Let’s Go Crazy
The people crazy enough to believe they can change the world. are the one who usually do.
What was the moment that radicalized you?
I’ve seen variations of this question posed on several different social media platforms over the last year as it seems more and more of the country — and the world for that matter — is being set on fire.
And while I’d love to blame my desire for rebellion on me being an Aquarius (with a Libra moon and Gemini ascendant to boot), or Jamaican (they dropped my people off first slave port possible because they had a reputation for being wild), or a Black American woman of African descent; I’d have to say none of those things truly made me radical, only set the stage for me to grow tired of the bullshit quicker.
If I really had to pick the moment, it would have to be when in the year 2000, at the tender age of 11 years old, I sat and watched sheer fuckery take place in my country’s election. We didn’t have cable — my momma was frugal so I could go to Black-owned private school because NYC public schools were trash for Black and Brown kids— and by the time we got home most days, all that was on was the evening news on PBS. I remember watching Al Gore, the first motherfucker who actually gave a shit about the environmental well-being of the planet, win the popular vote; I also remember watching the sheer fuckery that took place afterward when a C-student, with no clear interest in politics, won that same election through the most blatant example of voter tampering I’d ever seen in my 11 years.
I watched news reporters try to explain (uncomfortably) what the hell was going on; I watched polling officials and various randomly interviewed people in the state of Florida explain to me that the ballot had to be recounted because of “hanging chads” rather than admit all this shit was happening because Jeb Bush, brother to George W. Bush, son of George H.W. Bush was the governor of Florida at the time his brother was running for President of the United States.
I watched in amazement as I saw in real time that all the principles my mom was teaching me (work hard, go to school and you’ll have a good life), all the shit I was learning in school about the democratic process, all the history reports I’d done as an advanced placement student, didn’t mean a goddamn thing if this simple-minded motherfucker could get placed in the White House over the nigga who wanted to save the planet!
I remember discussing the shit at school (because Millennials been woke and worried for the safety of this country) and watching the looks on my friends faces as we tried to rationalize what the fuck was “goings on”. I remember my mom listening to NPR and Democracy Now, trying to understand what in the fuck was happening right now. I remember her discussing the fuckery of the election with one of her best friends (a fellow Aquarian). And in that moment I intrinsically understood something that would take me years to fully articulate.
This country didn’t give a fuck what I thought.
That shit was hard to process. Especially after watching my parents talk about Rodney King getting his ass beat by LAPD; watching Mayor Giuliani talk cash shit about my people; listening to my mom (who came of age in 1970’s Brooklyn) talk about Mayor Koch; watching the reports of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell and, and, and….
So when I turned 18, I wasn’t excited to vote; who gave a fuck if it was for the first Black president. I watched the towers go down, and saw my country go to war with one place and end up in another because of “weapons of mass destruction” that didn’t exist. I watched real estate experts predict the downturn of the economy in 2006 because they’d already picked up on the foreclosure trend long before the market collapse, because banks were actively giving out subprime ballooning-ass mortgages. I watched nothing but fuckery take place in the 7 year gap between seeing George W. Bush perform a legal coup d’etat and my 18th birthday.
Shit by the time I was old enough to vote, I was knee-deep in conspiracy because I was looking for answers to rationalize how the fuck I as Black woman in America was going to survive. I remember my hopelessness got so bad that when I learned of the 2012 Mayan prophecy in 2009, I quite literally talked myself out of doing anything significant with my life because I figured this planet deserved a reset if it had gotten this bad.
And now, in the middle of an election year, at the less than tender age of 31 I can say with a straight face that I don’t give a fuck about the democratic process because it doesn’t exist. I’m not interested in choosing between the lesser of two evils; I’m not interested in voting for the Black woman who built her career off sending Black and Brown people to jail. I’m not interested in voting for the mother fucker who authored the motherfucking Crime Bill responsible for taking millions of Black and Brown people out of their homes, and making it so they could never have a legal voice in this country. The same way I wasn’t interested in voting for the bitch who called my people super-predators.
And y’all can save all that “ not voting is making a choice for him rhetoric”; as my problematic fave put it so eloquently in “The Ruler’s Back”:
You can’t sell me bullshit, we know the prices.
And in case y’all forgot, again, HILLARY WON THE FUCKING POPULAR VOTE; this was after she spat on half the country by calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables”, not for one moment considering that even with Barack Hussein Obama in office — the nigga who ran on hope and “yes we can ”— this country failed the midwest and the south to the point where their drugged up selves were willing to vote for the Orange Pussy Grabber.
So no I’m not voting for the Orange Pussy Grabber and Darth Vader or Grabby Hands and Prison Industrial Complex woman. Because I’m tired of the fucking center. I been tired of that shit since the year 2000, and no amount of rhetoric is going to change that shit because I staunchly believe this whole shit need to come down brick by motherfucking brick. We don’t need lukewarm changes; we need radical ones.
The Climate is changing. People are dying in the streets. And I’m tired of motherfuckers trying to sell me hope every 2 to 4 years and then serving the master who paid for their campaign run. And if y’all cancel me behind this shit I honestly don’t care because this is a hill I am willing to die on. I love this country too motherfucking much to watch it continue to burn like this. This bitch been on fire and it’s going to take the people rising up and taking collective action for shit to change. I hate to break it to you but outside a few philanthropic motherfuckers, the people in charge don’t give a flying fuck about us.
If they did they wouldn’t have pushed back on the Affordable Care Act; if they did they would have selected Andrew Yang as the Democratic Candidate because he was the ONLY motherfucker talking any sense at all; if they did they would have kept the country shut till a viable vaccine was found and did what Roosevelt did in 1932; turn to temporary socialism.
Y’all don’t have to agree with me and that’s fine; but after watching Stacey Abrams lose in my state because the votes were actively tampered with, and this piece of shit Kemp just UPPED police protections after the death of GEORGE FLOYD and RAYSHARD BROOKS, and BREONNA TAYLOR’s MURDERERS STILL haven’t been arrested; I only got one thing to say:
