It’s a daily struggle finding any words in my personal vocabulary to suitably convey my unrepentant hatred of Donald Jackboot Trump and his gaggle of criminal miscreants, the vilest administration since Reagan.
The “President” continues surpassing his endless diarrheal stream of racism, idiocy, authoritarian rambling, and so on.
Then, he pulled that Juneteenth stunt.
Yes, believe me, I have been EXHAUSTED by this lone year. That’s not even acknowledging the years before 2020. I’ve been mired in daily hatred of this son of a bigoted bastard. But then I saw this video from Kimberly Jones, and she mentioned something I’d never heard about before.
Tulsa.
Over the whole of my time within the public education system, not once did I learn about Black Wall Street, the massacre of an entire district that was A) not Harlem and B) in Oklahoma of all places. I didn’t get the reference. I quickly read the cliff notes version on Wikipedia, and shook my head for the millionth time. Like most white Americans, I learned of yet another tell-tale racist crime against humanity inflicted upon our black brothers and sisters by white mobs that included Klansmen and local police. A crime conveniently left out of History class when such information could have helped a young impressionable and naïve boy understand the racist swamp that sadly is his homeland.
So, when Trump announced that his first Nuremberg Rally since COVID-19 arrived in America would be on Juneteenth AND in Tulsa, I blew a gasket.
I wrote a barely-coherent barrage of obscenities in the Word doc I used as the basis for this piece, and left it untouched for about a week.
During this brief writer’s block, I noticed my cousin sparring with her zombified peers on Facebook. She lives in Nowhere-In-Particular, Wisconsin. Population: Too Many. Average State Ethnicity: Alabaster Dipped in Hellmann’s Finished with a Touch of Aryan Impotence.
I think this should be separate from the White/non-Hispanic designation on the Census. Then the so-called proud whites afraid of being erased out of existence along with General Lee’s many disappearing statues could have their master race they’ve so desperately cried for since forever.
I noticed her getting bogged down by trying to address the suffering of all minorities, Jews included. She meant well, but I reasoned to her that in the scheme of things, Jews have surpassed our people’s wildest dreams on this island continent of chaos we call home.
And we owe our success to Black America.
Kimberly Jones addressed conservatives’ sycophantic obsession and nervous protests over the George Floyd protests and ensuing clashes with the police, completely ignoring the reasons why these uprisings were even happening.
Her words clapped louder than thunder (emphasis mine):
“..the social contract is broken. And if the social contract is broken, why the fuck do I give a shit about burning a football hall of fame, about burning a Target?!
You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a fuck.
You broke the contract when, for 400 years, we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract when we built our wealth, again, on our own, by our bootstraps in Tulsa and you dropped bombs on us.
When we built [wealth] in Rosewood, and you slaughtered us.
You broke the contract, so fuck your Target.
Fuck your hall of fame.
Far as I’m concerned, they can burn this bitch to the ground. And it still wouldn’t be enough. And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”
If you’re Jewish and you’ve lived in America your whole life, have you ever felt this type of rage? This weight of destructive oppression? Have you woken up, looked around your home, sat in your car, trailed off at your cubicle feeling, KNOWING, that your neighborhood was owned by Nazis? Your businesses presided over by the descendants of Ramses and the men who pilfered your people’s spirit into the desert sands of Goshen?
Have you passed street signs bearing the names Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Rommel?
When was the last time your kids played rec league baseball at Schutzstaffel Veteranen Memorial Park?
Are you an alumnus of Eva A. P. Braun High?
Do you remember the last time you stood in front of a faded statue of Der Führer?
What’s your earliest memory of seeing that sinister-shaded burnt orange flag boasting the black bars of the Master Race atop the state capitol building?
Or those miniature flags sprouting from Luftwaffe graves, memorializing fallen Stormtroopers from Normandy, Casablanca, Aachen, the Bulge?
Stalingrad?
Better yet, how about that lovely wedding at Auschwitz? Perhaps the Cotillion at Dachau, or that peaceful weekend getaway to Bergen-Belsen?
Remember all of those moments you had to stifle your utter contempt, devoting every cell in your body to prevent you from ripping your own vocal chords to pieces from bellowing at your great-grandparents’ tormentors to burn in the deepest pits of Hell?
Did you grow up under a mythical depiction of heroes from the Third Reich prominently flaunted on the side of a mountain overlooking your family picnic at the park during your brief moment of equality, when you thought only of the PB&J sandwiches your mother packed instead of the disapproving, even fearful gazes from Adolf, Otto or Gustav?
Has there been a night you feared that brownshirts would surround your car, drag you along a dirt country road to a nearby gas chamber, your loved ones screams fading in the dark?
Be honest with yourself: we have never experienced the level of crushing abuse in this country that the average man and woman of color has dealt with for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Did your bubby and zayde live in domineering fear during the Holocaust? Depending on your family history, they may well have.
Even if that is your case, you didn’t inherit that same fear.
When the war ended, the Nazis were purged.
There were the Nuremberg Trials, Simon Wiesenthal and his hunters, the vast numbers of executions and gutless suicides of SS schweine too cowardly to face their victims in person without the protection of their watchtowers and sheds, the showers or the ovens.
They were ostracized, banned from the Rhineland. Criminalized. Driven to the shadows. De-legitimized. Forced to change tact, return as new versions of their vile old selves.
Here in America, the Confederates were greeted with reconciliatory overtures of peace, brotherhood, acceptance. Just a heated racket amongst family.
An honest moment of brief shame.
Reconstruction was intended to reconstruct the South into a closer version of what America sought to be when the Declaration of Independence announced our intention to leave a clueless king and his brainwashed enablers behind.
But we only rebuilt the same repressive system that facilitated the slave trade in the first place.
Slaves became sharecroppers.
Jim Crow obliterated the newly-gained agency granted to freed men and women.
Segregation divided and weakened the community, consigned them to drug-infested crime-ridden ghettos.
To add more injury to gaping sores, the side that “freed” them upheld that barbaric system of dehumanizing horror and perpetual second-class status in their own metropolises.
All of this suffering, all of this brutalizing, government-backed wars, skull-cracking tyranny, and the goddamn bastards in Congress had the nerve to erect statues of Lee and Davis in the very city both men sought to raze in triumphant Dixie dominance.
Lynching STILL isn’t a federal crime.
Black America, despite white supremacists’ best efforts, managed to not only survive all of this bloodshed, each hate crime, the next massacre and the five ones that always lurked in the shadows, they have damn-near reached prosperous emancipation before cross-burning forces conspired against them. Through it all, they are still standing.
Could we have done the same in Europe?
Thankfully, men like my zayde made sure we never had to find out.
Thanks to Black America, we have America.
It’s their suffering, their pain, their anguish, the blood and tears of their ancestors that made this land of marginalized outcasts and Dreamers possible in the first place.
If they didn’t build it, we would have never come.
Maybe it’s time we as Jews, as proud Americans, as members of this self-destructive species called humanity that we level the playing field for good.
Instead of assimilating into modern-day Kapos, braindead mannequins, or capricious gits, why not live the truest form of tikkun olam and make our world better than it was yesterday?
Black lives matter.
Always.
Diary of a Mad Millennial 