By Teka Lark (September 21, 2015)
They have zero loyalty to anyone Black,white, Latino, Asian, Native or biracial.
They don’t care how smart you are.
They don’t care that you went to school.
They don’t care if you follow the Bible or the Torah or the Quran. They don’t care how hard you work.
And if you don’t spend every moment awake and asleep supporting the institution by your work or compliance they don’t care if you are alive or dead.
They are the wealthy. They are the 1% in this country who want to have us all on our knees.
Are you tired?
Are you disgusted?
Are you sick of working for nothing?
Having a job and being homeless, is not having a job. Looking for work for 10 years, is not normal.
That is slavery. That is sharecropping.
According to a June 11 article in the Wall Street Journal, the net worth of the US is $84 trillion.
The stock and mutual funds owned by the richest in this country just in this year alone increased by $487 billion. Real estate’s value increased by $503 billion.
And this is just what the Wall Street Journal is letting us know. The wealth of the richest in this country is probably worth twenty times that, but yet we can’t get free medical care without a body cavity search.
We can’t have housing not infested with bedbugs without perfect credit. We can’t have perfect credit unless we have a job.
We can’t get a job unless we have perfect credit.
Are you sick of living or are you living sick?
And there is no middle class. There is the temporarily privileged poor and the slumming rich. There is no left in the US.
There is a far right and a playground for the rest of us to let off steam and get our wiggles out.
On the playground you ride bicycles, grow organic tomatoes, draw pictures and eat gluten free muffins.
The playground is the left.
You vote for the student body president during nutrition.
Are you a child? Is this is a game to you?
You should not have to fight for your life. That narrative needs to be thrown in the trash.
This is not my grandfather’s left.
The left that fought for the right to have a vacation and a weekend. The right to do nothing.
The right, if you work 40 hours a week to have a home. The right to send your children to college with dignity without having to hold your breath and pray that your child’s loan will have a bit left over after paying for a PUBLIC university tuition to cover such basics as food and books.
The right to have a good retirement.
The right to be able to get hurt and not have to live on the streets.
What do we have now brothers and sisters?
We have a left that wants a cookie for $15.00 an hour.
We have a fight for housing, not for those who have houses, but only WHEN, not if, but WHEN you become homeless.
People are homeless, because housing is too high and wages are too low, but fighting that is not fundable.
We have a left that fights not for wages that you can easily feed a family of four on, but a left that fights for you to have the right to stand in line at a church and beg for food.
This is our left.
This is our “paid for by corporate America” left.
A left paid for by people who will give every kid a computer, but won’t pay their parents a livable wage. A left paid for people who will give one person money to draw a picture, but won’t pay their fair share of taxes.
Corporate America has taken over the narrative of the radical. It has twisted the radical’s mind into thinking, “What is fundable?”’
The rich will never have a grant process to fund change.
You are not the left and you are not radical if you are on your knees begging for change from those who are committing economic terrorism against your brothers and sisters.
Those who no longer want to negotiate with oppression are not the distractions or the agent provocateurs.
Teka Lark is a journalist, poet and satirist based in the L.A. suburb of Inglewood. She is the founder of the Blk Grrrl Book Fair and the editor of Blk Grrrl Magazine–www.blkgrrrl.com and the author of the upcoming book, Queen of Inglewood,to be published on Punk Hostage Press.