Dylann Roof grew up like I did.
So many stories I could tell. In some ways I both recoil from and feel so much commonality with this life still; these were my people. You can leave it behind as I did and yet there is this invisible rope of shared fate that always connects you only because your early experiences bind you and that vinculum takes a lifetime to completely unravel.
I can understand why the people around Roof did nothing. Southern underclass white culture is full of big boasts that never come to fruition, that are never even attempted — both evil and aspirational. A friend of mine avers when I was 10 or 11: “We had the niggers in slavery once, we can put them right back in.”
I sit down on the couch at my dad’s place. I feel something poking into my bony butt. It’s a .38 pistol. I take it out of the couch and put it on the counter. There is nothing unusual about this.
Other friends of mine wear to high school shoddily homemade t-shirts with the slogan “KKK – Kool Kids Klub” on them. A group of black students nearly beats the both of them to a bloody mist. They are never seen in school again.
My sister drops out of school at twelve years old. She’s a heavy drug user by thirteen. She’s pregnant by a notorious area violent felon and drug dealer by fifteen.
Everyone you know nearly talks about the heroic acts they will undertake and the Homeric (except they have no idea who Homer is) deeds they will do in the inevitable and much-needed cleansing race war.
I could go on. Oh could I.
These are the people without a culture, the people that the world has left behind, where nothing matters and nothing makes sense and each day is unconnected to the last and unrelated to the future. There is no direction because direction is meaningless when you have no possibility of going anywhere worth going.
This is why they did nothing: they are and I was surrounded by penthouse paupers boasting about their great and terrible deeds, all built on smoke and lies.
A former friend of mine from where I grew up said years after we both left that he still had a lot of Lake City in him. Even though I did not, I understood what he meant. As I understand these people. I am no longer a part of them, but they are a part of me.
It’s an enormous big deal that you escaped from this alive and with your intellect intact. This almost never happens.
Back in Ukraine, my mother taught at a school for kids who are our equivalent of this social class. They are all my age, and today 40% of them are no longer alive. The rest are in and out of jail or are hopeless alcoholics. I can’t imagine a bigger deal than managing to escape.
Yeah, probably 40% or perhaps more of the people I was closest to as family, friends and acquaintances back then are now dead or in jail.
I escaped because of books, my grandparents, and art — in that order, I think. And that I joined the army. I recognized at the time the nearly-inexorable magnetism of that life and how it’d inevitably pull me back unless I made a hard-to-reverse break. Probably the best life decision I’ve ever made despite its difficulty.
I’m curious about how that class differs and is similar in Ukraine. I don’t know much about the culture of the region save what you write.
These were the people who lived in what we called “workers’ barracks.” In a way, they were an equivalent of trailers but these were long, ugly, concrete structures with many little rooms and communal bathrooms and kitchens on each floor. Teachers were obligated to make the rounds, visiting students at home at least once a month. My mother never took me on her rounds because she didn’t want me to see how people lived.
It was a rare kid who didn’t have anybody in jail at any given time. And many were suffering the consequences of fetal alcohol syndrome.
This was all back in the USSR, and when capitalism came, all these kids were first in line to join criminal gangs. And not in a leadership capacity, obviously.
Oh, and one curious thing. A popular narcotic substance was black tea. Apparently, there is a way to brew black tea that gives one a serious high. It was invented in Russian jails.
When do people realize they’re making choices? When you look back when you do realize you made a choice that at the time you had no idea you were making?
Hi, Shakti, that’s a great question and one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
Life seems to hinge on those decision points where we’re making momentous decisions without being aware of them. But that would happen regardless, because any decision could be momentous. Contingency is statistically capable of being modeled to some degree but can’t be fully enclosed. A friend of mine was killed recently while crossing the road. A minor decision leading to vast and irreversible consequences; a matter of inches that erased 40 years of potential future.
And when growing up in poverty and abusive environments, there are cultural and even epigenetic tendencies and incentives that lead to giving priority to short-term decisionmaking as the future is essentially out of one’s control. This seems to carry over even when the situation changes.
Decisions we don’t know we’re making. I thought of that as I was leaving for the army. What am I foregoing? What’s the opportunity cost?
As a society, we tend to hold people culpable for things that by all rights they aren’t responsible for such as poverty, and to not assign guilt to those who are very much guilty such as the banksters and their actions.
Now I’m rambling, but decisions are only a choice for most people if the circumstances truly allow a decision, is I guess what I am trying to say.