Racism

Yesterday I went out to eat with my BDSM girlfriend and her black sexual dom of a roommate. She'd suggested a popular Italian chain (not the Olive Garden), something to which I had agreed while thinking in the back of my head "Or we could go to a real restaurant and eat like adults" - a thought which I shared with my hunting roommate, who laughed.

The dinner itself was rather uneventful. The two of them both go to nursing school, and spent a lot of time complaining about that state of affairs. I guess it's just what we humans do best, is complain, though my BDSM girlfriend has been riding an unemployment train for the past year, and pays no rent in return for cleaning the apartment. My lord, the concept of not paying rent boggles my mind. As has been mentioned before I've already proven I can subsist happily on a diet of ramen noodles and hot dogs if need be, and properly budgeted my current level of funds could likely carry me for at least two, three years if I never had to pay rent again. That's my honest to god dream, to live like a derelict. Currently 40+ hours of my week are spent accomplishing nothing of importance to myself, an act which exhausts me long before I return home.

To be fair, during the intirim period of no responsibilty following my graduation from college and my move to the city, I spent every day jerking off, dicking around at the mall and stealing shit from Wal Mart. It was not a productive time in my life.

Anyhow, this story is less remarkable for its recounting of $12 plates of cheap macaroni and the insufferable anxiety I suffered every time my fellow diners made outlandish requests of our host, demanding additional dinner rolls and actually going as far as to order items not on the menu. Rather it was the train ride home that struck a note. Boarding at the last stop for the ride back into the city, a Muslim woman in one of those headscarf type deals sits across from me (Hajib? Something like that). At first I honestly paid no heed, glancing over only to see the cute little kid she was riding with. At some point however, I noticed the strange rectangular box under her shawl.

To be quite honest I felt something primal kicking in. My reptillian desire to survive, fighting a desperate battle against my social etiquitte. The rational brain keeps telling me "C'mon man, she's just some dumb Muslim broad. Her religion might be asinine, but she isn't any more of a threat than Khaki pants Polo shirt guy a few seats up." Meanwhile my panic button is screaming "What the fuck. You're going to take a chance on this because your education somehow elevates you above the racial panic of the working class?" She must've noticed me staring a few times, tracing the outline of that sinister box beneath her clothes and wishing to god she'd pull it out and I could see it was just a shoebox or something harmless - a pair of sneakers for her son, not some concoction of wires and timer devices. And in my head I keep wondering just how powerful a bomb of that size is. I picture the train car flashing white, shrapnel propelled outward from the box in her hands, taking her and her little boy along with it, my body parts scattered about the train car as my life is uselessly snuffed out.

I eventually end up down the other end of the train car, assuming its far enough away from the blast that my only real worry is getting damaged when the thing derails. I consider diving beneath the seats if she gets up and starts screaming in Muslim, though wonder if I'd be trapped or impaled by the seat supports when the crash occurs.

The point is, I can't pretend I'm immune to racism, whether its the result of post 9/11 trauma or just the fact that someone wearing all-black, face hidden, with a big box under their coat- is like some giant outlandish cartoon portrait of what a villian should look like. It's really fun to see the hypocrisy of life. We yell at our homeland security agents for profiling minorities, and yet even a supposedly educated liberal like myself can't help but act in the benefit of my own self-interest. I can't well apologize for that.

Someone called me a sociopath and I realized it was a true statement. Truly I believe most functions of our current society are off, from how we raise our children, to our outdated and illogical concepts of morality, and of course to how we percieve races/classes of people. The real problem is that since birth I was taught two opposing concepts.

1) There exists different groups of people
2) These people are all the exact same

Our current way of explaining the first statement is to show how cultures differ, something which immediately contradicts the incredible importance of the second statement and one which, as a functioning human adult, I find myself somehow unable to rekindle after decades of improper education. Look, this race is so different from ours. They have different customs and feelings and thoughts and ideals. Look at this religion and how they worship, look at this social class and how they suffer.

They are different from us is made clear
We are all the same is not

The first and only time I have ever been able to understand the second part of this grand unified race theory was a few months ago. When my grandfather died we looted his house of whatever we could find in an odd mixture of nostalgia and treasure hunting. My sister took his old police uniform and wore it to a costume party, this lack of any respect for the dead fitting of her generation. I took an old Super-8 video camera worth a hundred something bucks on eBay, a field manual to firing Colt Revolvers, and a book on the Holocaust called "The Good Old Days". The book is rather disturbing, and it's the kind of material I wish was taught in our schools, much more real than the screenings of Schindler's list or the tired readings of fictionalized crap like "Night" or nonsense like Anne Frank's diary, which cuts out before any of the true atrocities take place. The entire book is nothing but first person accounts of regular people, soliders, officers, or just commoners, and the things they saw - related in letters, in journal entries, all seemingly unfabricated first-person material. The stories are of course, horrible to read. People led to the gas chambers, or gassed in vans which locked shut, carbon monoxide piped in through the back. People lined up - shot in the head and pushed into a pit, only for the next in line to step forward and take their place. Letters from soldiers discussing the best way to speed up the process of death, or worse the sympathizers who could not stop it, or the victims who watched friends and family taken from them.
And the whole time I read this book I kept saying the same things.

"Those poor Jews."
"How could they do that to the Jews?"
"The trials those jews suffered."

Until suddenly, that night in the shower, it hit me.

They were me. These atrocities had happened to my people. We were exactly the same.

It was a feeling so strong I wanted to weep.

That's been the problem of our education. To me and to other white anglo-saxon Catholics like myself, we are taught that the Holocaust is this horrible thing which happened to someone else. That slavery is a horrible thing that happened to someone else. That every tragedy over time has usually happened to other people, and that we were the ones responsible.

But the truth is, we are all exactly the same. I am the Jewish Holocaust Victim, I am the African Slave. My people were subjected to the Rape of Nanking, to the boming of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stretching back my people have been slaves to the egyptians, my people were given smallpox by the English settlers. My people have endured every torment known to humanity.

And yet in the same breath - I am also the Nazi, the Slaveowner, the Japanese Solider and the man who dropped the Atomic Bomb.

Within each of us exists this same duality. We inherit every trait of our ancestors, take on every ounce of suffering and cruelty and innocense and ignorance and bear it as our own. I know there are some who would never accept this. Maybe it's callous or even rediculous for a middle-class Italian-Irish white kid to claim to understand the suffering of black slaves or jews, while also claiming to accept responsibility for the actions of German soldiers and Egyptian pharohs. And yet the only truth I can see is that we all stem from a common ancestor. We are all bound to this race of ours, the race of humanity, each of us creatures capable of great acts of both virtue and of vice.

All I know is that for one brief moment I was connected to all the people of the world. I understood for a moment what we were, how equal we all are. Until again the logical groupings beaten into me by society again took over, and I felt nothing.

Back in the real world I see a Muslim woman on the train. She is different from me. We worship different gods, we have different sets of morals, and we know nothing about each other.

And we are exactly the same.