Submitted by Bishop Rabid on December 1, 2008 - 4:40pm.
From the depths of my cramping gutpain I weep.
I don't buy martyrdom.
Like I don't buy presents.
Here is my gutpain:
What I saw was a mostly black crowd stampeding a black man to death...so they could further enrich the richest white family in the US, by buying goods made by slaves in Chinese labor camps.
Don't read that too fast. Don't jump to conclusions about what I'm saying. Don't go all liberal Democrat on my ass.
My gutpain is seeing this logjam of injustice, indifference, and self-hatred. It can't be Hoped away by the convenient desire to pretend racism is all gone. This is a racism so internalized that the message of the massas--buy this thing, be better for a moment, till we have something new for you to buy--means more to shoppers than their neighbor's life. Whether that's the man opening the store door, or the people at their elbows competing for the same tossed bones of consumption.
It would have been no better if everyone in question had been white; that's not my point. My point is that racism isn't just people dissing each other's skin. It's also at least in part classism, and one of the manifestations of classism is greedy consumption as a path to alleviate one's soul suffering, one's loss, one's emptiness. Desperately trying to stuff holes in hearts with things.
And don't we preach what depths of insecurity and self-hatred lead people into the addiction to things? Or indifference to a worker's life? Or to the lives of those against whom they grappled over these consumerist scraps?
And aren't we now called to preach this harsh jeremiad: how can Wal-Mart get away with sending a lone/sole sub-minimum-wage worker out to face hundreds of pumped up "blitz line" consumers, racing to enslave themselves to more things?
Wal-Mart. Plantation owners. In a form as diabolical as the kind my family fought against in the Civil War.
I've been reading that it'll be a good three years before the US can be out of Iraq because we bought so much Stuff (materiel) and transported it there, we have to stay till we use it up.
I am retreating to my studio now to make posters. My throat is too busy crying to cry out against Nineveh.
Sick, so sick, so sick and sick and sick
I don't buy martyrdom.
Like I don't buy presents.
Here is my gutpain:
What I saw was a mostly black crowd stampeding a black man to death...so they could further enrich the richest white family in the US, by buying goods made by slaves in Chinese labor camps.
Don't read that too fast. Don't jump to conclusions about what I'm saying. Don't go all liberal Democrat on my ass.
My gutpain is seeing this logjam of injustice, indifference, and self-hatred. It can't be Hoped away by the convenient desire to pretend racism is all gone. This is a racism so internalized that the message of the massas--buy this thing, be better for a moment, till we have something new for you to buy--means more to shoppers than their neighbor's life. Whether that's the man opening the store door, or the people at their elbows competing for the same tossed bones of consumption.
It would have been no better if everyone in question had been white; that's not my point. My point is that racism isn't just people dissing each other's skin. It's also at least in part classism, and one of the manifestations of classism is greedy consumption as a path to alleviate one's soul suffering, one's loss, one's emptiness. Desperately trying to stuff holes in hearts with things.
And don't we preach what depths of insecurity and self-hatred lead people into the addiction to things? Or indifference to a worker's life? Or to the lives of those against whom they grappled over these consumerist scraps?
And aren't we now called to preach this harsh jeremiad: how can Wal-Mart get away with sending a lone/sole sub-minimum-wage worker out to face hundreds of pumped up "blitz line" consumers, racing to enslave themselves to more things?
Wal-Mart. Plantation owners. In a form as diabolical as the kind my family fought against in the Civil War.
I've been reading that it'll be a good three years before the US can be out of Iraq because we bought so much Stuff (materiel) and transported it there, we have to stay till we use it up.
I am retreating to my studio now to make posters. My throat is too busy crying to cry out against Nineveh.
Pope Rabid