The Dishes

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

We are all too dependent on vision.

The house is a wreck but we’re still doing dishes. A warm dishrag smile wipes fresh tears off all our faces. When we trust our eyes too much, they show, they reveals us. Superficial. I know what you thought when you read that word. I know its most common usage. As insult. Negative. Self defense. That’s not even half of its definition though. Mostly because, there’s barely half a definition there to start with. Surface. Visible. In its truest meaning, there’s not one of us who isn’t superficial. It isn’t a choice. It’s biology. Evolution. Our anatomy. What’s crazy is, our eyes aren’t even that spectacular. But that never stopped us trusting them completely. 

Which makes us an easy trick, cheap, corporations are like abstract painters studying what certain colors opiate or infuriate or inspire us to work. What shapes set us at ease, what wall-patterns put us on the edge of our seats, grind our teeth. Look at our faces. We look like hoot owls and chimpanzees mated. We’ve made the entire surface of our skin one huge sex organ, with nothing more than time and boredom to work with. When they talk about enlightenment, about piercing some form of illusory perception and seeing true, pessimistic, hard pill to swallow, reality, this is what they mean. 

Just do the dishes. Not to get a good feeling or delight or ease or feel all put together for once. Anyone can put a suit on. You’re not the devil because you’re dirty and live out on the street. Wouldn’t it be so wonderful if all the important flaws we carry around could be seen. Well, that superficial dream has led us by the hand through the absolute worst chapters of the ongoing novel that is humankind. 

If skin color was a poker-tell, if skin color was a political persuasion, if skin color was a criminal confession, hot damn, wouldn’t that be easy. Wouldn’t that just please these predator eyes we feverishly and catastrophically feed. If the deepest, truest nature of a person could, just for once, be as superficial as an earring in one ear, or tattoo above the rear, or otherwise respectable young man too lazy to cut off his long hair. What if it was as simple as a pigment in someone’s skin? What if the dishes weren’t white? Would they be harder to clean, would you get the same peace of mind from warmly and tenderly washing them. The cleanest dishes in existence, it’s just, you can’t easily see that from a distance. Inside we find a simple, universal, colorful frustration, we find the tiny innocuous seed that grows into such destructive things, the worst of which has always been the thin permeating invasive vine of systemic racism. 

Maybe there’s hope in this, I don’t know, I don’t think there is, but it feels good to them, hate, they do it like a drug-user during the years they refuse to admit it’s a problem, back when they still call it medicine, being hateful, racist, alleviates some stressful condition we are in. Hate is not fire the way they would have it seem.
Believe me when I say, hate is a balm to the hateful. 

It sets their guilt at ease. 

I’m not saying it’s better, or that you should, I’m stating for fact that if you fully think it through, you’ll eventually feel what I feel when I think about myself, and people who were in truly hateful places in their lives while I knew them. Sympathy. I just see pain. Planted in the most fertile soil that exists. The misplaced human conscience. I kind of see them perpetually trying to scrub black dishes white, eternally, in some place that is so almost heaven. Eyeballs are for earth. This is the place of their birth. Their original intention. Heaven might not appear on the surface so pleasing to them. So try, strive, to glimpse something while you’re here without using your eyes. Practice.

That elusive deep down buried in the chest heart smile happiness.
No one got that from doing the dishes.

I have nothing new to say.
Eyes were never the only way.

There’s always been more than one definition for vision.

#LookItUp

Deadwood Sermon

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I cringe-watch this HBO show, Deadwood, no kidding I’ve probably fast forwarded through a third of the entire series.

But there is a really great moment when a character who is a drunken, racist horror-show finishes up a rant expressing his illogical judgment and condescension toward an entire group of people. And a man at the bar questions him for his own genetic history, making a suggestion his ‘nose looks a little broad’.

You’re not going to teach someone twenty years or older to start branching out beyond hate and judgment to search for an alternative source of self esteem. For a lot of these people, being White is the only thing they ever won outright. They hang their skin color on the wall like a diploma or a college degree, beside the flags and relics of an even longer heritage of losing.

You can hate someone, and still consider that any path to their subjugation or denial of their rights will never be exclusive. Any denial of any citizen’s rights is untenable, because down the line you will not be the right kind of White. If you accept a racial class system, then the burden is on each and every one of us to trace our own and impossibly produce documentation of our ‘purity’ and evidence of its lack of any corruption. Which you can’t. It will come down to DNA, and guess what, our ancestors were just as dumb, anxious and horny as us.

Hate. Hate everything. Hate your neighbor. Hate snakes in the grass. Hate love, hate hate especially. Not allowing your government and society to condone, propagate and operate under the principles of racism has nothing to do with who or what you hate.

Any path to taking away a citizen’s right to life is a path to taking it away from all of us.

On a long enough timeline, you won’t be the right kind of White, because White never meant race, it has always meant money.

And honey, if you’re still flying the Stars and Bars, you may as well be red and blue, because White isn’t you.

Better Business

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Freedom is the simple recognition that your neighbor will inevitably have to be offered all the same rights as you.

You only sacrifice a freedom, if say, it’s for something that negates the freedom of another individual.

The simple answer is, if you would hate to have something done to you, you are called to sacrifice doing it to others.

Straight, white, “normal” people want the right to gender identify, they just don’t get challenged on it as much. But we do, and we take it for granted. You don’t have to respect your neighbor’s identification. No one can make you. But your neighbor, whomever he or she or however they identify is, probably works, and probably has money, and probably has network connections.

You respect how they identify, you call them how they prefer to be called, because selfishly, greedily, connivingly, they are valuable. And people who get along with more people are going to be better at business. End of story.
They’re going to get more out of life.

Say you hate someone over their skin color when it’s really your own lack of self esteem. But eventually, they’re going to receive every right you have been offered. Including the justified right to hate you right back.

Prejudice, racism, sexism, I’m not sure these things are inherently so bad as they are stupid. They’ve been cursing and tackling civilizations for millennia, while we crucify and martyr anyone who dares recognize the value our economies ignore.

And that is the value of love.
One sided consideration that never asks to be reciprocated.

It may not make you wealthy, but it will make you impervious to poverty.

And I wish I could hand you loftier reasoning, but if nothing else, trust that black kid, that person you don’t know how to call, people who don’t speak enough of your language to know how to call you, have money in their pockets. Value to their person. Probably spend it here and there, when and where they feel invited, welcome, and free.

Conservatism isn’t dying.
Natural causes are revealing it was never in our nature.
We’ve never been a conservative creature.

If we were, we’d have gone down with the trees, and never learned to stand upright. If we were conservative, there wouldn’t be this much diversity in our species.

In fact, one could argue, that if homo sapiens had been a more conservative animal in the past, we’d all still be black.

No matter how you look at your neighbors, exercise no right you would not also extend to them.
Because in the end,
it will come back for you.

Not because it is right.
It really is just better business.

Just Like the Rest of Us

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

This just in. You may not actually be a white supremacist if you have no problem using United States currency. You’re probably not a true racist if you participate in any way in this economy. The people who entered this nation as a commodity actually have more claim on this country. It was built on their backs. They are its original profits. Value. Commercially speaking, if you enjoy anything about this country, you enjoy black people. You like Asians. You delight in the gifts of indigenous peoples, whether or not they gave them freely.

Their contribution is inseparable, and indistinguishable from what America is.

This just in. A person might have more luck being a white supremacist in Europe. But even then, it won’t be easy. Still, not all of those countries stacked their foundations on the backs of the people who are the colors racists claim to hate. Claim to be better than. Beyond. But the dollar in your wallet says something totally different. It’s just how capitalism works. These races you perceive actually have a good bit of money. And it is quite impossible to delineate, or keep separate, their effect on markets, culturally and commercially. So if you hate them, you are most definitely in the wrong nation. Because without these people, the United States would mean nothing. Financially speaking.

This just in. You’re not a true racist if you are in any way profiting off this system. Maybe there are a few in-the-moment instances where you use a word, or judge a person on this basis, or a whole group of people, because of skin color, or they’re speaking languages you don’t understand, or have a sense of humor you don’t get, or different fashion or food or whatnot. That’s called being afraid of different. Racism requires research into continental movements and biological and environmental and genetic factors, migrations and immigration and forced exoduses into new worlds, and a subtle, for the most part, unspoken promotion of the theory of evolution.

This just in. Racism requires reading. And honestly, I doubt the homework has gotten done. I know somewhere, someone left you hurt, and any descriptor you can cling to in order to separate them from you, you will use. You take it as offense that you have to be the same species as the organism who treated you as an object. So, you objectify them. I get it. But that’s like a drowning person striking out at their lifesaver. A reaction to fear. And pain. Thrashing out at darkness that isn’t there. You’re just blinded by your own night light. Being racist requires a lot more than being proud of being white skinned. Or beige tinged. Or deeply black. Or light peach. This just in. That’s not racism. If skin color were race, then I’d be a new race at the end of every summer. People come in different colors. I’m not surprised that gets a rise out of a lot of us. It makes sense we would fear different, and favor familiar. But that isn’t racism. Racism would refuse to use the dollar. Refuse to walk on and benefit from an infrastructure that has time after time apologized and defended the people it once acquired and treated as commodities.

If I search my heart, it says there are only maybe ten true racists in this country. Who have now realized they can camouflage themselves conservative, and recruit armies of highly confused colorists. People who naturally fear different. And change. People who do not actually care at all about race. They’re just lifelong pessimists. They meet a few people, experience some uncomfortable situations, and that becomes the standard, and every good person, and positive experience, just an exception. The most hateful, what I would come closest to calling truly racist, whom I have met, always had exceptions. Certain humans who didn’t adhere to a stereotype they otherwise treated as a rule.

This just in. Racism can’t have exceptions.

If you do not hate all people included, you do not hate a race. In my heart, I don’t believe there are more than ten humans in America who have the moral bankruptcy and self-contentedness to sustain such a powerful exclusionary philosophy. It’s not good for capitalism. Not good for small towns. Not good for government.

And, you know, America sort of stands alone among nations in its inability to separate success and vitality from the impact of large groups of non-white and immigrant people.

This just in. You wouldn’t even deign to make your white supremacy stand in America if you were truly racist. This isn’t the hill you would die on. You wouldn’t be able to eat at McDonald’s. Let alone stand keeping cash in your wallet. Knowing where it has been. The hands that make it what it is.

I know people. I know myself. Don’t let the propaganda of a few highly unsustainable individuals convince you that a natural fear of what looks different, denotes any kind of evidence for superiority or inferiority among the racial and geographical dynamics of humanity. Of our species. This is just what happens when you’re a creature who doesn’t go extinct with its environment. When you cross mountains to find new forests, and new worlds. We get a little reshaped by each place along the way, but we wouldn’t be able to breed if we weren’t the same. We’d have different eyes. Different hand shape. Different lives. Just stop thinking in exceptions and standards, and lend other people the same autonomy you demand for yourself. Hate them. Hate everyone if you want to. But if you’re not rejecting capitalism as an economic system, you’re probably not racist. And if you think America is a good place to formally distinguish the white race against all others, you really haven’t done your homework.
There’s a lot more reading required to being a true racist.

This just in.
You might just be afraid of different.
Which means, you are just like the rest of us.

And if facts don’t persuade you, no mater what,
you are going to have a hard time being a true capitalist.

White Heaven #considerallthings

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

If I reach the end of my life, and find my greatest sin was being white, what then?
Will I explain to God how it was part of being American?
It was an entrenched system.
It had more to do with inheritance than with decisions.
What then?

I care so little for the color of skin. But the weight of true sin,
that is a burden like no other. An anchor on a ship built to circle the world.
And if you never learn to recognize it, you never leave the harbor.
Too heavy to push off from this morbid coil, this meal we let spoil
into redemption soil, inherited toil, this life effort into death comfort, into oceans.
History so heavy it drags bottom. Measures how far we’ve not gotten.
Shows us the depth we are all so eager to stay on top of.

It makes for an awkward discussion, but the perfect poem.
Seeing society cripple itself so that it favors one leg over the other.
White people who are really beige, offwhite, often pink, rarely really white,
fostering fear and weakness and feigned innocence so that disparity
can be dropped like an anchor and stop progress pushing in the wind.
We all see round sails and current lines and a horizons frowning
they are so anxious to be pushed back further.
Yet we do not draw it up to drip above the water,
so our past has become a permanent tether.

We know history can not go away, but while we refuse to carry it,
at least we know where we stay. White in the United States.

But ships are not meant to stay anchored.
I am confident we were not either.
And I refuse to let my greatest sin be living complacently in white America.
I don’t know what afterlife waits for white Americans.
Though I am doubtful it will be a white heaven.

White America #considerallthings

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

America.
Which has been white historically, right?
White while it ousted brown.
White while it bought up black and broke it down.
White while it tore through textures of white.
White bleeding purple reading yellow
where it prefers seeing taupe.

White America is not a title or a phrase to some people.
It is a redundancy.