“Don’t go fucking yourself in the foot”

Razor Blade Suicide — “Some people don’t deserve to live.”

Caveat: This post contains racist slurs I do not endorse. It talks about rape. It does not follow any linear format.

Somewhere around five or six, ballpark figure. Young. A child. Not the sort of person to shy away from a stranger, which is something both rewarding and deadly. She grabs a Junie B. Jones book, the one with the monster under her bed. She tells me that she’s not sure if she’s read this one already, but peruses it anyway.

“Monsters aren’t even real,” she tells me. “Are they?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think they are.”

Monsters, my dear, are real. They just wear better disguises in real life.

A different girl, miles away. Is raped by someone close to her. Or she’s raped by four football players, and they’ll brag about it the next day. Her days are lived in fear. She’s not sure who thinks her a slut and who a victim. Her name and reputation are dragged through the mud.

Tell me whatcha gonna do now,
Tell me what when there ain’t nowhere to run
When judgment comes for you, when judgement comes for you?

Someone posts that America has died after Obama was reelected. Teenagers post “nigger,” “monkey,” and hopes that our president dies. They make threats. Has the civil rights movement been in vain? Is this what post-racist America looks like? A Tumblr user wishes we can return to an age of innocence. Things were better in the days of Mayberry. Conservative era. When wives were in the kitchen fixing supper for their husbands and kids. When colored people had their own water fountain. Where separated-but-equal was a grand philosophy. When religion reigned, birthed from the fear of Communism. S/he asks me how religion is being forced down our throats. Is it the crosses at Arlington Cemetery? No. It’s the fact that you rather restrict my friends from getting married because it offends you, because it goes against what YOU believe. It’s restricting women right over their own bodies. It’s telling people that rape is a gift of god in disguise as a violet crime.

The truth is, there were no towns like Mayberry because the way things were never was. Mayberry? No, more like Maycomb where an Atticus Finch hoped for a better future for his children, but an angry mob wants to lynch the nigger. That’s the “innocence” you want to return to? No, thank you.

The monsters stop living beneath our beds, within our closets. They gave up on the dark, and adopted the light. They became politicians. They became hometown heroes. They became our neighbors. The reflection in the mirror.

Razor blades are tools of self harm. A household item’s darker side. But it’s the not the victim that should resort to pain in order to forget; it’s the monsters that should turn to pain to remember their crimes.