It’s late. The world outside is quiet, but in here, in the cheap, rented space behind my own eyes, the goddamn war is still raging. You spend a lifetime trying to be a good man, a decent man, a man who plays by a set of rules you thought everyone else had a copy of. And then one day, you wake up, and you realize you’re the only goddamn person in the room who’s still reading from that book. Everyone else, they’ve thrown it in the fire and are just trying to see who can piss the highest on the flames.
And you finally come to terms with a few hard, ugly, and beautiful truths. A final, quiet, and completely heartbreaking set of observations from a lifetime spent in the goddamn trenches.
No matter how many times you tell yourself, and them, that they’re not all like that, they will always see you as a monolith. You will never be an individual. You are just a white man, a symbol, a stand-in for every crime, real or imagined, that has ever been committed by anyone who looks like you. You are a ghost, a cartoon villain in their sad, tired little play.
No matter how much you fight for their rights, march in their parades, put their goddamn signs in your yard, they will always see your rights as an obstacle to their own. Your freedom is a threat. Your success is a theft. Your very existence is an act of aggression.
No matter how much you see them as an equal, a brother, another poor, dumb bastard trying to make it through the day, they will always see you as the enemy. The oppressor. The man on the other side of the wall, who must be torn down.
No matter how many times you say you’re sorry—for slavery, for colonialism, for the whole goddamn, beautiful, ugly, and completely human mess of history—they will never accept it. Because your apology is not what they want. They want your unconditional surrender. Your apology is just a weapon they use to beat you with. It’s the admission of guilt that justifies the punishment they were always going to give you anyway.
No matter how much you give them—the money, the programs, the opportunities, the quiet, respectable guilt of a thousand corporate diversity initiatives—they will always want more. Because it’s not about getting a piece of the pie; it’s about taking the whole goddamn bakery and then burning it to the ground so no one else can have any.
No matter what you build for them, or with them—the cities, the laws, the culture—they will see it as a prison, and they will try to destroy it. Because a man who is in love with his own victimhood will always see a helping hand as just another chain.
No matter how much you want them in heaven with you, no matter how much you preach a gospel of unity and brotherhood, they will show you nothing but a quiet, simmering, and completely honest version of hell.
No matter how much you try to love them, they will always, in the quiet, ugly, and beautiful honesty of their own hearts, hate you.
And after all the centuries we have tried to coexist, after all the wars, and the speeches, and the quiet, desperate attempts to find a common ground, it’s clear now, in the harsh, unforgiving light of this new, ugly day, that we never will be able to.
No matter how many excuses you make for them, no matter how many pretty, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing lies you tell yourself, the truth, that hard, ugly, and beautiful bastard, it just keeps shining through.
And the truth is this:
In a world that has declared war on you, on your history, on your children, on your very goddamn right to exist, a quiet, dignified, and completely logical survival instinct finally kicks in. The animal in the corner, after being kicked and beaten and spat on for long enough, finally shows its teeth.
And you are left with only one choice. The last, quiet, ugly, beautiful, and completely honest choice a man has left when the whole goddamn world is trying to kill him.
Love your race.
Or die.
