Notes From The Flip Side: 11.22.2000
"And I'd like to be the one to wipe that smile off your face / To let you taste the bitterness that passing time has not erased."
Dillinger Four
A Thanksgiving Prayer
Thank you, America. Thank you for the blessings you have bestowed upon your children. Thank you for your grace, dignity and kindness. We are truly grateful.
Thank you for destroying our hopes and dreams. Thank you for reminding us that tomorrow is another day just like this one and the one before. Thank you for forcing us to understand that you won't let it get better. Thank you for never allowing us to forget that you demand loneliness and alienation as tribute for the meager favors you dole out like a capricious femme fatale, stringing us all along like a fisherman's line of suitors.
Thank you for a legacy of abuse, hatred and genocide. Thank you for letting us steal your amber waves of grain from the people who were here first. Thank you for letting us put them in the concentration camps that we call reservations where they can drink themselves to death, out of sight and out of mind.
Thank you for slavery, without which we never would have gotten where we are today. Thank you for the foundation that this country is built upon, a foundation consisting of the backs of people who were never recognized unless they were being whipped senseless. Thank you for segregation and the barely hidden racism that lingers beneath the surface of our skins like radon gas of the soul. Thank you for prejudice - who knows where we might be without irrational and unfounded fears?
Thank you for sexism; women belong at home, cooking turkey for men who deserve to have a hot meal on the table at the end of a long day. Thank you for reminding mothers and daughters and sisters that they shouldn't be working menial jobs for substantially less money than men doing the same tasks earn. We need them to make babies and cater to our infantile egos and needs.
Thank you for gender discrimination and harassment. If we actually treated women like people, how would we know who we really are?
Thank you for your decimated children, stripped of their innocence and orphaned by selfish parents whose only interest lies in their own fulfillment, in their careers and their happiness. Thank you for creating a country that allows us to chase our dreams, no matter who we damage along the way. Thank you for providing us with an environment that allows us to ignore accountability and our responsibility to others.
Thank you for your ignorance, America. Thank you for the blind eye and cold shoulder you turn to those of us who have no one. Thank you for the willful ignorance you show to the plight of those who spend your hallowed holidays alone with the taste of cheap alcohol on their tongue while you encourage everyone else to take part and rejoice, never letting the rest of us forget for a second that you don't love us at all and that we are the bastards you would just as soon forget you ever birthed. Thank you for reminding me at every turn that you've taken everything that you once offered away from me and laughed about it. Thank you for reminding me at the end of every year that I'm someone you'd rather taunt with images of happiness than someone who deserves your affection.
Thank you for the consumption you demand that leaves those who are simply too poor to buy your overpriced goods and services behind. Thank you for behaving like the cheap whore you really are.
Thank you for all these things, America. I am your bastard son and I am what you created, the true and hardened steel you forged in the blast furnace of abuse, ridicule and mockery. I am the clay you fired in the kiln of alienation, isolation and ostracization. I am everyone you ever cast aside as being unworthy of your slatternly and unbecoming attentions, as being unfit for your kohl-rimmed tavern wench eyes to see.
Thank you for everything you've given me to rebel against, America. Thank you for giving me more reasons than I can count to wake up in the morning and start fighting all over again. Thank you for providing me with a wealth of things to which I can declare undying enmity. Thank you for everything, America. I won't forget it.