"The bargain store is open, come inside..."

https://www.facebook.com/maishazj/posts/10100657216529672

Thank you for this ^ ^ ^, Marsha Z Johnson.
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I am grateful for poets, writers, storytellers, and others who share in these ways. I believe posts like these create more possibilities for listening and for loving hard work to show up as alternatives to silencing and sound bite hatred.
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I grew up in a mostly "red" state with a mom who was a Democratic party chairperson for our county. I witnessed as sound bite hatred was lobbed her way. I have been involved in electoral politics in some way or another since I was a kid and rode with my dad as part of a tractorcade of farmers driving hours to Omaha to speak out against Hal Daub (R). I remember the excited/nervous feeling as we rode along, that we were going there to do something important, to speak up for small family farmers. I remember the rally in Omaha less specifically (I was still a kid), but the sound bite hatred was all around. I remember that. It hurt. I remember how, as kids back there and then, we saw adults who felt broken and hopeless.
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Recently I saw a meme. It said something like, "I am not sure if people are getting more racist or if more rural areas are finally getting internet." I was nauseated. Sure it's just a meme. I get it. Hey, I am of a mostly white rural area, where all through my growing up (and still today) I talked about racism. Is racism there? Hell yeah. It's everywhere white supremacy is (read: everywhere). It's embodied everywhere I go as a white person, whenever any white people go. What this meme banks on is a shared inference by non-rural people about the way (or range of ways) rural white people express white supremacy. The meme leverages that shared inference into a contrast with some presumed sameness among non-rural people, specifically a sameness of "not as racist as" or even "not racist at all, unlike" rural people. That's a sound bite to me. That's a manifestation of sound bite hatred to me. It hates on rural people (and "rural" as used in the meme is often code for "white trash"), and, ultimately, it hates on people of color since it offers non-rural white people an opportunity to ignore or minimize their own internalized white supremacy, their own variations of enacting racism on a daily basis.
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Figuring out how to have conversations about race, growing up back then and there, was not unlike doing it now, actually. Figuring out how to talk about electoral politics, growing up back then and there, wasn't unlike doing it now either actually. I know I want to be able to stay in conversation with people around me and to try to always be increasing listening for all of us and to try to always be decreasing sound bites as much as possible. I am hopeful that doing that will keep us all seeing each other as humans and, thus, help us to collectively challenge dehumanization in all its forms. So, I read Marsha Z. Johnson's post and appreciate these humanizing words, this sharing of stream of consciousness, and I use it to help me go out listening again.
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Love you all.