I Used to Be Smart.

(I was tempted to give an apology of this…thing I’m writing, but I’ve decided against that. The writing is the only apology I need.)

For no real reason at all, I threw the thing as hard I could. I reached down and found something violent and I just ripped across the parking lot with abandon. It was my only option. And as I watched it sail through the sky I hoped that someone would step in it. I hoped that they would be walking along innocently and that would step right in the middle of it. I hope that he would curse loudly at some damn fool who had thrown his gum down just where anyone could step on it and I hoped that he would always have that blue stain on the bottom of his shoe. I wished every bit of that in spite of you. In spite of me. I wished it all in spite of a deeply encoded sense of propriety that makes me open doors for the people behind and treat people with respect. I wished it in spite of smiling at strangers and washing my hands after I use the bathroom. I wished it in spite of doing all I could to make sure I did things the right way and treated you the way I thought a person should be treated. I wished it in spite of the way I kept everything together for you to see while I couldn’t hard stand to be close to you.

And there it was. There it all was. As that piece of gum arced across the parking lot in the slowest of motions, I said all that I needed to say.

(And if you read this, and you know it’s about you, I only hope you’ll understand.)

I’m not sure that I’ll ever forget the moment. It was one of the two weekends a month I got to see my Dad. We were spending Saturday morning like we usually did — sitting in his living room, in the middle of some mess that would never be passable at home, gorging ourselves on TV and contemplating some Saturday afternoon activity. I couldn’t have possibly been more than ten. The show was one that people of a certain age will remember well. Trendy (in that neon, early ’90’s, way) hosted a game show that pitted groups of kids against each other in various outrageous games for nominal rewards.

One of these games was some sort of giant crossword puzzle. There was, of course, some disgusting twist — the kids had to sift through some disgusting pile of goo in order to retrieve the letters, or something equally as outrageous. The pairing of teams was….unfortunate. One team was white. The was decidedly…not.

I’m sure I noticed. It was quite a contrast, and I’d like to thank that I’ve always been observant, so I must have noticed. However, I’m sure that I didn’t think it was much of a big deal. Though I grew up in Kentucky, I didn’t grow up in one of those towns that had the “one black family.” I’d always had black friends, and while I’m sure I had encountered racism before, it probably didn’t make an impact.

That day was shocking.

The way he said was so straightforward that I’m not sure if I was even initially shocked by it. “The white kids will win. Just watch.”

Although I can’t remember if I was observant, I do know that I was inquisitive.

“Why?”

“The black kids are dumb. They don’t have a chance.”

You can’t quite process that when you’re ten (or nine, or eight, or however old I was). I just remember being filled with this overall sense that he was wrong. Beyond that, I’m not sure. How does a kid react to that? It is, after all, Dad. He knows more than we do and we do it. While deep in my gut I know that he’s wrong. I do. But he’s Dad. Maybe he knows something I don’t.

What I hate is that he was right. I remember it so clearly. The team of white kids destroyed the team of black kids. It wasn’t even a competition. Almost from the start, it was clear who was going to win.

“I told you so.” Smug.

I just watched Easy Rider, and I’ve had this reading of the Declaration of Independence bouncing around in my head for the past week. I don’t have anything coherent to say about either one, so I’m just going to ramble a bit.

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So Tom Jefferson said that God made us equal. All of us. Maybe Tom Jefferson didn’t believe that, but that’s what Tom Jefferson said. And Tom Jefferson said then since we’re all created equal, that the being that created us gave us certain rights that we can’t possibly deny. Some of those are the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to find a way to be happy. Tom Jefferson also said that governments have the responsibility of protecting those right, and those governments exists because people agree that it’s okay to be ruled by people much like themselves. Tom Jefferson knew that sometimes, these governments don’t do their job properly. When that happens, those governments have to be replaced. But, Tom Jefferson thought, while we should think long and hard before we replace those governments, we should also be careful not to keep suffering under an unjust government just because that’s the only government we’ve ever known.

Tom Jefferson was on to something.

I could wonder all day about all the things Tom Jefferson said. I could marvel at the courage of all the men who laid their signatures to this document of rebellion. I could lament all of the ways that we’ve gone astray, I could wonder if our government is one of the governments that needs to be replaced.

But Tom Jefferson rarely lets me get that far.

I get stuck when he tells me that all men are created equal. Tom Jefferson, slave owner, tells me that all men are created equal. Who knows what Tom Jefferson meant? I don’t. I’ll never be able to figure out. Tom Jefferson was a man like a me, and men like me are complex creatures, unable to know what we’re thinking from one moment to the next.

I do know that we’ve done a terrible job of treating all men (and women) equally in this country. Not to sound some great moralistic trumpet from high on my horse. We do a terrible job relating to the Other among us. Hospitality has rarely been our strong suit. We’re more prone to fear, and that fear often leads to violence. We (and I MUST include myself) fear the Other and would much rather exclude what is different from us than take time to try and understand something outside the systems that we have set up to order the world.

So we react with violence.

We “remove” Natives. We dictate the level of pigment necessary to enter certain establishments. We assume that alternative lifestyles are necessarily deviant. We fear the Other. The story of American history can nearly be told by the ways in which we have sought to destroy the Other among us. We can define ourselves by all of the ways that we have trespassed our fundamental belief that the Creator created everyone equally.

Red-faced and screaming, we grab tightly to what we know because the Other is just too much. The fear that something different raises in us is so great, so deep, that we cannot imagine the world ordered differently. We react violently to anything that threatens our tenuous grip on how life should be.

We pretend that we’re free, but we’re all chained to our arbitrary concepts of reality and propriety. We’ve all sold our souls for a flimsy piece of pretend stability.

But, talkin’ about freedom and bein’ free? That’s two different things.