I feel numb. The anger and fear that I carry with me everyday has been satiated since the murder of Sara Milgrim and her fiance-to-be Yaron Lishinsky. I think all of us were emotionally and mentally prepared for something like this to happen. However, what I was not prepared for was the online vitriol, the celebrations of their murder, and the calls for even more death in the name of progress and justice.
For those of you who think you are still on the right side of history all I can say is give it a few years. Today for the first time in my life I looked up shooting ranges. I am looking to get a gun–and I am also going to take as many self defense classes as I can. Because, I’m not going to stop writing. The overplayed, cliched, overused old saying of the pen being mightier than the sword–is true. And while the cowards may be crying crocodile tears on social media platforms and celebrating Luigi Mangione and now Elias Rodriguez, I will be busy digging up every skeleton I can find from their past lives and current and secretive social alliances.
Because I know you–I don't just see you, I. Know. You.
I have attended your liberation workshops, I have broken bread at your tables, and I have invited you into my home. You were my friends. I never called you my comrades but I’m sure in certain instances you probably threw around that term for others in your social circles. I didn’t bat an eye when you celebrated the deaths of the rich people who died at the bottom of the sea on a cursed submarine. “Isn’t it great!” you exclaimed. I should have known then that our values didn’t align. But I ignored it, brushed it off, and moved on. In retrospect, that was the first warning of your dark and distorted code of ethics.
You were Democratic Socialists of America members, you attended protests hosted by Workers World, and you approved of the hateful messages of the Party of Socialism and Liberation. You were a champion of the oppressed, the marginalized, the downtrodden. You hated your jobs that you felt were beneath you with your bullshit liberal arts degrees from bullshit schools. And I was initially sympathetic. I cared about the fact that you felt slighted, that no one was making the money they thought they deserved, that we all felt stuck.
We were all artists, and artists are edgy. Artists are allowed to live on the margins and have dumb fringe political takes and wear Che Guevara t-shirts and think that Cuba and Venezuela and communist Russia would be fine places to live. Artists were allowed apparently to be lazy pretentious scolds who felt superior to blue collar working class people that we were all trying to “uplift.”
I was attacked when I got my first factory job making a whopping 16 dollars an hour. God forbid I be able to pay my rent, to make an honest living, to not be stressed out about money 24/7 in the name of solidarity. Isn't it funny that my terrible, awful, no good, slightly boring blue collar lab jobs actually got me somewhere–I met people from all different backgrounds, many of them immigrants and working class black and white people, all of them with politics that would make you shudder. Not the right kinds of minorities apparently, the ones who want to be treated as victims.
No, the people I knew were not stereotypes but humans who walk the earth, and have blood pumping through their veins, the kinds that don’t want your sympathy because of the color of their skin, their familial background, or their country of origin–they wanted your respect. To be treated as equals to be given a fair shot and the dignity of working for a living.
In 2016 I worked at a place where every poor custodian who emptied my trash voted for Trump. My Vietnamese and Laotian immigrant friends also voted for Trump. I was the lone Clinton supporter at my job. When I told you all this you cringed–and so did I. I didn’t understand what could make a working class person vote “against” their interests.
But then I remember the rhetoric used by my friends regarding people they didn’t like, the disgust, the tone of voice they used to convey something to someone they thought had a lesser intellect, the condescension. Maybe the custodian I knew who worked three jobs to make ends meet didn’t like being preached to by people who thought they knew his life struggles better than he did–maybe that’s why he cast his vote for the other guy, the opposite guy, the “evil” party.
I still have the Motorcycle Diaries on my bookshelf, and the Wretched of the Earth, and Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, and Foucault, and Derrida and so on and so on and so on.
When I finally started talking back I was cast aside. My opinions rendered unsophisticated, uncouth, racist. I was worried about crime, about safety, about the erosion of women’s rights, the new racism of low expectations, the new sexism of gender ideology, and the coddling of the mind, and I was the bigot. But which one of us is on the side celebrating murder? I ask sincerely.
I still care about all of you–but your world view scares me and your utopian visions of the future keep me awake in the middle of night staring at my ceiling. How many atrocities have been committed in the name of doing good? How many people have died at the hands of revolutionaries on the altar of “progress?”
I will be investigating your organizations–like I always planned to do. There will be posts on Workers World founded in Buffalo NY by a Stalinist, and posts on all the anarchist groups that live in West Philly and wave hammer and sickle flags in Seattle. They may take me six months to write–but if you don’t think I have been lurking on anarchist chat forums since Cody Balmer firebombed governor Josh Shapiro’s home on the first night of Passover a month ago–clearly you haven’t been reading my stuff for that long. So buckle up buttercup.
Like I said a month ago in a previous essay–this is war. And while the BBC and the UN are busy repeating blood libels like the 14000 babies lie that may have been a factor in the tragic death of two young bright lovers on Wednesday night, I will not lie and I will not cower to respectability politics. And so, today on this gloomy Saturday afternoon, on the one-year anniversary of the first time I sat down at my studio desk and typed out a 3000 word piece that would become my first post on this platform, I will continue researching and writing until I keel over on my laptop.
