My December to Remember 3: Day Twenty-Six
News: Colorado Gov. Jared Polis ripped for cringey “Feliz Navidad” video on X, after 350 migrants were bussed into his state 24 hours prior.
Telsa robot malfunctions and injures worker.
Teen tourists stabbed in Grand Central Station by man who wanted “all white people dead.”
Trudeau announces there will be tampons in the men’s bathrooms in Parliament.
Last year, I wrote about how some dingus in my neighborhood keeps writing political messages in chalk along some construction walls across the street. I haven’t seen any lately. Not even after the Hamas attack. Weird. Anyway, these messages were just progressive liberal talking point tripe. I hated looking at them. Just because I live in a deep blue sh*thole doesn’t mean I need to be reminded of it just when I’m walking home. One of the worst I saw was “In a world of Greg Abbotts, be a Beto O’Rourke.” Like ew. Multi-time loser. Indirectly responsible for this horrible Tweet that still haunts my very soul. And yet one day, I decided I had enough of looking at this chalk monstrosity and decided to do something about it.
I was walking home from work. I craned my neck to look at the flurry of chalk garbage, sighed, and walked to my apartment. Without a moment to spare, I got some soapy warm water and a sponge and headed back outside, where I calmly and methodically wiped off each and every slogan I could find. Yes, that person has the right to exercise free speech. Well, they did it. I have the right to make my neighborhood, ahem, inclusive for everybody. This isn’t a district like Christopher Street where there’s a central hub for gay pride flags. This is just a regular old neighborhood. We’re not here to electioneer when we’re just trying to make it back home.
I did something similar when I saw a poster advertising products “Made by those with Latinx heritage.” Know what I did? Plucked out my pen knife and cut the “x” off Latinx because that isn’t a word nor a concept and I just wanted to make it accurate. I know it’s not my place to do any of this and I’m basically admitting to criminal mischief, but I couldn’t take it anymore. Everything around me was just so wrong. So off. Entirely broken. I needed some level of control, so I acted and erased it myself. But now what? The world is still stupid around me. Did I do enough when all is wiped clean?
Sometimes I wonder if these little things I do matter. I like to think so, but what happens when the news is so backwards, it comes out of its own behind? That’s what I think is happening right now. That’s why there are days it just feels so helpless being here and watching it unfold. But truthfully, all that is starting to fall away. Whenever I see the ultra-craziness right at the forefront, I know who’s winning, and it’s not these loud obnoxious chalk-possessing lunatics.
It’s all just put out there for us to observe. Shining a light on the things we must not tolerate because they are simply intolerable. That’s it. So what do I do now? Just wait. Watch. And farm a little chaos every so often. Maybe grab some chalk myself. There’s a million things I can do. I don’t need to do them all right now.
