I used to live in a fortress. A nice, clean, and completely bullshit condo complex on College Avenue in San Diego. It was a gated community, a little slice of the American Dream, perched on the edge of a quiet, slow-motion apocalypse. To the right, an old, quiet neighborhood. To the left, the beginning of the great, creeping tide of the ghetto.
The black community was a few miles away, but Hillcrest, which had been taken over by the gays—good for them, they served a decent drink—they’d started gentrifying, buying up all the cheap property, fixing it up, and pushing the old residents out, right towards our quiet, respectable, and completely unprepared little fortress.
And I want to be clear about something before we go any further. This is 2025. I have been lectured, and shamed, and called every name in their new, holy book. I have been told about “them,” and “those people,” and “all of them,” by the other side. So you know what? Fuck it. If generalization is the language of their revolution, then I’ll speak it, too. If you’re not “black enough,” you’re not a real Democrat. If you’re not a victim, you’re not on the team. So if they get to use “those people,” then so do I. It’s the only goddamn language they seem to understand.
So, those people.
I remember my car alarm going off in the middle of a bright, sunny afternoon. I looked out the window, and there they were. Two of them, trying to break into my car. I threw open the garage door and chased their asses off the property, a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest little burst of primal rage.
The homeowner’s association, a collection of soft, comfortable, and completely castrated white folks, they had a meeting about it. “Don’t do that,” they told me, their voices all hushed and concerned. “Those people will kill you. They’ll stick you. They’ll shoot you. Your life isn’t worth a goddamn stereo.”
“Fine,” I said. “Next time, I’ll just put a shotgun in the garage and blow their fucking heads off before they can get to me.”
And you should have seen their faces. The quiet, polite horror. “You can’t kill someone over property,” they said. “That’s not right.”
And that’s the whole goddamn story of the decline of the West, right there in a quiet little community meeting. Why is it not right for me, a civilized, white man, to defend my own goddamn property, but it’s a perfectly acceptable and predictable outcome for them to kill me over it? Why is there a different set of rules for the two sides of the fence?
A few weeks later, they got me. Came back to the garage, one of them peeled back the corner while the other one went inside and opened the door. They took all my tools. A quiet, efficient, and completely predictable act of war.
So I put in an alarm system. And in the middle of the night, it went off. I came running down from the third story of my townhome, a loaded shotgun in my hands, tripped on the goddamn stairs in the dark, and the noise of me eating shit was enough to scare them off. I saw them, a couple of shadows, hopping the fence, back to their side of the world.
And it wasn’t just the property. It was the whole goddamn culture. You’d go to the grocery store, and you’d see a man built like a goddamn silverback gorilla slap his woman so hard that the whole store would go quiet. You’d see the look on her face, a quiet, ugly, and completely familiar kind of pain. And nobody did a thing. You just looked away. Because this was them. This was how they did things. And you didn’t want to get involved.
I was at a CVS one night, and a beautiful young black woman came up to me in the parking lot. “Can you help me?” she asked. “My car won’t start.” She popped the hood, and she pointed. “What’s that thing, that wire? The one that if you pull it off, the car won’t work?”
“You mean the distributor cap?” I said.
She reached in, pulled it out, and the second she did, some big bastard came out of the shadows and started beating the shit out of her. Right in front of me. Slapping her around, screaming in her face. And I just stood there. An Asian guy at the gas pumps, he was watching, too. And neither of us did a thing.
Because it was them. Not me. Not my culture. If it was a white woman, yeah, maybe. If it was my daughter, Christ, I’d have killed the sonofabitch with my bare hands. But this? This was a different world, with different rules. And the first rule was: don’t get involved. Because there was no rational conversation to be had. He wasn’t going to stop beating her just because I asked nicely. He didn’t care if he went to jail. He didn’t care if he got killed. The only person who cared about my life was me. And I think most white people, in the quiet, ugly, and completely honest corners of their own hearts, they feel the same way.
The thing that finally broke me, the thing that made me pack my bags and run, was the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in downtown San Diego.
We used to go to Horton Plaza, a beautiful, stupid, and completely magical shopping mall that’s probably a homeless encampment now. We’d just walk around. We didn’t have any money, but it was a nice place to be. But on this day, the place was different. It was loud. It was crowded. And it was full of them. All of them. Dressed in their uniform, the baggy pants, the jewelry, the shiny sneakers. And there were the white people, in their pink sweaters and their blue shirts, a quiet, nervous herd of sheep in a field full of wolves.
We were in a little nature store, looking at rocks and telescopes, when we heard the shots.
And all of them, all the black kids in their hoodies, they started to run. Not in fear. No. In a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest ecstasy of chaos. They were laughing. They were crashing through the patio tables, throwing things in the air. It was a performance. A cultural ritual.
When they were gone, the place was a goddamn warzone. Trash everywhere. A disgusting, beautiful, and completely honest expression of their own inner landscape. I remember standing by the door of that nature store with another white man, making sure none of them came in. And I looked back, and the back of the store was full of white families, huddled together, the kids in their blue shirts and their summer dresses, their eyes wide with a quiet, ugly, and completely new kind of understanding.
And in that moment, I knew.
I knew that it would be an insane, irresponsible, and completely unforgivable act of malpractice as a father to raise my kids anywhere near that.
So we ran. Unconsciously, at first. We joined one of the whitest religions in the world, the Mormons. I read about the Mark of Cain, and it rang true to me in a way I didn’t want to admit. And then we joined the great White Gold Rush of the ‘90s. Sixty, seventy percent of the white people in California, they left. We all ran. To Utah, to Colorado, to Oregon. To a white utopia. And when we got there, it was beautiful. No crime. No locks on the doors. A quiet, peaceful, and completely segregated paradise.
And now, twenty-five years later, the rot has followed us. You go to a grocery store in a “good” white neighborhood, and the liquor is locked up, the razors are in a cage. They’ve followed us. And the quiet, respectable, and completely bullshit lie that we can all just live together in peace, it’s been exposed for what it is.
And the people who stayed behind in California, the ones who were brave, or stupid, or just too poor to leave, what happened to them? Their daughters have blue hair and a lesbian girlfriend. They’re on their third marriage. They’re working some shitty hourly job, and they’re telling themselves they’re good moms, because they’re “survivors.” No. A good mom doesn’t just feed her kids; she gives them an environment that isn’t a goddamn warzone.
So yeah. I’m done. I’m done with the conversation. I’m done with the quiet, slow, and completely predictable decay of it all. The people who tell you that this isn’t happening, that it’s all in your head, they’re either liars or they’re fools.
This is my life experience. This is what I’ve seen with my own two eyes. And when they sit there, in their safe, quiet rooms, and they generalize about me, about my people, about “all white people,” and then they tell me I’m not allowed to generalize back?
Well, fuck them.
I don’t want to live next to those people. And maybe that’s the real, ugly, and beautiful reason I’m going to Argentina.
A little more purity. Is that too much for a man to ask for?
