Soapbox

… And then there's that moment when you finally come to terms with the idea that has been nagging you for weeks- muttering in your ear while you type, poking you in the ribs as you sit in your chair at open mike trying to decide what to read:
    No one really needs to hear your shit.

    Of course you need to write it. Sure you do. It's how you cope. Well, it's one of the more constructive ways you have to deal with things, anyway. You won't stop writing this stuff, because how could you? And really, why should you? Pour your heart out!

But nobody really needs to hear it.

    It's not about feeling unwelcome, and it's only partly about feeling unworthy. You just sit there, night after night, listening to other people and that voice keeps saying, What makes you think they need to hear what you have to say?

    What's the point of this anyway? Do you think that you have something important to say that hasn't been expressed a thousand times, both worse and better? Will your brilliant word juxtaposition  move people? Will your witty observations make some sort of difference? Change anything in any way?
    No, of course not. It's just … interesting. Just for fun. Except maybe it's not fun- or interesting- for them. How many people are just sitting there politely while you do your thing because they're waiting for their chance? Not hating you, but not really careing. Waiting you out.
    And as soon as I think of that-  then it's not fun for me any more, either. And then, what's the point?

    What was ever the point? Getting famous or something? No, just getting out, seeing some people, sharing some things. Fine. I remind myself that I can do all that without standing up there shouting "Hey, look at me! Listen to how cool I am!"
     Because of course-  I"m not cool. I'm ok. Worse than many but better than quite a few; a bit of an odd duck but that's alright. But week after week now, I sit and look at the papers in my hand and  think, "What am I doing?" Who am I kidding?
    Just because hitting the mike is what the other poets do doesn't mean I need to. I'm never going to publish a chap book or do writing workshops or travel around doing features.  I write my stuff for me. So why am I telling them?

    Emily Dickenson had it right. What am I doing, croaking my name to the swamp night after night? Swamp don't care. Why should they? They're all busy making their own noise. So say what you need to say- but to yourself.

    Some things go in seasons. They matter a lot for a while… and then they don't. For whatever reason. I don't go to church any more, for many reasons, and while I miss many of the people, I just feel that it's a season that has passed for me. And maybe this is one of those things.
I'm just not going to be hitting the open mike soon.

It was no grand event… perhaps
as quiet a moment as a president can ever have in public
but some things are in such perfect proportion that they simply have to be.
Some echos do not die out but grow louder on return
until, at the right moments
they ring like a bell.
Courage and truth spread roots,
lift branches, cast seeds to the wind
and the future grows.
My skin tingles at  the thought of him there,
living embodiment of the ripples spread from one small act.
Sliding quietly into the seat she took that day
in that same old bus smelling of  diesel and sweat,
of long days and hard looks
and the dry stone dust of walls suddenly cracked
though not quite ready to fall.

He looks out the same window where she once  turned her weary gaze
upon a world that seemed the same as  yesterday- but was not.
In a moment of quantum truth, the world was changing before her eyes
simply because she was sitting there
looking at it.
She was surrounded by angry people frightened of change
and she was just tired, maybe wasn’t trying to knock anything down
but she sat like thunder and woke the world.

And now here he sits, the circle completed,
the ripple returned to the source
the very change she wanted to see
through that soot-streaked window.
He is the echo that has become a new, ancient song,
looking out that window, now wiped museum-clean
yet still streaked with blood and resentment
wondering, perhaps, what  he may be changing
by some simple act at the end of a long day.
He is alone here, palpably so- yet no less surrounded
by angry people frightened of change,
and wondering how far his ripples will spread ,
peering forward,
hoping to catch a glimpse  of the change
he wants to be in the world.

They call themselves by many different names- pundit, anchor, blogger, spokesperson, surrogate, consultant. But their proper label, the name that truly describes their profession and the role they play in America is “Pusher.”

Yes, they are pushers, and they have a product to move, folks. The product they’re trying to get you to buy is anger- specifically, anger born from fear.

They are the merchants of partisanism, jingoism and racism- from the subtle music of racially coded dog whistles to the freight train thunder of hoods and crosses. They’ve also got homophobia, Islamophobia,  xenophobia, changeophobia, paranoia, ethnocentrism, self-righteous delusion, persecution and blaming the victim. Lots of exciting, brightly colored product with such entertaining labels but all containing the same base ingredients; the dynamite of fear and hate.
You name it, they have  little bag of it in their pocket, and when they see that you’re curious they’re always ready to dip their fingers in, touch them to your lips, give you just a little taste.
             You like that, huh?

They hang out on the virtual street corners of cable TV  and the playgrounds of online chatrooms and message boards, ready to prey on the ignorant and confused,  the worried, frightened and the disenchanted.
They sidle up to you in late-night email forwards and through talk radio while you’re stuck and frustrated in traffic, always ready to capitalize on your weakness, hunger, dysfunctional need.
They come on like your best friend, the only one who really understands what you’ve been through. They clap you on the back and say,
Man, have I got some great product for you!
Check it out: Biden is a communist, man! For real! A Nazi communist!
And he’s using drag queens in the Department of Education to try to brainwash our kids
so they all grow up to be gay atheists!
           You like that, huh? Yeah! That’s an even better high than that birther
dust I hooked you up with a while ago, am I right? Hey, only my best
product for you, my friend!

Like so many of the pushers who haunt the streets of our cities, most don’t sell this poison because they believe it themselves. It’s all about profit, folks. A gentleman has to make a buck, and dirty money spends just the same as clean.

And they sure don’t give a crap about the squalid emotional state of fear, division and self-loathing that having this kind of hate addiction brings. It’s not their fault if your emotional crack habit causes you to work against your own best interest and tears apart your community, bankrupts your neighbors, sells out your children’s future.
This is just the politics of capitalism, man, and Jesus loves the free market. It says so right there in the bible, right after the part where he said “Thou shalt not raise a rich man’s taxes.”

And once they have you hooked on that feeling that someone else, someone different than you is responsible for all the messed-up shit in your life: your dead-end job, the mountain of bills, your rude pissed-off kids, the freakin price of gas- everything wrong in this country is the fault of those others,  those weirdos… you realize that anger  actually feels much safer than fear, gives a much smoother high without the gut-churning afterburn of withdrawl that daily anxiety leaves.
And when you find that grabbing your pitchfork and storming the castle is a much bigger rush than sitting down and hammering out grudging, common ground…
…they’ve got you! You’ll come back again and again, pass it on to  your friends.

But pretty soon just the occasional  “socialist liberals are giving free stuff to lazy people” epithet isn’t enough to keep you going any more.
You need that outrage to get you through your daily grind, to take your mind off all your misery-  which you’re actually making worse by buying their product, but you can’t see that, because they whisper in your ear that it’s the kindergarten teachers teaching kids how to be gay that’s the reason why you can barely afford your rent.

Like the typical hard-core tweaker  who can’t see that the biggest problem he has is his habit, you can’t see that a few illegal immigrants washing dishes and picking crops isn’t the reason why you leave for work every day scared you’ll be laid off as soon as you walk in, but there you are at 2 AM screaming in all caps on a message board demanding that  we build an electric fence around America “with a moat!” before it’s too late.

It’s crazy, and it’s destructive, it’s eating you alive and it’s dragging the entire country down along with you. But who’s the real villain here?

When cops want to clean up the streets, they don’t waste too much time rounding up the dumb addicts. As dangerous and destructive as they are, the true evil is done by the ones who put that crack pipe in their hands and make sure they always have more even when they really want to quit.

The real criminals are the pushers; the merchants of suspicion and blame, the hate pimps who hawk their wares to the gullible and weak.  The ones who put on makeup and straighten their suits and look right into the camera with their brilliantly white smiles and tell America that we need to stop asking billion-dollar oil companies to pay taxes and start demanding that the single mom with 2 kids whose income is so low that she can hardly put food on the table- she needs to starts coughing up her fair share by God!

Just like all the other  pimps and pushers, the ones who traffic in human misery are driving luxury cars and flying first class, and living in gated communities, protected from all the division and discord they sell. They’re living quite well  from the spoils of rancor, by convincing the average man  that their lives will be better as soon as women stop getting birth control and can be executed for having an abortion.

The only way to stop them is to hit the streets ourselves, to step between them and their customers,  to stop them from corrupting any more hearts and minds than they already have.
We have to call the station and complain, demand our cable company take the station off their line-up, snopes back the e-mail chain, report the white supremacist and anti-semitic crap we see on social media. Call out the lies and offer the miserable addicts, whose habit enriches and empowers those pushers, the methadone of  truth.
Even if they won’t take it.
Also, as difficult as it is and even though it’s probably too late for many of them to ever get clean, we need to offer civility, common ground and a little compassion for people who, after all, may have been groomed since childhood to hate.

But most of all, we need to point our fingers and call the predators at the top of the food chain what they are: rage-pushers, hate-pimps.
The scum of the earth.

One thing his opponents agree on is that they hate him. Ohh, how they hate him, with a spittle-flecked ferocity that far out-strips any hatred we held for their guy. But why? You scratch your head, ask them- what is it about him that you hate so much? and they'll tell you "We hate him because, because… um…"

We hate him because he's a socialist!
    ….which he isn't. not even close. This is a word they thoroughly and proudly refuse to comprehend the meaning of, but they use it because they're sure it means "evil"  and "freedom-destroyer" which depends, I guess, on your definition of freedom.
We hate him because he's going to take away our guns!
     …which he isn't, hasn't said a word about it, though given the number of their buddies who threaten him with assassination, maybe he should.
We hate him because he's raised our taxes!
     …except he has lowered them- but that's impossible, and irrelevent, because he's a democrat so therefore he has raised taxes, just as all the Republicans who are raising their taxes must really be lowering them, because everyone knows it always works that way.
We hate him because he's bankrupting the country!
     …except that studies show the stimulus package helped. Their own party's decades of corporate welfare, tax loopholes and bloated military spending did much more damage than unemployment extensions, a few road projects and some extra cash to keep our teachers working ever did.

We hate him because he's anti- business and is killing jobs!
     …except he's the only one who has managed to create any jobs at all, and he's been pro-business and anti-regulation and reform to such an extent that many in his own party shake their heads in despair.
Death panels, then! We hate him because he's going to make death panels that will decide who lives and who dies.
     …if you want a death panel, look no futher than the roster of  Republicans voting to take away a woman's right to have an abortion to save her life. And what is lobbying to kill the Affordable Care Act if not a death panel? Sorry- that flea-bitten dog named "death panel" belongs to you.
We hate him because he's trying to take away our freedom of religion!
     …. except that nothing he has done interfers with their right to believe what they choose and to live their own lives accordingly. One person's religious freedom ends where another life begins, and they are the ones who too often fail to respect that boundary.

We hate him because he is weak; he ended a war and appeases terrorists!
     …except he has been surprisingly militant, taking out, one by one, the top eschelon of those labeled enemies of America (and more than a few innocent bystanders) with rather chilling  efficiency.
We hate him because of all his horrible, dangerous policies,
     …many of which were policies they proposed themselves a few years ago and were cheerleaders for until he signed on to them.
We hate him because he's a Kenyan!
     …except of course he's not. No one even actually believes that anyway but the kind of folks who are desperate to keep the mask in place long after the costume party has ended. Others may say it, may answer that way on polls but you can see in their eyes- they're not that stupid, they know it isn't true.
Well, we hate him because he's Muslim!
     …Oh come on. He  has attended a Christian church all his life. What part of that seems Muslim? This reasoning also presumes that being a member of the Muslim faith is, in itself a reasonable cause to hate and revile him and millions of people on earth (whereas hating someone because they're a bigoted, close-minded Christian is just ridiculous).
We hate him because he wants to murder babies!
     …which to anyone who has ever seen him with children is just patently moronic . He's the one trying to feed them: their party is the one cutting infant nutrition programs!
We hate him because he has made the world a more dangerous place
     …except by every measure of every group except theirs, he hasn't. In fact most of the rest of the world trusts him, finds him careful, reasoned, honest.
     
Why then do they hate him, this quiet, smiling, thoughtful man?

    They will tell you that they hate him because he is too smart, too foreign, too devisive, too savage,  a communist, a fascist, a communist fascist.    
    They hate him because he's the worst president this country has ever had- how else would you describe a Kenyan Muslim socialist gun-stealing tax-raiser? They clench their fists and brandish the second ammendment and list you a dozen different justifications for their hate based on a dozen proveable lies.
    Many will eagerly admit to thinking he is the anti-christ or is possessed by demons- yes yes, they'll cop to that one in a minute!
    But the one reason for their hatred that you must never, ever dare to suggest, the one outrageous and over-the-top accusation which leaves them shocked and insulted and unable to figure out where you got such a ridiculous and untrue idea and which they will not tolerate you even hinting at is that they hate him for being the one thing he actually IS:

Black.

"You belong to me"
The words simply escaped, kicked past the boundary of lips,
brushed by the guards of convention
and presented themselves as I stepped into his embrace.

He had only been gone 4 days, just a few hours away by plane
but with every nerve now fine-tuned to the thousands of ways
the world can take someone from you,
I found his return more than just the reestablishment
of companionship and routine.
For me his absence felt like something of irreplaceable value had been stolen, 
something rightfully and unquestionably mine,
like my voice or my fingerprints had been
slipped from my back pocket while my attention was elsewhere
only to turn up again here in the baggage claim area of the Columbus airport
looking fit, slightly tanned and cheerful.
"I missed you too" he said,
amusement in his voice because he didn't understand
hadn't been awake to see, didn't hear the echoing emptiness
that had threatened everything like the scream of an approaching missile…
never quite saw what was missing
until it had already come back.