Cracker Jacks

I’m sitting here this morning, at 5:00, because I can’t sleep. I’m sad and confused and it is making me shake with anger.

 I’m eating Cracker Jacks, because it’s the biggest act of defiance and rebellion and protest I can muster from behind a computer screen while using social media.  I’m not so much eating them, as chomping down on them with all the anger my 38 years can muster, with a very defiant attitude, one hand shoving them in my mouth, and the other clenched in a fist of rage while I stare at a cursor between typing and chomping so hard I might crack a tooth.

Most people wouldn’t associate my Cracker Jacks, the treat of our younger years with the hidden surprise, with an act of protest.  But to me, they have come to symbolize something VERY close to my heart.

This story starts at a car wash.  I was about three.  I know this because my brother was born when I was four and my mother wasn’t pregnant and she was vacuuming our Toyota Celica at a car wash in Idaho Falls.  Going to town was always a treat.  We always got Kentucky Fried Chicken and went to the zoo to see the monkeys.

It was a sunny day, and I vaguely remember the sun was pale yellow and streaming through the window in a bright ray that reflected dust.  I was crouched on the floor behind the front seat, scared, staring at the black vinyl pocket on the back of the seat.  My mom was looking for me, but I could not move or speak from fear.

She finally found me and asked what the hell I was doing, in that panic-stricken way that is tinged with ultimate relief.  I said, “That man got burned up.”

A black man had pulled up and started using the vacuum next to us.  I remember my mother telling him hello and asking how he was.  He’s also the one that told her I was hiding behind the seat when she panicked.  I had never seen a colored person.

My mother was embarrassed.  She pulled me out of the car and informed me he wasn’t, in fact, burnt up, and made me speak to him.

Fast forward a couple of years and I had a cousin who went through a phase of using the ‘N’ word.  I remember standing in front of the dryer and it came out of my mouth.  My mother grabbed me by the nape of my neck, marched me to the sink, and washed my mouth out with Lemon Joy dishsoap.

I wasn’t yet in kindergarten, and my mother wasn’t the type to ever say, “Wait until your dad gets home!”  No, she was the take charge type that flushed your shit the minute it happened.  But, not this day.  She let me know Dad was going to hear all about it, and she made me tell her where I heard that word.  And let me clarify, she had every right.  I heard every cuss word known to man with my mother’s family, but never in all of my days, even still, have I ever heard that word uttered by my parents.  I’ve witnessed my father tell people to leave his house for using it.

My father has never laid a hand on me.  I was in my room when he got home, and he called me down stairs.  He was sitting on the edge of the coffee table, by the heater, in front of the television we had that didn’t work.  A stack of vinyl records were under the table, and I stared at the cover of Linda Ronstadt in roller skates on the top, because I was scared to look him in the eye.  I was scared I was going to get my first Buddy spanking.

It never happened, but at 5 years old, instead of just telling me it was bad and handing out corporal punishment, my dad gave me a history lesson about the derogatory meaning of that word.  From slave ships to MLK, Jr., he covered it.  It ended with him telling me of a good friend he had in college who returned to Uganda and was killed by Idi Amin.  And, even at 5, the power of words used to oppress people was not lost on me.

And in the middle of all of these memories from my early childhood, sunny summer mornings helping my grandmother clean the bar stand out like lilacs in bloom after the rain.  Grandma would pick up the mail at 10:00 in the morning and deliver it to us before going to clean the bar.  We’d play the jukebox and pretend to mop the floor, probably making a bigger mess than we helped clean.  We’d fight over songs and space invaders and see how fast we could get the bar stools to spin.  When we had finally drove her good and crazy, she’d kick us outside. 

We’d do balancing tricks on the parking curbs in the parking lot, roll down the hill, then get bored and decide it was time to visit Joe.

I’ve written about Joe before, but he was the first gay person I ever knew, and I didn’t know he was gay until years later.  He was a part of our family.  At every Christmas, he had gifts for all of us.  Plus, he always had boxes of Cracker Jacks that he kept just for us when we’d visit.

Cracker Jacks. That red, white, and blue box. I always looked forward to the Cracker Jacks.

I grew up around gay people.  There are too many to even count, and all of them, every single one, has done more good in this world just by being brave enough to come out of the closet, than all of the people combined whom I have heard utter “faggot” over the last two days and the course of my life.

My mother has always called me too sensitive and too idealistic.  I’d cry over books or get pissed at being told I couldn’t do something because I’m a girl. I’d get pissed at my grandparents’ racist comments.  I STILL get irate when people lecture me for giving money to panhandlers.  Mom would tell me, “They’re just uneducated.”  Her compassionate way of dealing with people.  And, my mother didn’t mean school educated.  She meant opening your eyes to new ways of thinking.

I don’t believe it’s a lack of education.  I believe it’s fear.  Just like me when I was three.  I had to get out of the backseat and shake the hand of the real world.  I had to realize it wasn’t what my few years in an isolated small town taught it me it was.  

It’s fear because it’s hard.  It’s hard, because, just like that first book you had to read for symbolism and metaphors and look between the lines, it takes putting aside what’s on the surface and digging deeper. Learning to think in ways you haven’t before.

It’s fear because we have a messed up notion that giving some “outcast” group of people a chair at the table means we have to give up our seat, when in reality, we just make room and pull up an extra chair.

Telling the oppressed to respect the oppressor is the trick used by partriarchy, colonial imperialists, and just about every class of people seeking to preserve a false sense of entitlement.  Call me crazy, but I have no desire to inflict myself with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.

I have come to the conclusion, that, no, they’re not uneducated.  Stupidity is not inherent and is not a justification for bigotry and being an ass.  Most people with serious learning disabilities still understand kindness.   It does not, and should not, ever, excuse behavior that is unjust and evil.  I’m not jumping on some “let’s just keep our mouths shut and let them be mean” bandwagon.  That’s how tyrants become tyrants…no one stand up to them.

Moreover, I have no desire to surround myself with assholes.  And, when you consciously make a decision to hate a group of people that you don’t even KNOW, and lump them all together as one type of person, you are missing stories and the deepest connections that make us human.  You are choosing to be a total douchebag, and as for me, I’m not going to stand in silence while you bellow through a megaphone how others are inferior.

I don’t stand for it in the walls of my home or from the mouths of my children.  

Anger is an underlying emotion.  I know.  I’m not angry.  In fact, I’m deeply sad and confused. 

This isn’t about you being able to say whatever you want.  It’s not about some pasty-white, straight, Christian, Daddy-rules type vision someone else has about what this country should be. 

It’s about standing up for justice and equality.  It’s about standing behind the things I teach my children.  It’s about taking up space, and refusing to accept a world and way I don’t want my children to grow up in.  It’s about people thinking it’s perfectly fine to be an asshole.  

I don’t care if you find justification for bigotry and hatred in the Bible, the Constitution, or whatever news outlets from which you choose to glean your information.  They are the same things that have been used throughout the ages to keep people on the fringe in a nice little box so they don’t get all uppity.

You’re right.  You ARE free to be an asshole.  You’re free to choose to be an asshole.  You’re free to sit in judgment, and say I have mine and all of that.

You’re not free from being called out on it.  So, when you decide to be that asshole, I’m going to crunch Cracker Jacks in your face and let you know…because, in the words of my mother throughout my entire life, “Don’t be a dick.” 

I'll chomp my Cracker Jacks with my mouth open, so you can see them being chewed up.  Because you're behaving like a Cracker and a Jackass.