whoever lived there and is trying to sell this half-decayed house to recoup some of its costs.

And my first thought upon seeing all this was Good. Fuck ’em.

I’d like to be the kind of person who doesn’t celebrate in even a minor way when people lose their homes. For all I know there are kids living there who don’t deserve to be tarred with their parents’ asshole brushes.

I bet they’ve found a way to blame black people for them losing their house, though. Which brings me back to “Fuck ’em.”

Sigh.

On sexism, privilege and shitty white men

On March 1, 2017March 1, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics1 Comment

raf,750x1000,075,t,athletic_heather.2u1.jpg Let’s recall that Barack Obama rarely gave a speech without the media roundly criticizing his performance. Let’s further recall that Hillary Clinton’s every vocal utterance of any length at all was frequently criticized as well, in terms one never ever hears when referring to speeches by white men. Hillary’s voice and cadence were/are criticized constantly, and conservatives never missed a chance to complain that either Obama or Clinton always seemed to be talking down to them.

(They were talking down to you. They are better than you, both of them, in nearly every imaginable way.)

So last night Cheetolini gave a speech to Congress. I didn’t watch it, but from what I’ve heard he managed to both wear pants and pretend to be an adult who could actually read throughout the entire speech, which I’m sure he wrote not a single word of. He has, of course, been receiving praise all day for finally “looking Presidential”– by which everyone means he spent the entire speech lying through his fucking teeth but managed to do it without shrieking, going off-script, or shitting himself, which are things we expect of ten-year-olds before they give a presentation in the fifth grade.

But he’s a white guy, so we’re alllllll gonna pretend that this was an important moment and praise him for it. I haven’t heard anyone mention his voice once. Dubya got the same treatment.

I don’t want to hear shit about participation trophies from white people ever again as long as I live. This fucker got handed the biggest participation trophy in human fucking history just now, and the white assholes who scream the loudest about them all voted for him.

On gestures, meaningless and otherwise

On November 17, 2016November 17, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

I got my first tattoo at a place called the Jade Dragon in Chicago. It’s a pretty famous tattoo parlor; there’s pictures all over the walls of various celebrities who have gotten work done there and there are billboards for the place all over town.

At the time, much like now, I was bald and had a goatee. In between my tattoo and the tattoo the friend I was with got, we ducked into a bar next door so that she could have a quick drink. It was her first tattoo too, and hers was a lot bigger than mine was, and she wanted a touch of liquid courage.

A guy at the bar, also bald and bearded, wearing a denim vest over a black T-shirt, made eye contact with me, did some sort of fist-pump gesture, and yelled “Skinhead! RAAH!” at us. We got the hell out of there– I told my friend to steal the fucking glass her drink was in if she needed to– and went back next door to get her tattoo done.

You get a T-shirt if you spend more than a certain amount on your tattoo, and the place is overpriced as hell so just about everyone qualifies for a free shirt. It’s got the logo of the place on it and a bunch of symbols all over the place. I figured they were just random flash tattoos. The shirt looked cool. I wore it as often as I wore any of my other shirts, I suppose.

Fast forward about a year. I’m chatting with this girl online and we get to talking about tattoos. I mention that I’ve got one and tell her it’s from the Jade when she asks where I got it.

“Ugh,” she says. “Don’t go there. The place is run by neo-Nazis.”

I flash back to that guy in the bar next door. And I do some research, and I discover that I’ve been wearing a shirt covered in white power symbols for a year. Luckily for me, a shirt covered in obscure white power symbols, as I’ve been wearing them on the South Side of Chicago and that could have ended up going very, very poorly for me.

The shirt is thrown away on the spot.

I am on an L train heading somewhere; hell if I remember where any longer. There’s a mom with several kids in the back of the train. The kids are being loud– not ridiculously so, but they’re clearly excited to be on the train and I get the feeling that they’re not from Chicago and this might be their first time. The train is maybe a third full; a few dozen people, perhaps. Some jackass starts yelling at the lady about how loud her kids are being and how she needs to keep them under control and it gets very creepy and threatening very quickly. The rest of the train car goes dead silent.

I unleash my teacher voice on the poor stupid bastard and redirect his attention from them to me. I am still bald and bearded and I’m wearing a black trenchcoat. I basically order him to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down and not say another word until either the family or him is off the train and then stare at him until he complies.

No one else on the train says a word. One person– a white guy, maybe in his mid-fifties– nods approvingly at me. I get off the train a stop early at the same place the family does in case he decides to try and follow them. The mom thanks me. The guy gives us the finger through the train window. I blow him a kiss.

My wife and son and I go to hang out with some of our friends a few days after America decides to elect a fascist. One of our friends is wearing a safety pin on her shirt. I am not wearing one on mine. I think about that family on that L train, and wonder about that safety pin. Were they supposed to look around for someone wearing a safety pin, to appeal to that person for help? If it’s winter, does the safety pin move to the outer clothing, or does it stay on the shirt, where you can’t see it under the coat? And if the person wearing the safety pin stands up and makes herself visible, or speaks up and makes his voice heard, is the safety pin really making any difference? Who is it there for? Is it a reminder to ourselves? A signal to other people that we are virtuous? Both? Neither? If it’s not combined with action, does it really mean anything at all?

My friend has five children. Those kids need to know to stand up, and she’s teaching them how. And she walks the walk and talks the talk. She will stand up. The pin represents something real, on her. I wonder how many others that’s true for. How many people are just trying to make themselves feel better? And do I have any right to criticize anyone else for making a small gesture that makes the world seem a little less bleak than it has recently?

I probably do not.

There is an American flag on the wall in my office. America decides to elect a fascist and I find that I can’t stand to look at it any longer. I order a rainbow flag from Amazon and hang it over the American flag, without taking it down.

I still believe in the things that America is supposed to represent, but I’m not sure the Stars and Stripes represents those things any longer. The rainbow flag is better. It expresses my ideals more concisely.

It’s on the wall in my office. No one but me and my family is ever really going to see it. I leave it there anyway, because I need the reminder. So, for that matter, does my son, once he’s old enough to understand what it means.

I find myself looking forward to the day when I can take it down.

REBLOG: And none could say they were surprised: on #Ferguson

On August 10, 2016August 10, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

In honor of the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s murder (which, I admit, was yesterday) I’m reposting this.

Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I keep needing to remind myself of something: I have liked every cop I’ve ever known. The number’s not large, mind you; four, perhaps five people, one of whom’s faces I can remember clearly but whose name has escaped me. At least one is a Facebook friend who may read this. Alternate universe me actually is a police officer; if you Google search my real name most of the results you’ll get are for the other guy since I’m as diligent as I can be about keeping my name off the Web.

But as much as I want to generalize, I keep having to remind myself: I know cops. I am friends, or at least cordial acquaintances, with two of them. They aren’t all bad people, as much as it frequently seems like they are. They’re just embedded in a system that encourages them to be bad people, and if…

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So, yeah, what had happened was…

On July 10, 2016July 10, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I know for damn sure that I’m far from alone if I look at the last week and just have no goddamn idea where to even start. I could probably generate half a dozen posts from national and local/semi-local news events alone, and that’s before we get to the part where I turned 40 this week and my mom had surgery on my birthday and I don’t even remember if I mentioned it around here (she’s fine) and after eight months of sick leave and unemployment I was at work for 54 hours last week and it was both week 3 at a new job (certainly within the learning curve for anyone, right?) and my first week on the sales floor.

(Which went well, even if all the stories I have from the week are about things that went wrong, including a nearly seven thousand dollar sale today that went south due to financing issues and wasted, literally, four hours of my time out of the last two days. My supervisors appear to be very happy with me so far and I’m enjoying the job quite a lot.)

Oh, and I’ve started unfriending “all lives matter” people on Facebook, particularly if I know you only because we worked together at a majority-black school and after repeatedly pointing out to you that the words “more” or “only” or “just” do not appear in the phrase “black lives matter,” you still point-blank refuse to affirmatively answer the question “Do you believe that the lives of your black students have value?” At that point I have given you every possible goddamn chance to do the right thing and you’ve repeatedly chosen not to so you’re just a fucking racist and I don’t care if it makes you feel bad. If being called a racist makes you feel bad, I can come up with a real good way to keep that from happening.

Because that happened this week too, and white folk, I am, by and large, done with you, and I’m doubly done with explaining simple shit that you have had ample time to comprehend at this point. White people’s need to be at the center of every single conversation, and their inability to deal with the idea that there might be anything in the universe that is not about them, has pushed me to my breaking point. I’m done.

Also, this: