i get it

I live in the northwesternmost extremity of California. Cows outnumber people. Hispanics outnumber whites by at least three to one. The crime rate, including, outrageously, rape, is stupidly high here. There wouldn't even be this many whites except it's the closest affordable place for the Pelican Bay prison guards. A trip "downtown" to the grocery store is unnerving on many fronts. It is swarming with people speaking Spanish and glaring and scowling at me, I guess, for being white, even though I'm not "white" in anything but skin, freakish really, for all my indian blood. I count myself lucky because after three years one or two of them will crack a smile, probably about my weirdness. One of the checkers is frequently at a boil because they don't know he speaks Spanish and the heatless insults they sling at him while paying for their groceries are horrendous. So. I get it. I get it. I get it.

A thousand times I have wished for some of our thug prison guards to go squelch their yapping dogs or booming music or break up the clutches of dirty old men and dirty young men making women on the street miserable. I feel the urge to scream at them for their thousand babies each, for the hassle of waiting for all their milk coupons to be duly signed and countersigned and sorted out, for the fucking affront of turning my culture into a foreign culture, for being the reason the grocery prices are so stupidly higher than stores down in Crescent City or up in Brookings, for being so relentlessly everywhere except the expensive restaurants. I feel it. I feel it a thousand times more since learning about the outrageously high rape rate here. Half of them are farm labor and the other half are the relatives of the inmates of Pelican Bay, city gangbangers just withering here so they can visit their husbands, fathers, brothers.... I get it.

What a relief it would be if the government just went in and leveled the few square blocks in town where they all live! All that oppressive seething resentment and ugliness and foreignness and tastelessness and sexism and racism and noise would be gone in a stroke. I get it.

Of course, that's how the people on the local rez have felt for well over a hundred years, but, hey....