"JAR2: Left for Dead"
Introduction of Sorts
04-07-06
The big news of the day is that George Bush authorized the treasonous act of burning a CIA agent. All well and good that the general sheep are now being told this by the Neo-con press, (or is it free press again?) I just wonder when are they going to start delving into the fact that the George Bush family has had ties to the Bin Laden family for decades and that Bin Laden was a CIA agent during the time the first Bush was in power and that 9-11 was made to order for the Neo-Cons. The one big and obvious clue lies in the fact that George the Emperor Fascist Chimp refused to allow Bin Laden to be caught when he was cornered. Why? Because Bin Laden was probably working for the Bushes as he had been in Afghanistan as he had been for years. Is Bin Laden still an agent for the CIA? I bet he sure is. That would make George the biggest terrorist in the history of the planet. Second only to Hitler in the breadth and the scope of the bloodshed he has caused. Impeachment would be a slap on the wrist for the war criminal.
Also in the news is the US refusal to vie for a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council. The hypocrisy of the statements they have made as to why is mind boggling and insulting to the intelligence of any thinking person. They refuse to acknowledge the council but then make statements saying they will support countries they see fit.
From the illegal elections of Bush, to the secret imprisonment of thousands upon thousands of innocent individuals, from the aggressive invasion under false pretenses of an oil rich country to the mindless slaughter of women and children, from the trampling of civil rights to the destruction of constitutional freedoms, from the illegal spying to the illegal detentions, the US racist/fascist system needs to be dealt with by the international community. Of course the countries of the world will never do such a thing, they are too scared, and I suppose I should be too, just like every single non-white person I know and have ever known, just like every single exploited person in the US, just like every single exploited country in the third world.
Why is the US not joining the Human Rights Council? Because the US does not meet the criteria. With most countries in the world doing away with state execution and embracing real democracy the US falls far from short of ever meeting the standards.
Just look at the US record on such "Human" areas as education, healthcare, and the rights of the poor and the minorities. Minorities who are not really minorities anymore but in many areas have become the majority. Look at the unequal conditions under which they live. The racial inequality is a daily fact of life and one that most Americans who are effected by it will not do anything to stop, out of pure fear. I am afraid for my family and for the millions who are being kept down.
Everyone of you knows what I am talking about. In this I am addressing the non-white, non-republican, non-conventional, non-Catholic, non-anything population of the United States of America. Everyone of you who has dealt with it from first grade to old age knows what I am talking about. Everyone of you who has been beaten, been called racial epithets, been refused a loan, been denied employment, housing, medical care, and has had your lives turned inside out for no other reason than your appearance or orientation or religious beliefs. I am talking to you and I have one thing to say. It has got to stop.
In the next few weeks I will be detailing some of my past experiences in this area and I hope that you will come back and see what I have to say. This will be the first in a series titled, "Left for Dead" in which I will detail what it was like for me growing up and eventually leaving the United States.
"JAR2: Left for Dead"
First Installment
06-14-06
What is troubling about this article, this "Opinion Piece", is that it attempts to distort the truth about the segregation that exists all over the USA in every city and in every aspect of daily life. It is not the Hispanics who choose to live in poor rundown "Hispanic" neighborhoods it is the system of institutionalized segregation and invisible barriers that keep them down. It is not only Hispanics, but also peoples of every other race group that are divided in this way in the USA. The government is now controlled by just the kind of people who would gladly bring back the segregation that existed before the 60's, just look at the makeup of the government, the abuses of the police forces, the racial makeup of the business world. Sure there are token browns and token blacks here and there but the quantity by no means represents the percentage of the population that these peoples make up. So yes USA Today it is distressing, but what is distressing is the reality of the fact that so many people could live so long in the US and not be allowed to integrate into "White" society.
Stories like this fit right into the modus operendi of the Neo-Con racist machine which perpetually tries to place the blame on the exploited and victims of their fascist policies for their exploitation and their victimization. Racism is an issue that no one wishes to debate, it is taboo but it is real and it must be dealt with on an open and intelligent level, and not perpetually denied and white-washed and pushed back into the closet or swept under the carpet like the dirty little secret that nobody wants to talk about.
In a country with such a large population of non-whites this is something that must be dealt with. Unfortunately those in power are doing their best to promote and propagate more of the same racist policies that have been becoming more and more prevalent. With the stripping of more and more freedom the United States of America, once the land of the free is now the land of the subjugated.
Make no mistake the Republican Party is the party of the racists, this is an open fact that nobody even tries to hide. There are a few black token republicans and I have recently read an article in one of the major papers that openly asked, "Why would a black man want to be a republican?". That one sentence has stayed with me because in that one sentence it showed that for the man in the street the Republican Party is openly the party for the bigots in America and it is not even supposed to be a secret anymore.
I could tell you hundreds of stories about the suffering that my family and myself went through living in the US just because we were not-white, and I think that one day I might just write a book about everything. I can tell you first-hand how people live in fear to even speak out or openly speak about the injustices faced by them on a daily basis. Today to be accused of not wanting to be American means that you do not want to be "white". For me that was a painful fact of my upbringing in the US. Despite the fact that I am more "American" than any white-American, I am one quarter Taino Indian, I grew up to be made ashamed of my dark skin and my dark coloration. Extra pigmentation, for that simple fact people are discriminated against every day, and it is rampant, it is the way of life. For as my father said once the USA is "the white-man's world".
The last time that I talked to my sister she told me several stories relating to how she and our nephews; clean cut, honest looking students have been harassed on separate occasions by the police and told that they looked like they might be "Muslims", she recounted several incidents not just one or two isolated anomalies but several separate incidents that pointed to systematic racially motivated harassment and they live in the more progressive Eastern Seaboard. She was even afraid to talk about it with me on the phone, she was afraid that "they" might be listening.
Should I go on? If I get started I am afraid I won't stop until I tell everything to you, dear reader. I don't ask for sympathy, nor do I want it, I don't ask for pity, nor do I need it, I just don't want others who are going through what I went through to think that they are alone, because you dear reader are not alone. We must all speak out for our obedient silence only places us in collusion with the subjugators that are keeping us down.
I have to go but when I come back to this topic I'll tell you about how a young brown second grader was called "Nigger" terrorized by threats to have his testicles nailed to a stump and then to be doused in gasoline and set on fire, after being given a knife to free himself of course, and beaten on a daily basis. In none other than beautiful Ogden, Utah. And so I will begin to recount real experiences with, the "real America".
It is difficult for me, and I hope that you understand, to recollect experiences of that nature so please be patient if you would care to hear more. I believe that it would be a disservice to anyone who has ever gone through experiences such as these to remain silent.
Have a great day and stay human!!
07-15-06
"JAR2: Left for Dead: Race in America"
Second Installment
On June 14, 2006 I promised to continue with a story I was going to tell you about what happened to me as a child when we moved to Ogden Utah. I have now found the time to do so and if you are still there and still remember and are still interested dear reader then this is for you.
If I remember correctly, as time with its merciless progression onwards has a way of blurring events in the past, it was sometime in 1972. We had been living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, probably one of the few places where I was able to make real friends during my childhood and where I had happy memories, and were forced to move away. Recalling the steps that led to our move might give you an idea as to the events that were transpiring at that time, and serve to give you a prelude. For me those were happy memories so recalling them was easy and reminiscing is always more pleasant than recalling painful events disremembered.
I recall how I first met my best friend in Albuquerque, it was the first day of school and we were both running to get to class on time, he running down one passage way, I running down another, the two of which met at a right angle, and lo and behold at the same instant we both came around the corner at top speed and like battering rams knocked each other into a state of near oblivion. Needless to say bashing foreheads when running at top speed is not something one would want to try. We both ended up in the nurses office and then sent home. I suffered a concussion and stayed home for three days if memory serves me. After that we became great friends. I still remember that he was a Jehovah's Witness and used to get a lot of abuse at school because of that but I did not care I felt sorry for him because he never got to celebrate his birthday or any other holiday for that matter. His name was Jonny Hovey, yeah that's how he used to spell it, J-o-n-n-y. We got along great. He had a great collection of dinosaur stuff at home and we used to read books about dinosaurs and see who could name the weirdest dinosaurs all the time.
It was one of the happier times in my childhood. I remember having a lot of good times with my sister there. We used to fight a lot but she was as big as me and could punch better than I could. I also remember a lot of other things about that time. That was when "Roots" was on television. My step-mother made me watch every single episode and made sure that I understood the injustices faced by Kunta Kinte, sorry if I spelled that wrong. I remember wondering why he didn't just say his name was "Toby" like the nasty white slave owner wanted him to. He kept getting whipped and beaten, he even had blood all over his back but he kept on saying "Kunta Kinte."
If you are my age then you may recall that that was around the time that the hand held calculator was invented and the digital watch. Made possible by the invention of the LCD screen. I remember my step-mother, who I used to call my mother, dreaming of buying a calculator for her job. She was so enrapt by the stories in the papers but the things were so expensive. If I recall correctly they cost more than $600.00 dollars, which in 1972 was a small fortune. The watches were also expensive but some of the kids in school had them. I remember I begged my dad for one but all I got was a toy one that had a black face and red numbers. I thought it was cool and wore it to school but I don't think that anyone really believed it was real.
The worst thing about living in that place was that the garage was always full of black widow spiders, and they scared the crap out me. There were also the dust devils that would build up in the wide open school yard across the street and would always slam into the garage door for some reason and pick the thing up and slam it back down making such a racket that it sounded like the end of the world.
That was also around the time that Farrah Fawcett was so famous, and Star Trek was a cult like thing and Space 1999 made us all dream about the distant future and how we would all be living on the moon and stuff.
We were renting from an old woman named Mrs. Nesbitt, who was an evil witch. I remember being terrified of her, and I remember listening to my parents talking about how she was a German and lived in some mansion and hated us because we were different. I mean my parents were an interracial couple which was something almost unheard of in some of the places we lived when I was a kid. She eventually evicted us and my father got even by peeing on her damn precious living room carpet. I still remember that kind of crap.
I still don't know what on Earth my father was thinking moving us to places like Ogden, Utah and Fresno, California.
Well from there we moved to Ogden, Utah. It was there, that for the first time in my life, at six years old, I met the ugly face of racism.
Now, I was a bright boy. They were always saying I was a genius. So I got jumped a lot during my school years. You see at six in the U.S. you start the first grade and they teach you to read and add and subtract and write and all of those basic building blocks, but I already knew all that so I was put in the second grade. With bigger kids.
We had moved to Albuquerque from Chicago and I knew so much so they had jumped me a grade. That was my entry into school life. So when I got to Ogden I was pretty confident in myself.
I remember we had some neighbors who lived down the street and everyone knew that the guy had something like eight wives and never worked and I remember these really mean kids who invited me to their house once to see some puppies that had just been born leaving out the fact that they had been left out overnight in a box on the porch and had frozen to death. Nice kids.
Then there were the kids who made fun of me at school and called me "Nigger" looking back now I realize that I was probably the only non-white kid in that town and they had never actually seen a real dyed in the wool black kid in their entire little sadistic lives.
My step-mother used to get upset because I would always come home beat up, or with my clothes torn up, or with knots on my head. But I used to implore her not to go to the school 'cuz then things would just be worse.
She eventually wrote a long letter to my homeroom teacher explaining to her that my skin was darker than the other kids merely because my ancestors had come from sunnier places and had tanned through the ages. My step-mother was a well educated "Northern" woman, from Chicago, so I bet you can imagine the way she tore into that small town holier-than-thou redneck teacher. It was a thing a beauty.
Soon thereafter I was taken by some big kids to a barn on the pretext of seeing some rabbits or something. I went with them but was kind of nervous because I did not know them that well and they kept snickering like they had some big hilarious secret amongst themselves or something.
They kept prodding me to come along and I finally did so, all the time ready to run. When we got to the barn as you can guess there were no rabbits anywhere to be found. What there was, in the cool shadows of that barn was a tree stump, which may have been covered with blood, and which had a knife sticking out of the top of it.
The kids surrounded me and started pushing me toward the stump and telling me that they were going to do to me what they had done to some other boy. And what may that have been? Well they were going to nail my privates to the tree stump with a hammer and some big rusty nails, then they were going to set me on fire, and if I wanted to live I could use the knife like the last kid did to castrate myself and run home. I don't remember how I got out of there but I know one thing as I ran out the door three of them were on the ground cursing and the fourth boy had run off to look for an axe.
Soon after we moved away from that damned place and back to Albuquerque. Where someone tried to kill my father because he was married to a white woman. But that, dear reader is another story.
I am going to sleep dear reader and I hope that you enjoyed my little tale. It was all true and none of the names have been changed to protect anyone. That was what happened to me in Ogden, Utah in the winter of 1972.
Next: blood, the FBI, and a piece of slate stone through the living room window.
John Anthony Robles II
07-15-2006 Moscow, Russia