Hey, patriot.
It’s been a week.
As ICE spreads terror through the streets, and Teacup Eichmann presided over the murder of yet another innocent civilian in Minneapolis (bringing this year’s known death toll up to eight), I know a lot of you are struggling to recognize me lately.
And while I don’t know what’s going to happen next either, I want to at least assuage your fears that I’m turning into Nazi Germany or Franco’s Spain or some other scary, distant place torn from your history books. Because that’s not what’s happening.
Baby, look into my star-spangled eyes. It’s me.
I’m your America.
Maybe you didn’t recognize me without my hood up.
I’ve been brutalizing civilians in my streets ever since I was built on stolen land.
I tore children from their mothers’ arms at the auction block, cut braids and buried bones at residential schools, and locked those girls inside the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
I cracked skulls at Stonewall and Rock Springs, slammed the gates shut at Manzanar, and bombed Black Wall Street into dust.
I dragged disabled activists out of their wheelchairs and down the Capitol steps.
I came for the socialists and communists and trade unionists.
I killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good and Keith Porter Jr. and Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres and Geraldo Lunas Campos and Víctor Manuel Díaz and Parady La and Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz and Heber Sánchez Domínguez and Philando Castile and Emmett Till and Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain and Harry and Harriette Moore and Paul Guihard and George Floyd and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Tamir Rice and Medgar Evers and Ahmaud Arbery and Heather Heyer and Jordan Neely and Addie Mae Collins and Denise McNair and Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley and and and and and and and and and and and and and and
I’ve always carried this gun. Maybe you’ve never seen it pointed at you.
I’m blue jeans and apple pie and the Indian Removal Act.
Before Alligator Alcatraz, I was Krome.
I said, “Give me your tired, your poor,” with one side of my mouth, and shouted “Go back where you came from” with the other.
I forced the shape of English onto resisting tongues and then dared to call it “broken.”
I toppled fourteen foreign governments before breakfast and let Hitler copy my homework.
I said “law and order” and meant “slave patrols.”
I helped myself to Mexico, then got mad that there were Mexicans in it.
I’m not changing. I’m just expanding my repertoire.
This isn’t even the first time I’ve shot white people.
But I put on a good show for company and holidays.
Didn’t we have some good times, baby? Remember the barbeques and fireworks? Everyone loves fireworks—except my veterans and mass shooting survivors. And your dogs, of course.
I am my own original sin. One someone is always willing to forgive.
Until enough of you demand that I be better.
I have only changed in spite of myself.
Every scrap of progress has been torn from my clenched talons by citizens who loved me more than themselves and their neighbors more than me.
I am “the land that has never been yet.”
But I could be.
I could be.
