The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

2010

Law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law….freedom in America? Yeah, right.

If you make a directional driving mistake on the streets of the country a money hungry black and white will roll up on you and, if you are poor, take everything you have, literally.  Happened to me yesterday. Saving every penny from being a substitute school teacher and authentic Christian and for what? Now I have zero so Police Officer Assistant Debbie can have her salmon at Chez Louiee on Saturday night.

It is preposterous that money from traffic tickets should go to the people giving them out. This is almost as ludicrous as putting the control of hard narcotics into the hands of the people that the rich people have crushed and tossed to the street to practice necessary crime. (crushed by pricing and culturalizing them out of existence and neglecting the fact that we are emotional and psychological beings who, when defeated, will self-medicate).

When you are poor, I mean really poor, not the kind of poor where you can’t buy another fishing boat or have to drive a Kia, but poor poor, you look at the world around you and everything and everybody you see is just cruel. Everybody is holding on to what is theirs while forming barriers around themselves for fear of losing it. They look at you and see someone who wants what they have. It doesn’t matter that they don’t carry cash. They know what they have. What their worth is, so to speak. And it seeps into them and they glance at you sidelong and wonder: is it in the tossed aside poor where the justice (that even they feel deep down)  is going to show itself – in the destruction of ME?

Paranoia. What a wonderful thing paranoia is. It is spread throughout the world, passed on to everybody, but it has its birth by people closing down, not because they have not, but because they have. They need to protect themselves. And they really have good reason for this paranoia, because of their ill thought out protection methods, most noticeably, “the drug war.”

Then there is paranoia on the streets driving (oh, as long as I have money in the bank, but did I just make an illegal turn…oh…oh), paranoia on the news: actual quote (Glenn Beck) “Gaza….Gaaaazzzaaaaaaahh.” Ooooh. I’m so scared of those philistines. Pass the corn pone Stupila. Okay, Dupus. Stupid Americans, the same ones who keep us in paranoia because they believe in killing everything just to sort of get it out of the way.

Back to our idea of paranoia and how paranoia is part and parcel of a deep need by those who live good, fearful little lives to kill everything that is Not Them. The Drug War. My own personal hell in this drug war comes from having gall stones. I have been hanging at the beach in sunny southern california before going back to my illustrious gig as a substitute teacher in Nevada when I had a gallstone attack. Now, in California you can get a card that says you can use marijuana if you have a physical ailment. I’m not from California. Well, gallstones go something like this: you eat that bowl of potato salad because you just had to eat it and eight hours later you are curled up on the floor in a fetal postion for another good six hours before you come out of it and just wonder what the hell you’d been through. The Only thing that alleviates the pain is pot. No, I went to the doctor once. He gave me a narcotic. It didn’t work. Nope just pot.

Call me a stoner. Take me to jail.

Anyway, it’s seven in the morning and it’s coming on. I’m not yet in the fetal position (I’m a 46 year-old-man), but I will be soon enough and I’ll welcome it. The fetal position remedy is better than the standing straight up or sitting remedy in my professional opinion. I’m poor. Don’t tell me to go to the doctor. Anything to take away the pain.

I go out to the beach boardwalk area where you see the people who know the real carnage that the drug war has wrought (the actual patients, I mean addicts, I mean criminals, I mean…) These are the beaten down homeless people who are necessarily scammers and thieves, some of them, or just good souls who have lost faith. Don’t say that they need Jesus. They don’t.  Jesus is the last thing that they need. They need You!

But getting back to the story, it’s coming on. The yuppies are on the streets. Their equivalents, the down home country folk from Missouri, won’t be out for a few more hours. But the yuppies like to walk and breathe the nice fresh air. They live in nice houses that cost thousands of dollars a month. They’re good people too, generally, but the butter crust of humanity doesn’t see them like that. They’re just more rich people (everybody is a rich person compared to them) who are seeking their morning comforts.

I go up to an African-American fellow whose chances went away a long, long time ago and chat with him. He’s off his rocker, but hey, I live in America, Everybody is off their rocker. I tell him straight up because of the knife trying to carve its way out of my insides: I need a joint.

My new friend has been around just long enough to not give me too much of a “you’re not a cop are you” stare. I feel that he will help me. Now, this is the lowest of the low. His face was so punched in that his nose actually looked kind of cool because of it. Distinguished in a way. He’s the guy you would steer your kids around on the sidewalk. He helped me. He was the only person in the world who would help me.

I can’t help but think about Jesus (my mother owned a Bible store for 25 years), how Jesus talked about the “least of these.” That if you help the “least of these” that you help HIM (Jesus Himself). Well, I was the least of these and was helped by what you would perceive as the top qualifier for “the least of these” title.

A little Christian charitable act, also known as a misdemeanor in modern Christian America, as the joggers jogged by and the sleepers from Tennessee slept with their doors locked dreaming of new laws to take money away from those who make innocent mistakes, and the “fundamentalists” (as if they were doctors or something) blocking themselves further and further into their fearful shells while the Karl Roves (non-Christian, college-educated) of the world hover like the vultures they symbolically are and pick and scheme ways to tie in their love of safety with their love of Christ and come up with the idea that “War is the Answer.”  (Thanks, guys, you killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iraq.)

But let’s get back to the real criminals: poor people who are destroyed by road confusion tickets and gall bladder attacks. Well, I have one friend in the world. He got me a little weed. Just enough to get me through six agonizing hours of pure pain. Thanks criminal homeless dude who should be off the street and is what is wrong with everything in this country today and Mr. why don’t you go get a job and do something with yourself and get off drugs and you loser and law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law after law.

Good luck with all of that you “christian” (small c, quotation marks intended) fundamentalist, protection-loving fearful ones in all of your red states And blues. Don’t worry. It’s not just Republicans, although they are the most fearful and heartless in this world (and most gullible) {Ooh, was that politically incorrect?}  It’s everybody who goes day to day in this morass of laws without thinking about it. Some of us do think about it, obviously, but most don’t and you’re the ones, the non-thinkers (Saytan creayted yooniversitees where they learned too HATE Jesus {bravo, semi-educated Glenn Beck. Bravo!}) who keep it all alive.

Smile! Smile! Everything is good, because deep down you know that you would never give your life for another, ever, that you would seek a second amendment remedy before you did anything like that.

…but you give your life to shysters, to Presidents who say they are “born-again.” You killed hundreds of thousands of human-like blobs in Iraq because you didn’t want to think for yourselves. It was all over the place, the signs. I’m an idiot and by following responsible, non-biased journalists even I could see that Bush and Cheney’s whole thing was fishy. I don’t choose my journalist via religious affiliation. I am not a Fox News christian.

Now you’ve brought Jesus into this thing so, like John the Baptist (off with his head), you have earned my wrath and I therefore proclaim: Repent Fundamentalist Killers or God will spit you out of His Mouth.

Thank God I’m not a fundamentalist or you would have to fear that I mean that literally, that I’m a kook who is going to become the “mouth” of God. I don’t roll that way.  But you do. Your Tea-Partiers do. You are right up there with other famous “fundamentalists” who I will name now: Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, The Shoe Bomber, Mohammad Atta and some others who, like you, their names I can’t pronounce. Wake up! Law after law after law after law after law after law….(pharisees).

Legalize all drugs now so that doctors can dispense them and America can lose the paranoia that disturbs the average American peace of mind by nurturing violent criminality. There is no better combination for mayhem than competition and paranoia and that’s what you are sensing on your streets or at night when you lock yourselves in your homes.

Let’s give our country back to the people and stop this policing industry in its tracks once and for all. Give all monies made by arrests, confiscations and tickets to charities, anywhere that is not the pockets of those giving them out. This is Ludicrous, as is the drug war (just let the doctors be El Jefe, that’s all I ask), as is hoping that anybody is reading this or even cares. Good day.