“Why Don’t You Vote?”

“Why wouldn’t you vote. I’m not from this country—I came here from Newfoundland and lived in Ireland. Why wouldn’t you want a say in the best country in the world? You actually have hot running water here. In Ireland you need to take a blanket into the shower it’s so cold under that tiny trickle of warm water.”

Dawn

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I simply do not regard America as my country. I have always felt like a person without a country, mostly because I am such a weirdo. This was from childhood. I was not on the baseball, football or wrestling team, but attached to those as a low functioning undesirable, actually vetted out by the players and coaches.

However, as an adult, fighting my extended family’s final rearguard action being driven from our ancestral city, where our people have lived for 100 to 200 years, I came to realize that my weird view as an accidental mirror on reality. Ironically, those family members who refuse to believe they were driven out of Baltimore, and frame it as economic choice. One cousin is still hanging on just inside the city line in a nicer enclave.

If America was my country, rather than the tax farm for USG, then I would have a hometown. If I would have been permitted to defend myself against the invaders, I might have begun to believe that Baltimore, the home of my birth, of my great great grandmother’s birth, was my country. Not only was I not permitted to defend myself empty handed or armed against the hyena tribe, but USG imported them to drive me and mine out of town, in the April operations of 1968 and 2015, the same month chosen for Hyenadon risings in 2020 in dozens of other cities.

I have recounted many tales in the Harm City section of police and hyenadons hunting me at the same time, of cops backing up the five men who threatened to burn my house down, of the two negradons who tried to rob me at Fort and Hanover, of the hoodrat who tried to rob me at Glenoak and Northern, of various cops who refused to believe I worked or lived where I worked and lived…

That last, having pigs constantly accusing me of being in the wrong place, of not being a grocer, of not being a Baltimorean, even as they roared to the rescue of my hunters whenever the hunt went bad and the blacks called in the blues on my lack of identity, that convinced me that this was not my country. When the Israelites left Egypt, driven forth and escaping, did they think of Egypt as their country? What of the Crows when they broke off from the Lakota and left the Great Lakes woodlands for the Rocky Mountains, were they still Lakota, still flat landers?

How can I say a country is mine, when the writers and enforcers of the law have writ that I shall be held to account for defending myself? I was attacked by two men and then summoned to court to face charges for fighting back. On December 11, 2017, I was hunted by two pairs of hyenadons and driven at last from my living, no longer able to fight my way to and from my $10 an hour job.

Then, an American company cut my remaining income back by banning my best selling books.

Further, every commercial on television, every movie, every sportscast, billboard, poster, every bit of public media I see, including the dust jacket on my Amtrak ticket, declares that this country is not for men who look like me. This country has been, for my entire life, devoted to the promotion, employment, feeding, housing and the rights of the men who hunted me and mine from our homeland, who raped my niece in the gutter, who robed my son over and over again, who cut up my cousin Brian, who beat up my wife, who hunted me for 42 years.

The bad guy on every crime drama and movie, looks like me. Although 75% of American soldiers who die look like me, every Armed Forces ad I see focuses on a man who looks just like my hereditary foes, looks just like the hundreds of men who threatened, attacked, shot at, called the cops on, chased, and cursed me.

On the train, I have been relegated to second class status because of my race. A girl of my race, a ticketed passenger from Oakland to Portland, was denied her seat in favor of an unticketed black woman.

On the train from Denver to Chicago, I was told to mask and the blacks next to me were not.

America is not my country.

I am a subject of the USG.

The fantasy of America being the home of the free is nothing but the funerary mask used to erase my ancestry.

I have no problem with people voting. It is their country, not mine, and I could not imagine expending a thought, a word or a calorie concerned with the activity of my fellow subjects of the USG.