the Love Thy Neighbor edition

​Nine FACTS, One LIE
Issue #37

1. I mean, sure, this is all anecdotal. But it's also all true.

2. I have worked in many restaurants. It may be different now, but back in the day almost everyone white who worked in the kitchen was a lunatic. Almost everyone else tended to be Hispanic, and often illegal. Every single one of those restaurants would have collapsed into a pile of cocaine and ennui while the angry white waitresses who were really dancers, and the angry white cooks who were really documentary filmmakers, and the angry sous chefs who were really illustrators, and the angry bartenders who were really actors were busy letting the world know through the language of poor service exactly how unfairly it was treating them. The Hispanics just pulled their shifts, and mostly kept the place afloat.

3. I worked for a construction company for a year, nominally as a carpenter's apprentice, but really as a tall dude who carried things. Most of my fellow laborers were Hispanic, and often illegal. While I was learning almost everything on the fly, many of the other laborers were as skilled as the carpenters, but they did the shit work for shit pay anyhow. When you have no choice, what's your choice? Also, I was salaried and they were not, which likely was just a coincidence.

4. I worked in a hotel for many years, first as a clerk and eventually as general manager. During that time, I probably hired (and sometimes fired) between 100-200 people. You learn a lot about life from trying to staff and run a business that never closes. At first I mostly hired cute girls for front desk jobs. Most of those girls were young and white, because most of the young girls who applied were white. That policy got tossed out the window pretty quickly.

5. In the end, I needed people I could depend on. If you've ever been woken at 3am because the sewage pipe burst in the basement of a six-story building with 80 rooms in downtown San Francisco, you know, as you run half-dressed to your 1978 Celica GT to punch it through traffic, that you have to have someone who can handle chaos in the interim.

6. Culturally embedded entitlement, unearned self-regard, and a general parental pampering are not resume attributes that inspire confidence. Fair or not, generalization or not, brown people in America need it more. Require less. Are not obsessed with recognition. Believe in the concept of actual pay for actual labor. Many of those brown people are immigrants. Some are illegal. I’ll take them on my team all day, any day.

7. Fair point, at this juncture, to mention that I was a self-involved asshole in my twenties as well, racial classification notwithstanding. But I was, and still am, a hard worker. Give me a hard worker over a hip guy I can break down noir cinema with, or a girl who looks like arty Winona Ryder all day long.

8. Also worth pointing out that this is not about how all Hispanics/immigrants/illegals are saints, or even cool. Lazy Mexicans do exist, which I know because I've both hired and fired them. But they are unusual. Actually, I disliked a healthy number of brown people I worked with over the years, but I disliked them because of their personalities.

9. It's interesting that in this current discussion of the border/immigration/deportation, almost no one makes the distinction between Mexico and South America. Further, they ignore the profound differences between the people/countries of Central America. A Honduran and a Guatemalan, are, unsurprisingly, as different as a Manhattanite and a rural Texan. But we lump them all together because it’s easy, and because we’re generally lazy and stupid.

10. In terms of my personal hiring experience, give me a Salvadoran anytime. Amazing people, incredibly hard workers, hilarious and fun and awesome. I mean, yeah, not all of them. But, like, 88%. It got to the point that if a Salvadoran applied, I'd just hire them on the spot. Never once regretted it.

11. Probably because the statute of limitations has elapsed, I will admit that I hired illegals regularly and willfully. At least if their ID was fake enough that I could plausibly claim I'd been duped. I rarely regretted that either. What could be harder than trying to find work, and make way for your family, and to wake up with desperation instead of Jimmy Dean link sausages in your stomach, in a new country with a second language? It mystifies me why America is not knocking itself out to help these people. Big ups to Haitians and Somalis! How is it possible to live in a society led by a man who calls them "garbage" while the toothless gleefully cheer?

12. We’re the wealthiest, most fortunate, most powerful country in the history of humanity, and it’s not even close. A country of that description, I would think, would also be the exemplar of justice, humanity, hope, and service to the rest of the world. Can someone explain to me why we’re not again?

13. Hey, did you know that remaining in the US without status while applying for a visa/citizenship is a civil violation, not a federal crime? So what’s with all the guns and tear gas and federal troops tackling people in the streets?

14. Hey gun fetishist prepper! Remember when you had to have an open-carry auto-kit machine gun with bump stock and silencer and military scope and Eagle Talon ammo to help protect against encroaching government tyranny? Well, it's HERE! So why aren't you in Minneapolis right now pointing your gun/penis at people?

15. Oh, wait, because "tyranny" is a euphemism for "not white", and what you're actually protecting against is "empathy."

16. Race is an entirely cultural construction with no scientific basis, purpose, or meaning. There are certainly geographical groupings that share common evolutionary phenotypes related to DNA pools drawn upon, as well as environmental considerations such as proximity to the sun, or the need for more or less facial hair. There is no "White". There is no "Black." There are only variations of DNA combinations. The truth is that every single individual who has ever lived was so mathematically and chemically specific that they were always their own race of one.

17. There isn't a single white person in the bible. There isn't a single Christian in the bible. Really! Origin-wise, we're all South African. Back when Pangea was Pangea, there weren't continents, let alone countries. Back when the Bible was still an amalgam of mis-translated scrolls and oral histories, Jesus and his posse and his stigmata-dealers were brown Romans or brown Jews. Even the Romans were only partly Italian! They were Moors and Picts and Vandals and Visigoths and Ostrogoths and Goths and Franks and Egyptians and Greeks and Turks and Persians!

18. I am huge fan of South African music, primarily the genre known as Cape Jazz. For that reason alone, I'd be perfectly fine to have a South African passport and identify as such, which, down to the molecule, would not alter who I am, what I believe, what I stand for, or what my relative value is in relation to anyone else on Earth.

19. The Himalayas are the youngest mountain range on the planet. Nineteen major rivers/delta systems originate from them. The Valeriepieris Circle is an imaginary circle drawn on a map centered on the Himalayas that comprises 15% of the world's land mass and more than 50% of its population.

20. Which means, Stephen Miller, A MAJORITY of the world's population is neither Christian, American, exceptionalist, imbued with Judeo-Christian values, Miller-esque, Proud Boys, or white.

21. Not to get all Marx here, but the only true differences between any grouping of homo sapiens anywhere on the planet is economic status.

22. Hey, so time is static. Or at least it's non-linear. Which is to say, the past and the future are as real as this sentence. All three of them are happening, right now, as you read it. Gravity is the one force that connects all things in the universe. Because of this, time is influenced by movement. That’s not a clever bumper sticker, if you sent a windup alarm clock on a bedside table into space to orbit the earth, because of the increased distance from our gravitational center, the clock in space would record time faster than the one by your bed. It's true.

23. The earth is moving through space at 67,000 mph. So if an alien ship at the edge of our galaxy were moving at the same speed on a parallel line, January 17th, 2026, or our current conception of NOW, would be the same as theirs. But our brains aren’t really equipped to process or visualize in more than three dimensions. Which is to say, everything we see in the night sky that we presume is either static, or at least moving in concert, is not.

24. So if the alien ship were moving at exactly our speed but directionally closer or further away, that dimensional movement would change the NOW that they observe us experiencing, while our NOW would remain the same. In other words, if the ship moved toward us at 65,000 mph, the Earth they observed would be different than the one we think we're in. Say for argument 100 years in the future. If they went away from us, they’d see 16th century France.

25. Which is to say that everything in the universe is always happening all the time, the only factor that gives us the perception of a linear unfolding is observation relative to speed x distance.

26. Which is to say, Trump was a monster, is a monster, and always will be a monster. ICE is the gestapo, was the gestapo, will always be the gestapo.

27. Since a future already simultaneously exists and will soon unfold in which America comes to its senses and realizes what a FUCKING TRAVESTY this authoritarian swing into madness is, what exactly are you rooting for? IT’S ALREADY WRONG IN THE FUTURE!

28. Fuck ICE. Fuck simplistic thinking and the cowards who perpetuate it. Fuck tribalism. Fuck deliberate stupidity. Fuck white pride. Fuck greed. Fuck the current incarnation of America harder than Glen Rice fucked Sarah Palin.

29. ICE spending is currently at the level of the 13th largest military in the world — more than Canada, Italy, Poland, and Australia. Their new funding push includes 14 billion a year on detention alone. Ice is not about immigration, or fairness, or the law, or the border. It’s where the Police State meets the Industrial Prison System. It’s where people too fat for law enforcement and too dumb for the military hit the streets for a very specific brand of fascist cosplay. ICE is a private army whose real job is to trigger a justification for the invocation of the Insurrection Act, just in time for the midterms.

30. The great thing about life is that we mostly get to choose who we want to be.