Proud to be a N*gga

My cousin Kenny is proud to be a n*gga, because he's told me that more than once, even singing it to me like this: "...bee-cause I'm proud to be a niggggaaaah!" His cellphone used to have a recording of him singsonging "Kennndaahhhl!" every friggin' time it went to voicemail, which drove my ex-boyfriend crazy, because John would need help at the yard and "Ken Doll" couldn't be bothered; exactly what we'd come to expect from a fat, bald, 6'1, Celtic-Jewish-Indian like him.

He never wanted to fit in with the 9-5 crowd, and for years, he struggled to find work that was inoffensive to his cocktail party persona, before he finally settled on joining a pipe-and-drum band near the beach. He's good at it, too! He and his then-girlfriend (now wife) played together at the biggest parades 'round the way, turning their alcoholism into a somewhat respectable McOpportunity. It wasn't what I'd want for him, but he's made a life from the broken shards of his rough Brooklyn upbringing that's left most of his family dead, and he's not even 50, yet.

I just hope someday he'll realize he doesn't have to jettison parts of his identity that he feels he needs to hide in order to fit in with typical American society, because I personally know of a clan that would dearly love to have a musician with the heart of an Irishman, the beat of an Indian, with the soul of the faithful play at their tartan-clad family gatherings on a certain New Scotland beach. We pay with real money, too. My father always used to tell us as kids that we should be proud of who we are, because it's not like we had a say in the matter, and he's right. We don't. It's already happened.

Remember, my Americans: the freedoms you take for granted have not been equally extended. Some of us can't even walk on ancestral lands and feel proud about it, without someone else looking to take it away to sell it back for a fee. Think about that while you bitch about the line at the polls, or your simple black-and-white racism, or any of the other issues that you think take precedence over basic human rights like dignity and equality. We're not there, yet with this country, but some of us would really like it to be. They're colored, too, just not like you.

Bathtub Gin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Las_Vegas  

I never had great expectations about Las Vegas. So, when my father invited me and my Coloradan boyfriend to Vegas, Kent explained the trip to me like this: you won't like it because it's tacky and cheesy, but you should see it just once to understand what the hype is about. I loved his Anglo-Saxon bluntness about overblown tourist attractions that so matched my personality. We both hated unruly mobs of "Genericans" spending their money chasing a dream that would always be out of their reach, like his punk band playing at so many dive bars; there's only so many addicts you can put up with, before the bottles and the fists start flying.

The marketing campaign at the time advertised a more "family-friendly" experience, because Midwestern "family values" groups were targeting obvious hot spots like "Sin City", putting a huge dent in the notoriously crooked town that began with mob money way back when. From what we saw with my little brother during the daytime, their advertised clean-up was kind of true. We stayed at a rococo hotel decorated like a gay Roman bathhouse, with the added bonus of a small version of the Guggenheim Museum on the first floor. The exhibit featured American motorcycles, and my big lad couldn't have been happier about it.

We took my little bro to a hotel with an aquarium, and Kent rode the "New York, New York" roller coaster with him a few times, too. We strolled through each attraction in the air-conditioned underground via a series of inter-connected malls that blurred over time, with typical shit for sale. We went during August, the hottest month of the summer, in one of the hottest desert climates we have, thus ensuring the cheapest fares. The hotels had enormous water misters at every outdoor cafe and restaurant to spray the crowd down and keep them shopping; the same fake humidity that Denver used to "green" its lawns and parks artificially.

But at night, the town changed character completely. At one point, there were so many flyers for hookers strewn on the streets that we began shielding my little brother's eyes during every intersection we crossed, revealing the true character of the town that so many Disney-like structures sought to obscure with their phony cartoon cheeriness. It was fake, but so what? We felt worse for the retired seniors who were susceptible to gambling addictions, mindlessly pulling on the arms of so many slot machines that took their life savings. It was really fucking depressing.

After so much time underground, you begin to forget what time it is, whether it's day or night, and the day of the week. My dad won a few hundred bucks at a machine in a mall court, which found me and Kent escorting my brother 100 yards away from him because it's illegal to have children around gambling. We waited in front of some storefront while an employee gave him his winnings. And that was it; our Vegas vacation. Pleasant, but no big deal. When I saw on the news recently that workers were drilling a hole underneath Lake Mead (the only water source for all life in that area) so they could drain it like a bathtub, I knew it had gotten much worse since our visit in the late 90s.

With the sickness in Oklahoma, I'm not sure which crisis is worse. Chemical companies have been pouring waste water underground, destabilizing the entire region. There have been over 900 earthquakes already, and the situation worsens with each passing day. Unfortunately, we've seen what "the white man" can do to our Mother Earth here in the Americas, and it needs to stop. Today. I'm calling on my native people to pray like the faithful people I know you to be, to end this madness forever. You need to take back the land that is rightfully yours. You need to "go native". You need to "see red". 
I know I do.