Most of the time when I can’t decide what to do in a given day, the answer is usually “write.” It interferes a lot. When I am having to be at my regular paid job and need to write it’s hard to get anything done. Some people might also attribute that to being a symptom of mental illness. Maybe it is.
This morning I was treated to the sight of several of my neighbors sleeping on the sidewalks or in the park. It was surprising to see them still in their bags at 730 AM because you usually have to get up around 5 or 6 to get moving to access services but mainly so that cops don’t harass you for being too visible. Go walk downtown at 3 AM and you see people living and sleeping in public for a few hours while us “respectable citizens” are under our roofs.
Cops might let you exist in public but it’d better be where nobody can see or you better be moving somewhere. Walking around town is a good way to avoid police troubles because you can say you’re on your way somewhere, not that you have nowhere to be. It’s hard to be accused of loitering if you are just walking through but they still find ways.
The worst part about not having much money right now is not being able to send any of it to people I know are trying not to freeze to death. How can we still, in a time where we developed a vaccine for a completely new virus in 11 months, how can this same society, this same economy allow any human being to die from exposure today? How can we possibly justify or explain this?
We have been told our entire lives that human beings are essentially good and that we live in a society because we are stronger together than we are as individuals. And history, culture, art, language, literature, music, film, tiktok and others are incredible monuments to human cooperation. But I don’t know how much longer I can believe humans are essentially good or selfless. Our souls have been so disconnected from our bodies and some humans are making a truly ugly thing out of the gift of the lives they have been given.
Today there is one less person in this world who I and millions of others think made it a darker and more painful place to be. Regardless of whether you agree with Rush Limbaugh that queers deserve to die a slow painful death, that Michael J Fox and other people with disabilities are faking, that children should be traumatized on a national stage, that President Barack Obama is just a Black man who got above his raising … you might be obliged to agree that his methods were callous and intended to cause harm. Perhaps that’s even the part of it that appeals to you.
There are so many people in this world who are waiting for their abuser to die so that they can feel safe again. There are so many of us who wouldn’t and will not utter a cross word about our tormentors while they are living because the fear of retribution is so undeniable, so inescapable.
How is it that our culture, which glories in victories of every other kind in sports or war or film making or music making, how is it that we are expected to eulogize those we have defeated? Why are we not allowed to crow when time or disease or action stops someone who hates us? The anger we feel at his actions is righteous and this fury is our demand that the harm caused be taken seriously. When somebody tells me that they refuse to feel happiness when a harmful person dies and/or condemns others who do celebrate, what they’re really telling me is that they don’t consider this person to be a threat to them. That’s usually not an accurate assessment, sadly.
When the family member who abused me died, I didn’t mourn or feel sad. The narrative that we should always feel sad when somebody dies convinced me I couldn’t be a human being because I was just relieved. Our culture has gaslit us into thinking that fighting to survive is offensive. Part of that fight is celebrating the small joys in life, like the fact that Michael J. Fox remains a beloved American icon while #RestinPiss is trending on Twitter.
Queer Pandemic 