Issue #9 - Chaos or Community?
There's a lot going on right now. I'm not sure I have the credibility or resources to address any of it directly. But Martin Luther King tells us, from Chicago in 1967, what is happening in Minneapolis today, and will continue to happen:
Living with the daily ugliness of slum life, educational castration and economic exploitation, some ghetto dwellers now and then strike out in spasms of violence and self-defeating riots. A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is fed up with powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.
Touring Watts a few days after that nightmarish riot in 1965, we confronted a group of youngsters who said to us joyously, "We won."
We asked them: "How can you say you won when thirty-four Negroes are dead, your community is destroyed, and whites are using the riot as an excuse for inaction?"
There answer: "We won because we made them pay attention to us."
As along as people are ignored, as long as they are voiceless, as long as they are trampled by the iron feet of exploitation, there is the danger that they will have their emotional outbursts which will break out in violence in the streets.
The amazing thing about the ghetto is that so few Negroes have rioted.
-"The Dilemma of Negro Americans." Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
A verifiable miracle, really.
A Short Poem
The difference between patriot & riot
is 3 letters spelling pat, which may
mean a reassuring touch, or a grope,
or a condescension, or an answer that didn’t listen to the
question.
I was jarred by some feedback I received from the last issue. It was good feedback, but I decided to work out some meanings for words like vulgar and wound up on the subject of justice. I wrote a longer essay over at sethwieck.com, but here's an excerpt:
The other use of the word shit showed up for me around middle school, and was suddenly lewd and because it had a new moral quality, spoken with a glance over the shoulder for policing adults. Usually it was meaningless -- punctuation and cadence -- more akin to a dog barking than a person conveying ideas. But more often than I care to admit, we employed it in that adolescent posturing that also looks like dogs establishing dominance. In the right context, for the kid sitting on the edge, having the word "shit" cast on you, could be devastating. From the head of the lunch table, the boy in Brandname® jeans barks, "You are a vul...gar piece of sshhit. You don't belong here."
One defense against that judgment is to bark back. Another is to bark down the line at the next kid on the edge. We are all capable of justifying ourselves in awful ways.
I've posted the rest of the essay over at sethwieck.com if you'd like to continue.
News
Jenny Stalter, whose story was the subject of the last issue, has a new piece at Typehouse about why she uses elements of horror in her stories.