The Bums Lost Lebowski! Condolences! Get a job sir. The bums will always lose!
I was trying to garner favor with the prosecuting attorney, the one generally fighting against me. He probably wrote me that letter, got a stiffy…
Serves that motherfucker right. I had to put on this uncomfortable fucking suit that day and that cocksucker didn’t show up? Go fuck yourself you don’t make enough money to pay your child support.
…went home and took that uncomfortable fucking suit off and fucked his wife while he thought of himself. Go get em, Tiger.
And why would he get mad about that? He didn’t have to do his job that day. I wasn’t there. That’s a disregard, a no patient. He should be thanking me! We had guys in the fire department that would get mad about going on disregards. Why? Those are the best calls, the ones that don’t happen. That should have been a slam dunk for him!
Dear Diary. I got to go home early today. This dingbat forgot to show up to court, would you believe it? Yeah, they defaulted on his ass! I made $500, took that uncomfortable fucking suit off, not until I got home of course. My wife loves those things. Took that uncomfortable fucking thing off, fucked my wife, and took a nap on the new couch.
White society hates the idea of a lazy man. Don’t get me wrong, it hates anything that threatens its authority. It’s been really crafty at dismantling black leadership and doing cous all over the black and brown globe, plus fascist right-wing funding in Europe. They do it classy over there, no outright assassinations or drug smuggling.
And by white society, I do not mean white people or a white person. It is not a single entity; after all I am an olive shade of that creamy milk of magnesia. The owner class of Western society, the concentrated power of a few, has passed this country from one oligarch to next through the centuries: wealthy, white, businessmen. The kind that sucks on big black cigars all day.
And nothing says I don’t find black dicks delicious like a far-right authoritarian campaign to convince themselves and everyone around them that the United States is and always will be a Straight, White, Christain Nation (The 900-page Republican 2025 Plan lays it all out).
And nothing gets in the way of that image than a pink-haired liberal at Starbucks. You know, the real annoying kind that overshare. Or a black guy telling people we are all brothers and sisters, to never cast your brother aside. Or a white guy that doesn’t cut his hair the right way, like the fifteen approved North Korean Haircuts.
You don’t look like us. And that makes the owners very nervous, doesn’t it?
Because if they can dress all of us up to look like we have money and act like we care about what they tell us to, then maybe just maybe we won’t question where we go home after work. Optics, right?
Afterall, if they can just keep us there long enough around enough people that look the same, act the same, and only discuss the milk-toast agenda of the next fiscal quarter, trending TikTok, or latest binge porn on Netflix, then those existential ruminations remain out of sight, out of mind, and tucked away in our psyches, right?
Our justice system and cultural structures of power look down with deep despise on people who don’t toe the line.
Though the upper class perpetuates the stereotypes that keep my black and brown brothers and sisters down, it castigates the ones that dismantle the white myth of austerity the most: the bum from within. To see a white person living in a way that is reserved for “the lower classes” is a deeply uncomfortable example for the people whose only perceived separation between the white bum and themselves is a change of wardrobe and a “can-do” attitude. “Why can’t they just follow the rules?” Whose rules? Your rules? Do you follow your rules?
It is low-hanging fruit to see someone of a different race or culture and attribute their perceived misfortune to a set of alien values and backwards traditions. It is the position often taken to explain away poverty. Assimilation! White Americans who find their place in such classes “have no excuse.” They stand as bad examples for the “good kids,” the ones that follow all the rules and do not question that which is handed down to them from on high.
The Deep State, the real deep state, is the mechanistic arm of the government that seeks to perpetuate the owner class’s reach to every inch of the globe. These are the globalists. The CIA (a terrorist spy organization ran by wealthy lawyers and business interests since its inception). The FBI and its dismantling of black leadership and smuggling of narcotics into those communities. Not trans kids, or the gays, Jews, Communists, blacks, or immigrants. But they are the tools of the deep state, the scapegoats. Anyone who questions the conditions of our environment, the rules of our engagement must be quieted. All dissidents.
This is what the legal system was created for. It takes but a short dive into our country’s history to discover that prior to the slave trade being made illegal, there was little to be said of a prison system, institutionalized policing agency, or surveillance state. These are all products of a system that is meant to keep poor - mostly black - people in order by litigation, imprisonment, or debt. Oh, and jobs.
The owner class, the deep state, uses its power to weaponize perception, economies, public discourse, and the very reality animated before us to cut off our own noses to spite our face, voting for and turning our attention away from the very people who are dismantling programs and safety nets that are supposed to be there for all of us. And if they get enough of us distracted just long enough, they’ll get it: social security, job and human rights protections, and most importantly our time, taking from us our best years of our health and creativity while they profit off the backs of that labor.
And they have done a pretty good job of convincing us that if we don’t take that path, it is somehow a reflection upon our character. And by the perceived separation from “those people” they can tell us just about anything they want about “them.” History is written by the victors.
I am the statistic and I am the anomaly.
Math can predict everything except the individual articulation. This time something different emerges. And to that I say we are all the anomaly in that moment. Algorithms lead us there. We choose which direction to proceed, not what is on the path that meets us.
We can choose to make small and large changes in our lives. We can choose not to participate in systems that contribute to the destruction of the earth, and what time we have tea. And we can choose to use our phones when we’re camping with our kids before summer break ends to remind ourselves that we have court in the morning. Makes for really impassioned writing, but the things I said were true without me needing to kick my own ass.
Technology is a powerful servant but a poor master. And you have to engage with it for it to serve you. I’m still working on that one. We are so often our own worst enemies, but if we missed any other appointment would it warrant burying that person under unpayable debt so they couldn’t be with their children or house them? Feed them? Where is the line here on “there’s nothing we can do for you?”
Furthermore, in the court of public opinion, do my friends and family who know my situation redeem me in their eyes? I hope so, but why should it matter? Would this redemption be reserved if you didn’t know the person? Or if they didn’t look like you?
The word responsible etymologically comes from the Latin word repsōnsus, meaning to respond. To be responsible is to be capable of responding, not guilty. This is because being capable of responding is determined by both the ability of the individual as well as the conditions of his or her environment. The connotation of responsibility being associated with obligations or duties (determined by someone other than the subjective individual) does not make its appearance in in the English vocabulary until around 1855.
How does this inform to the accusation “You are responsible for this…” or the popular Western phrase of “personal responsibility” upon hearing or saying it?