The Colony

Despite depictions to the contrary, the continents of the Americas were already settled and populated for millennium before the European invasion, though carefully cultivated propaganda often repeated has done its best to suggest otherwise. In fact, while doing a word search for links to this piece, words like "occupation" and "invasion" were nonexistent when grouped with "European" and "America", replaced by the far more benign and majestic-sounding "Age of Exploration" (rather one-sided), or "colonization", implying that plenty of space was "up for grabs" and available without years of murder, torture, and displacement, which is simply not true.

It is a concept that's also reinforced in Euro-centric schools here in the United States, shown to schoolchildren as the Pilgrims and Indians happily sharing a feast together in what colonists called "The New World". Fellowship and friendship among people isn't arguable, though the intentions of a bunch of rabid nut-jobs like the Puritans were definitely suspect, and therein lies the truth: that "colonists" like them were driven from their homelands for religious extremism and other acts of violence against men, much like the establishment of penal colonies in Australia.

Convicts were often given a choice between prison and expulsion, because a long sea voyage that may be your untimely death was preferable to rotting in jail. Given the feudal system of medieval Europe, it's no wonder their "undesirables" chose a boat instead. The lord/serf system of labor and land ownership was a direct precursor to the slave economy of the American South, and just as deranged. In Europe, serfs were considered property just like they were here, in colonies created for economic expansion and world domination.

Not that it stopped there. With the advent of the media age came new conduits for programming and/or re-programming, as the case may be. Movie after movie after movie showed the handsome white man "dressed to kill" in his ten-gallon hat, armed and dangerous to the savagely murderous Indians who pillaged their towns and raped their women, in an almost direct contrast to the actual battles waged on land already occupied by the First Nations. The hero wore white, the bad guy wore black, and the Indians bled red blood. Done! History for the Special Needs set: easily digestible and almost guilt-free.

Except that it wasn't. As indigenous people fought back harder than any "sophisticated" wealthy euro ever had the right to expect, those territories were left to the natives (now as disenfranchised and often poverty-stricken "reservations" free of U.S. interference), as other less contested lands were carved up by the governments of France, England, and Spain, until a new American identity was born to the children of proudly mixed parentage from "both sides of 'the pond'", which is where we stand today: a nation about to be led by yet another rich white man born to four European grandparents (with an Eastern Euro import wife), who won an election in the same "red" states fed by the southern slave economy that drives them back towards the same rich white man they remain indebted to. And you wondered why he isn't taking a salary for his presidency....<shakes head in disbelief>

Slackers

All of my early life, I was told that I was sloppy, lazy, careless, and a pig, without actually being any of those things. The name-calling was used by my parents to hide their real agenda: using children as a workforce to make their lives easier. It was simple to them. Why else were we born? I was talking to my friend Katy today (while getting a haircut from her) about wild American politics, because the Russia she's from is so very different from our world here. But, times do change. We no longer allow children to get work permits from their elementary school principals for a paper route like they did when I was a kid, nor do we ask children to bear adult economic burdens by letting them leave school, like my grandparents had to do during The Great Depression.

But, my parents didn't have that to deal with. My mom had one (ONE!) part-time job during school wrapping Christmas presents at a department store (and that was only seasonal) because she complained bitterly about the homemade food my grandparents served her, so they told her to go out and get a job and go buy her own food. They were great cooks, by the way. My dad always complained about his terrible childhood and crippling poverty...with my nursing assistant grandmother and medallion-owning grandfather with his own taxi. 

It never added up to their self-described portraits of severe deprivation that they continually tried to sell us as a reason for their abuses against us, especially since I grew up with my maternal grandparents a mere 5-minute drive away. Sometimes the truth could be had for a 30 second phone conversation with them, too. Into this toxic cocktail came the Baby Boomer hangover about "free" everything without any work required (just like life!) that lasted for a couple of years in the 60s when they were teenage drop-outs, followed by my parents Silent Generation of rabid consumer fantasies fueled by massive t.v. consumption, where anything can be bought for a price including happiness, again, just like real life!

Any GenX'er wanting to make it had to give lip service to a bunch of half-baked stoner ideas from the late 60s, or subliminally gay "buddy" Western movies from the repressed and deeply closeted 50s, with neither being the culturally correct stance to have. People were totally full of shit all around us, every single day, parroting lines from t.v. commercials for dish soap like a long lost savior had just given them the winning golden ticket to a better life. It was fucking insane. No one told the truth anymore, because you couldn't make money that way.

Just like fashion magazines pushed the same vapid blond as their falsely generic ideal about "American" beauty so, too, did movies "toe the line" creatively by flattering fragile Baby Boomer egos with their hugely overblown senses of self (derived mostly commercially and economically), by rehashing the old media term "slacker" as a deliberate mischaracterization of GenerationX, the same way marijuana was demonized for being dark and mad. It had absolutely no resemblance to the blue collar roots that me and my friends had coming up from the city, with some of us from the projects, while working 3 part-time jobs just to get to school.

Of course, that's the plan behind any kind of serious bullying: make up a falsehood passed off as the truth, spread it around, and then sit back to enjoy the show. While some Ritalin-dosed muthafucka easily got funding and industry backing in the early 90s to make a really bad movie about arty assholes in Austin*, the rest  of us did what every real working artist does: we got a good night's sleep so we could wake up and go to work again, day after day after day. Not the exactly same picture as Hollywood's version, is it? It's not mine, either.


* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker_(film)