Drinking the Kool Aid.

I'm a child of the nineties.  I grew up with grunge, with industrial, with looking up to those oh-so-cool Gen-Xers who just seemed to say "fuck it" to all the things we were told about success, who went off to create their own world, or so I thought.  I grew up with "Follow Your Dreams", "Follow Your Heart", and, as proclaimed by the sign on my fuschia wall, "Girls Can Do Anything!"  I grew up truly believing that I was destined for greatness, that I could--and would--change the world.

And then, of course, reality.

Reality necessitates toeing the line.  Buckling down.  It means, to some extent, giving in.  Giving up.  Drinking the Kool Aid.

I always fought the system.  Always.  I started a riot on the school bus when I was in kindergarten because the bus monitors (oppressive fifth graders) were getting a little bit too much of a power trip. But I was also, at heart, a Good Girl.  I new how to challenge things from an intellectual or academic perspective, while still respecting the system at hand.  If it was a bogus assignment, I'd still do it, but I'd write about how it was bogus.  (Just try and fail that!) But at a certain point, I knew that I was still writing the paper.  I was still deciding that my time was better spent writing it....so didn't that mean that I was, at least in some way, deeming it more important than, I don't know, making a mix tape or writing in my journal?

I began the slow process of dropping out of college on the very day I got my first A, in a class called Minority Politics.  I wrote a paper that omitted half of the conversation because I knew the professor wouldn't want to hear it.  As soon as I saw my grade, I began listening to the small whisper of a voice that told me that all systems are, in fact, bullshit, unless they recognize what they demand of their participants to remain intact.  The Kool Aid, it turns out, tasted kinda funny.

Some years down the road, I recognized that the college degree was a necessary evil, so even though I was pretty disillusioned with College, Part 1, I went back. A different school, this time--one with the hippy-flair that encouraged students to design their own course of study. The degree (the most expensive thing I own, mounted and framed by my mother) hangs proudly over my vast collection of DVDs, and while it will allow me, someday, to pursue  a master's degree or a ph.D, it is symbolic of the mere fact that I was able to convince a committee who had no stake in my personal education that I did enough work to graduate.  The Kool Aid was rancid.

Skip forward some years.  Years spent working for companies, for owners, for people who had these lovely mythologies built up about what they were doing and why, and who showed their true colors at the first obstacle. People who made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and insisted upon staying open even though most of their employees had no power after a storm "as a community service", but would not offer up a free coffee to a neighbor who had been without power for a week.  People who said "homemade" but only cooked out of a box.  People who insisted upon integrity, but acted in ways that were completely unethical.

Fuck.  The Kool Aid.

So.  After a year of working at a quaint little Inn in Vermont, after it was "merged with" a budding little corporation that caters to the super rich, after being told specifically, to drink the Kool Aid, I finally declined.  One hundred percent. And you know?  The minute I did, all sorts of opportunities cropped up.  Opportunities from people who valued my intellectual approach, opportunities that showcased the sustainable, the homemade, opportunities that were in direct line with my own values and beliefs--that I had developed after years of tasting and spitting out a wide array of saccharin and vividly colored beverages.

And so I say, sometimes, drinking the Kool Aid is necessary.  Sometimes, it's take the shitty job to pay the bills.  But don't silence the voice that insists that somethings not right, that something tastes a bit off.  The Kool Aid is bogus.  Your values or not.

Not again....

I feel like I just wrote about Trayvon.  I feel sick to have to write about this kind of shit again.   This is a actually a facebook post in response to this article, which discusses how white perpetrators and black victims are portrayed in the media aftermath of various incidences.  It's chilling.  And somehow, drives the point home even more strongly than the  "if they gunned me down" website--which is incredibly powerful, itself.  

So.

"This is by no means standard media protocol, but it happens frequently, deliberately or not."

Out of all the statements in all the articles I've been seeing, this is the one. If it's not standard, but is frequent, and if there is a question as to whether these discrepancies are deliberate or not, this indicates another force, if you will, at play. There is something in our culture that predisposes us to portray one set of people in one way and another set in a completely different way, regardless of what reaction their actions might logically inspire. Simply calling it racism, while probably accurate, does a wonderful job of shutting down any possibility of actual conversation--it expresses the anger, outrage, sadness, and terror of some, inspires defensiveness and a deaf ear in others, burdens some with a guilt they can never hope to escape, and generally ensures that anyone engaged in a conversation in that framework will be speaking from such diametrically opposed viewpoints, they might as well be speaking completely different languages. 

As honest a term as racism might be, it might be time to recognize that certain words do more to keep us stagnant than moving toward a resolution. Racism (like sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, etc etc etc) are so culturally ingrained as to be almost invisible. Those of us who are attuned to notice such injustices can point to virtually any situation and see at least one of those systems of oppression operating, at least on some level. What we might not always realize, however, is how those words feel to the un-attuned--and how the defensiveness these words inspires effectively shut down any opportunity for real conversation. 

Perhaps we should begin to talk about the complex intersection of events and experiences that leads to that moment where the choice to shoot or not, to demonize or not, to sympathize or not--is so apparently clear. The terms that we tend fall back create the verbal equivalent of blunt force trauma, and we've reached a point where we need to be engaging in the most delicate brain surgery imaginable. A baseball bat might eradicate a tumor, but leaves little room for survival. Anger, outrage, grief, and helplessness are how we feel; how we act, what we say, the conversations we facilitate or impede are how we change things so that next time, maybe, everyone gets another chance.