THE FIRE THIS TIME

James Baldwin wrote, “One’s bitterness begins to be palatable and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.”

Indeed, these days hating is tasty. It’s the number one flavor once you tune in to your news of choice or log on to Facebook. A Senior Engineer recently got fired by Mark Zuckerberg for sharing evidence that the social media site lets conservative online ruckus slide. While liberal users posting news about Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic often spend thirty days in Facebook jail. Somehow the condition of COVID has been branded with race and class. Does this truly overlap and interplay? Or just distract? It ain’t droves of Black and Brown spreading the pandemic from the Sturgis Motorcycle rally.

One’s bitterness is palatable as it washes across your tongue at the sight of folks you blame for our current crisis. Is Congressman Gohmert sick with coronavirus because he wore a “dang” mask? Is the spread of the virus down to the masked Black Lives Matter protesters? Or is it the growing number of people living on the sidewalk, in cars and campers without handwashing, sanitizer or toilets? Outside of missing meals and baths, our local homeless neighbors appear vibrant and happy. If COVID-19 takes two weeks to incubate, 140 days into this pandemic, where’s the beef? In the Hollywood Hills, it’s tasty to try to blame sidewalk partying drug users for our current health crisis, but the infection numbers aren’t adding up.

Baldwin’s point about the plight of the Black man: “that hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry” is a worthy rhetorical flourish. But hatred is big business. It is the current operating system in politics. It drives the beauty and fashion industries: not thin, rich or hot enough? Buy this crayon to transform your eyebrows into Groucho Marx rectangles. Problem solved. Matte pastel lipstick dries out your mouth and has it looking like a puckered bootyhole. That’s the look! Add inch-long tarantula lash strips for extra drama-

In the isolation of quarantine, we swallow our bitterness down in secret. “It is what it is,” was Donald Trump’s read on our worsening coronavirus crisis. We Americans suck it up, suck it down and swear this is just how it’s got to be.

Our hatred is too heavy a sack to carry. So we put it off on others. We don’t hate; “they” are just hated. It really is their fault for being Black, immigrant, homeless, differently abled or sexually assaulted. Neither we nor the perpetrators did it; they did it to themselves. If only they would get off their backsides and stop complaining about all their trauma, we could get back to normal.

Hatred ain’t my burden as quick as I can deflect the blame on you. Bitterness rests on my tongue only as long as it takes for me to put the blame on you for suffering. And as long as I’m not on the very bottom of the ladder or barrel, I’m good.

And, come November 2020, as long as my candidate, my agenda, my comeup wins, I’m Gucci.