Kumbayeah, maybe it’s time to stop.
Three generations of signs.
May 15, 2017
The wind ripped my sign from my hands this morning and blew it across the sidewalk. I retrieved it, but it’s looking damaged, and I refuse to walk around with a damaged sign, because I believe it limits my credibility. Today, the swan sang for Sign #3.
Will I go for Sign #4? Or will I finally fucking let this go? I got off the downtown train early this afternoon so I could end a perfectly pleasant conversation I was having with a woman about Russian interference. We could have gone on sharing our core values with each other all the way to my stop, but I just felt like getting away. So I “honored” that impulse and switched for the local at 42nd.
On the way up: A guy — he looks 40 but will reveal himself to be closer to 60 — engages me by telling me how Black people knew Trump would win, because that’s how white people always do. This quickly turns into a monologue on his part re: systemic racism and the futility of fighting white supremacy, while I’m nodding, “Uh huh, yes, and private prisons! Yes. Uh huh…”
We’re in seats across from each other, and he’s speaking loudly. When his voice rises, people in the car look over to see if it’s an Emotionally Disturbed Person (which…who among us is not EDP these days? The lady with the wind-damaged protest sign looks pretty D right now). But it’s just him, laying down the specifics of his argument, which is now, “There is no hope, and it’s not going to change,” but with specific historical examples. Then we get to the crux of it:
“This is the worst it’s ever been.”
Yeah. This is where I wound up with the nice woman going downtown. “Nobody can do anything about it, nothing’s going to change. He’s gonna be there for 8 years.” This is where I wound up with the two 30-ish Muslim guys in nice suits the other day — sitting there across from each other in a near-empty car, them both manspreading all over the place, one of them hanging his head in his hands. This is where a lot of people wind up: The woman going into the station today — “They’re gonna take our health care, they want us to die.”
This is when I say, “But if we come together, if we make the phone calls and write the letters and share the information, we can fight back.” Little Holly Hopeful over here.
I want to give up too. I keep getting excited about developments that never develop, indictments that never come, saviors that don’t appear. I’m tired of rubbing my nose in the fact that, as Michael Che said on SNL this week, “Absolutely nothing matters anymore.”
I think the loud guy on the way up intimates that hope is the privilege of people who don’t know better because they’re not forced to confront reality. “You know what happens when you fight back?” he says. “They come after you harder. There’s nothing you can do.”
“Okay. So we just live out our lives as best we can.”
“That’s all.”
Okay.
(To read Kumbaya, Motherfucker in chronological order, click here.)