The most annoying thing about her was her voice, that insufferable know it all tone of voice that is always accompanied by a lot of gobbledygook that she learned in some expensive university from some over-paid, overweight, gray-haired left-over from the 1960s Marxist movement we all had to tolerate back then on the excuse of brotherly love, although with this girl – several generations removed from the era of the red-diaper baby or even the sad-sack people of the New Left – the term brotherly love, sisterly love or even human kindness did not apply.
This was no hippy chick, but a descendant of that other
radical breed the sixties had bred, not black so not a black panther, but a
kind of over-educated (if university liberal propaganda can be considered
education) cross over from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) just prior
to that point when the SDS evolved into terrorists called the Weather
Underground (a name based on the Bob Dylan lyric about you not needing a
weatherman to know which was the wind blows.)
She didn’t talk like a hippie either, no “far out” or “groovy”
or “slap me five, brother.” She sounded as if she was quoting the Port Huron
statement (the bible of the New Left), only using more modern terms, and
throwing around concepts about “carbon footprint” and “Social Justice” and “Equity,”
as if she was reading these out of a textbook (no doubt simply mimicking lecturers
her bitter Marxist professor gave instead of real education.)
Her tone was totally insufferable, beyond arrogant, filled
with that I-know-more-than-you-ever-will-about-anything voice, and a
determination to torture you with those things she kissed her bosses ass to get
A’s to repeat on the exam so that you felt appropriately insignificant in her
presence, telling you in one high pitched note just how superior she was and
how her quest was so much more rightfully moral than your existence could ever
be, and that you’d better listen for the welfare of humanity’s sake, a tone
that all the self-righteous, self-centered, self-important use partly to convince
themselves that they have in their short lives learned more about the concept
of justice and equality than you have even four decades of more actual human
experience than she has.
“You’d better watch your carbon footprint,” she said in one
indignant rant, followed up with a series of cliches about cops being bad because
they kill people.
I kept wondering if she kept her electric scooter doubled
parked somewhere on the street and needed to get back to it, but first needed
to urgently lecture us on what bad people we were because we still had milk
with our Captain Crunch and still stopped off at McDonald’s for a burger and
fries on our way home from real jobs she wouldn’t be caught dead doing.
She told us we were bad people because we still wanted to put
criminals in jail and keep them there to keep them from hurting other people, telling
us that criminals are victims of that racist “war on drugs” that was waged in
the 1970s and 1980s and made it safe for people like her to scoot through the streets
of the city after dark.
Carrying mental carpetbag left over from the aftermath of
the American Civil War, she had come to demand social justice and to force us
to give up our homes because people of color did not have what we had and ought
– making me wonder if she would do the same had she not still been living in
her parents basement, eating the food her parents paid for, using medial
insurance Obamacare had allowed her to get until she was nearly old enough for
social security.
I kept wondering if she ever actually had a real job, as she
demanded an increase in minimum wage, or whether she ever had to run a small business
her demands would make go broke, whether she actually met the victim of the
violent crimes committed by the criminals she demanded be set free, whether or
not she had ever gone hungry or actually interacted with the homeless people who
she stepped over at the curb to get here.
Did she ever look a beggar in the eye when he or she asked
for money for a meal?
Did she even know that there are actually poor white people
as well poor starving people of color?
Was she aware that there are parts of America where poor
whites live just as badly as the illegal immigrants, she wants to bring over
the border from Mexico (immigrants she would not share her room with even if
she was wealthy enough to have an apartment in a rich neighborhood while black
people live in slums a few blocks away?
Had she ever been mugged or robbed? Did she even know
anybody who had been?
She demanded social workers be sent on calls rather than
cops, oblivious to the fact that the domestic violence cases she keeps ranting
on about are often the most volatile and the most likely to end up tragically,
or if she did, she blamed the tragedy on the police.
Yet for all this, I
kept seeing her as a terrified little girl, guilt-ridden by the fact that she
had good parents who did all the right things for her, raised her well, sent (and
paid for) her to attend all the right schools, while some poor black person
(who she never probably actually met) had parents who were drug addicts or
worse, or were raised by grandparents when their parents deserted him, who got
caught up in a life of crime by hanging out with the wrong crowd (something
that can’t be helped if you are to survive the jungle of the ghetto) and began to
do all those things that inevitably would lead them to confrontations with the
police and eventually incarcerations.
Her white guilt would never allow her to look more honestly at
how some black families do manage to find the same salvation for their children
as her parents did. She sees only those who she believes suffered the indignities
of institutionalized racism (ignoring the thrill many people feel being apart
of a violent culture, becoming the black version of Jesse James or Billy the
Kid). She paints them all with the same brush as victim and believes somehow,
because she is white, she is to blame, but worse, all other white people are to
blame, too.
While sad in one way, she scared me in other ways, her artificial
rage resounding with artificial outrage over social victimization she never had
a chance to experience (although she wanted to), over indignities people of
color (she most likely never met) endured at the hands of a white society (she
blames for everything) and her inability to make right what she saw as a great
wrong (even though what she saw is largely a figment of her own imagination or
the exaggeration of something that is hardly as earth-shattering as she
believes), adopting the bitterness of angry professors who have hidden themselves
away from the real world in Ivory tower campuses where they see nothing but
their own misperceptions reflected back at them from the stained glass of
racism through which they view the world.
Then she stomped out, leaving a carbon footprint of hot air
behind her as thick with wrong-headedness as the smoke of oil coal train
engines, the dust of her anger clinging to the rest of us, heavy with guilt we
didn’t deserve.
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