It requires education to keep people out of jail. But in an age of information, education is well advised to be a selective enterprise. Knowledge without struggle is knowledge ignorant of responsibility.
Every day is the same time that isn't the same time at the same time everyday. I get on the bus again.
It is a nice crisp morning a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, well before the day has had a chance to bubble itself into another stultifying inferno.
The air around Queens Plaza is a particularly heady mix of automobile exhaust, rotting garbage, and human excrement.
I step over an unmistakably man-sized(or perhaps woman, let's not blame men for everything) turd, and think to myself, "that's a real steamer."
Profundity is a rare human forte first thing in the morning. In my defense I submit that perhaps my mind is being bent by what I am breathing.
Like the Romans and their lead enameled bowls, perhaps we are all going insidiously mad from self-induced environmental causes which are so endemic as to be invisible.
As soon as I am aboard, I bury my nose in the comics. A woman trips over my battered cowboy boots and curses me out. No problem.
I ignore her. The bus driver leaves the bus, either to take a dump (no doubt inspired by the aromatic precedent setting sidewalk case) or to get a cup of coffee (Hey you zombies, time to start twitching!). People enter without paying. I act like I ignore that.
A barrel shaped Puerto-Rican man and his girlfriend take the seat next to mine, and that little voice, which we all have, tells me "trouble."
As soon as they are seated he begins talking in an oratorial voice loud enough to deliver the Sermon on the Mount.
"See this shirt?" He has a stained Malcom X t-shirt on beneath his dingy baseball jacket, and it barely covers his bulging pot belly. He has a baseball hat that reads "Don’t need to know nothing that I already don’t know."
"He knew the score, and they killed him. They killed Martin Luther King too." I know the score too. II know exactly where this is going, so I bury my nose even deeper inside the paper. In the morning I belong to the ostrich school of interaction.
"It's the white man, do you hear me? The white man will do anything to keep the rest of us down.
Who do you think makes the real money? Who do you think has the real power? It's the white man.
"Lookit Mike Tyson, Lookit Ali. They got a little too big, and the white man pulled them down. If they killed all the white men in this country there would be no problems, you hear me? No problems at all. You hear me? No problems at all!"
I hear him. He's shouting about two feet from my right ear.
I wish I had ear plugs.
"This whole system is built on the racism of the white man. I know because I just got out of Rikers. Almost starved to death there. Never get enough food. The worst place in the world, but I SURVIVED. You hear me? I SURVIVED.
"It's the white man who is the inferior species. They stole everything from Africa. The white man and the stinking jew enslaved a whole continent of beautiful compassionate people with no purpose other than to exterminate another whole continent of people, the American Indian.
"What's a Puerto-Rican to the white man? Nothing but nigger lite. You know what's the only reason why I can't get a job?
It's not because I ain't got enough education, it's because I ain't white like this one here." Now we're getting personal. I feel a rage begin to boil.
"He's part of the whole conspiracy. I'll bet he's got a nice house in the country that he's made offa the suffering of the minority."
I think about the modest little Long Island City apartment that I struggle to maintain, and then fantasize about how he would look with a Cadillac bumber rammed up his ass.
"How many white boys you see at Rikers, huh? Is it because there ain't no white criminals? Steal a thousand dollars, go to jail, steal a million they put you inna country club. Murder one man, they give you life. Wipe out a whole race, and they make you president."
I want to point out that it is just this kind of paranoid conspiracy psychosis that is creating hate groups by the hundreds all over America, and that there is a terrible danger there. '
We're Balkanizing at a rate that rivals Eastern Europe. Pin-head Skin-Heads, Web-Foot Born-Again Nazis, Black Seperationists, Jewish Defense Nihilists, Irish Republican Dingbats, Lesbian Nationalist, where will it all end? This is America, not aMErica.
We need to learn to get along and revel in our differences, even as we come to realize that these differences are all diverting illusions. Otherwise, we will be at one another's throats. There are already more guns than people in our country. How I wish we would remember that there is only race to the eye of a child, the human one.
"Check it out. George Washington...he owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson...HE owned slaves. They were all into enslaving right from the start.
Check it out. I'll bet you somewhere they be a bunch of jew-whites trying to figure out how to bring slavery back. And you know what? They gonna figure out that they already got it.
Prison. I know, 'cause I been there. Come the revolution I know what side I'm on. It all goes back to the white gene. They'll never teach you that in History class. Hey, even Crack is white."
So are clouds, and I am watching them as the bus goes over the bridge. I wish I were on the plane that is flying up through them, and am forcibly reminded that I am not when the bus hit’s a bump that sends a drill press of pain up my spine. The back heals slowly, if at all. Cooperation is the backbone of any great nation.
At any rate I can be confident that this grand exercise in oratory and insight will soon be over. How will he make any sense running this tom-swillery past a group of guards the majority of whom are black? He reads my mind.
"And don't think for a minute that the guards who look black are black. They're really white on the inside. They're part of the system too."
God I envy you your optimism. It is impossible for me to believe anything or anyone is in control of this monster at all. System? What system? The very word implies a sequence and order which I have yet to witness. It is more like some enormous Sociological Hydra.
Once inside you are either consumer or consumed. The bus comes to a stop. With the kind of skill that can only be cultivated by months of relentless daily practice, I successfully cut in front of everyone to be the first one off again. Time for another day in paradise.
I thank God for the small conveniences of life. The officer at the first control point knows and seems to like me. I shoot through. He is an ex-paratrooper of Mexican descent with a French name, a beautiful true American mutt. He has the bearing of someone who has worked hard his whole life and is damn proud of it. More power to you, sir.
The bus to take me to the facility is right in front of my nose. This is almost too easy. Do I sense a conspiracy here? The headlines of all four papers banner that we have a new mayor. The tennis player is out and the baseball fan is in. I'm sure we have some big changes in store.
Of course the tennis player is "black," and the baseball fan is "White," which may give the Puerto-Rican man even more ammunition for future harangues. However, the baseball fan also provides the officers with job security, since he proposes to improve New Yorkers' quality of life by making even more arrests and building even more prison spaces.
I have to concede to myself that I am in on it too. Even I cannot be so arrogant as to assume that my work is making any substantive change to things as they are. I feel like somebody sand-bagging a force as vast and overwhelming as the flooding Mississippi. And when the levee breaks....
So where do we go from here? Do we generate a whole economy based on INCARCERATION?
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS, NAZI LITE?