Ran out of steam in Normal entries

Long about the crack of mid-November-ish, I jumped into a minor debate on the topic of white privilege on one of my sons’ friends Facebook pages. Friend is the absolute right term, but, I doubt he’ll ever make the emergency contact list. His mother and I were friends with the kids’ parents and so my son and the kid knew each from about ten days old and grew up together until they were about five or so. It may be a sit-com plot, but divorce and separation does usually mean the friends get divided up, and the kids’ parents (I don’t think they were married and Oregon doesn’t do common law marriage) had a big blowout, though the seahag and the kid’s mom stay friends, and my son and the kid always considered themselves friends. Neither one seems to have moved or even vacationed very far from the Portland metro area. I’d be surprised if they saw one another more than once a year.

I had already decided white privilege was a talking point for angry millennials and was nothing I was interested in or not enough to argue the point with any skin in the game. What bugged me about the post was 1) how hostile it was and 2) some little buddy of the kid was trying to suggest a hostile approach doesn’t promote unity. The kid bullied him until he shut the fuck up. Ok, let me stop calling him the kid, Emiliano is his name, named after the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. My kids called him Mee-Wee because Emiliano is a mouthful. His mom was, probably still is, of Latino origins, though if you put her in a parka you’d swear she was Inuit. His dad was a commie, a homegrown commie, one of those rural California kids who was too smart for the farm and too uneducated to teach. When I first met him, he was a paperboy for the Revolutionary Worker; it’s a hard gig, you have to convince someone to buy one, not just drop it off on their doorstep.

Emiliano is the whitest kid I have ever seen, I mean color wise. He’s peat bog pale and red headed, even his dad who, despite his politics, was a poster boy for po’ white trash, was a bit more ethnic looking than Mee-Wee. His dad, however, was a true believer, and could talk the ethics of socialism with fire brimstone and eloquence. I think Mee-Wee was under the impression that his dad was a bully too, mistaking willing to take a beating rather than stop telling “the truth” as a willingness to beat the “enemies of the truth” into submission.

So, I took up the mantle of the kid that was bullied on the Facebook page, though a bit more aggressively and I’m a hard motherfucker to shut up. I got him to start going ad hominem, which I consider a win, mostly because the point/counter-point was and is meaningless to me. I mean it’s a lot like shouting that stop signs are red, unless you are starting a movement to paint them or boycott stopping, you’re just making a lot of noise about the obvious. I mean I don’t know that white privilege is obvious, but I don’t mind conceding the point.

And some point my son politely added a couple cents worth and then my daughter. In my mind I had accomplished what I wanted; getting Mee-Wee all red faced. One of my points for arguments sake was that Jews, white people (yes, I know, there are dark Semites in the middle east, but not exclusively), hardly enjoy ‘privileges’ not since the beginning of recorded history until at least today. The argument against that was kind of funny. My son, somewhere in that, said that he was a quarter Jew and still something something something about white privilege. I’ve been waiting for a time when I don’t have to skirt white privilege to tell him he is not a quarter a Jew (not sure where he got a quarter from) and on skin color alone he would not be considered a white guy (he has a disease that, among more dangerous things, brings all the heavy metals in the blood to the surface. His blonde hair became black, his blue eyes darkened, and he looks like he’s been in a tanning booth year-round, or, if you’re a build the wall kind of conservative; a Mexican.).

It will be difficult to explain the history of the twelve tribes of Judea to someone who wears a cross because he likes jewelry but has never cracked a bible, let alone explain how the bloodline is matrilineal. When the romans and later the English translated the old testament, they made it seem very patrilineal, like, for instance, that Jesus was a direct descendent of King David (though, if you are following the new testament as though it were gospel, on his dads’ side, well, there either is no family tree or the tree is everybody and everything. On his mom’s side however …)

I was telling my mom the story of Sam’s bris this morning. It’s a pretty funny story. My circumcision was done but a gentile in a white coat at a hospital. So, my son has actually been the subject of one more Jewish religious ceremony than I have.

Shit I blew my energy wad on the fucking preamble. I’ll try to remember to tell the tale of Sammy’s (Shmuel) bris, in four-part harmony with hippies and Catholics and maddog oh my.