Trick or Tract: HalloWTF?

Scotteriology had a post on How to Ruin Halloween. It was so ridiculous, I thought I’d keep it going.

Chick tracts describes how to make Halloween a soul-winning event. You may remember Chick from the best tract ever. May God save you from hellish boredom if you’ve ever been handed one of Chick’s tracts by a badly-dressed, over-enthusiastic street preacher. They’re hard to avoid on Michigan Ave. The Statement of Faith on Chick’s website opens by declaring that the KJV is the only source of absolute Truth. Their theology degenerates from there (as if that weren’t low enough) to decry such heretical institutions as: Catholicism, Masonry, the odious NIV.

I digress. Back to soul-winning on Halloween. Chick.com says, “Let’s be honest. How many of us have hidden in the back of the house, with the porch light off, hoping the kids will leave us alone? We don’t like Halloween and its occultic history, and we don’t celebrate it. So we hide our light, instead of letting it shine. Is that what Jesus called us to do?” Apparently real Christians don’t go trick-or-treating. I forgot. So, how do they suggest we let our light shine, instead of hiding it? Check it out:

Let Trick-or-Treaters pick from a tray stocked with different Chick tracts.

Pass out Chick tracts at Haunted Houses.

Put a Chick tract under windshield wipers at adult Halloween parties.

Leave tracts in the candy section of stores.

Set up a table and give Trick-or-Treaters Chick tracts as they pass by your church.

Go house to house saying, “Trick or Tract,” then hand the person a Chick tract.

Share Halloween tracts at school.

Leave Chick tracts at Costume shops.

Hit the streets, shouting, “Free comic books!” You’ll be swarmed with requests.

Won’t be home? Leave a box of Chick tracts at your front door with instructions.

Give some of your tracts to your Christian friends to get them involved.

Organize a church-wide Chick tract distribution project.

Hand out tracts at places where they sell Halloween pumpkins.

I would just like to highlight number 6 on that list, “Go house to house saying, ‘Trick or Tract,’ then hand the person a Chick tract.” Disclaimer: if you say “Trick or Tract” to me at the door this year, I will throw a bowl of rotty oatmeal on your face.

Or how about number 9, “Hit the streets, shouting, ‘Free comic books!’ You’ll be swarmed with requests,” … until everyone realizes your passing out Chick tracts, at which point you will likely be pushed into a stagnant body of water, stripped naked and dropped miles from home, or mercilessly pummeled.  All of these are appropriate responses to the situation.

Please, kids. Stick to candy. It may rot your teeth, but it won’t rot your mind.

The Olympics and Homelessness. Why I’m glad Chicago lost the 2016 Olympic bid.

Today the Olympic committee rejected Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympic games. Chicago was one of the four finalists. The city has been pumping out propaganda about how hosting the Olympics would be a good thing. It would mean more jobs and more money. In an economy such as this, who would argue with that? The message we keep hearing: “The Olympics would be good for us.”

Unfortunately, history seems to suggest that not everyone will get to reap the benefits. History shows that for our sisters and brothers who are homeless, the Olympics are bad for us.

During the Olympic games in Atlanta, a number of organizations implemented a program called “Homeward Bound.” The name recalls warm, fuzzy feelings and nostalgic memories of a movie about the adventures of two loyal dogs and a cat trying to return to their loving owners. Homeward Bound was actually a mass deportation. Homeless individuals were rounded up like Jews and deported. Those who weren’t deported were thrown in jail. The police mass-produced warrants with the following description: “African American, male, homeless.” The blatant classist and racist motives are undeniable. All that was missing as a gas chamber.

Apparently, people learned their lesson when Salt Lake City won the right to host. There was no documented case of deportation, although allegations were raised. The city actually secured temporary housing for about 80% of the homeless population during the games. Nevertheless, as soon as the games were over, everyone was kicked back out on the streets.

Not surprisingly, the homeless in Beijing fared far worse. Official Chinese numbers state that only 6,000 were displaced by the games. Everyone else’s estimates put that number at anywhere between 1 and 1.5 million. I’ve heard from multiple independent eye-witnesses that Beijing literally built a wall around the Olympic city to keep everyone out.

Salt Lake City seemed to display the most civility and compassion towards its homeless. However, estimates put Chicago’s homeless population at over 70,000 (compared to 2,000 in Salt Lake City). The sheer magnitude of that number would have made it a much more serious issue. Of course, with the miles and miles of sprawling urban ghettos, it might be easier to turn Chicago’s homeless into internally displaced persons (IDPs). Who’s going to do anything about an extra couple thousand homeless people in the hood? Although you also have consider the tens of thousands who will lose their homes to Olympic gentrification, as did over 30,000 in Atlanta.

Olympic gentrification would have affected me personally. Our apartment is two blocks south of the proposed site for the Olympic village. Our entire community would have been destroyed as property values would rise and the barely affordable housing in our neighborhood would become utterly unaffordable. Those who own their homes would have lost them. Those who rent their homes wouldn’t be able to pay. Forced migration would ensue. Any remaining traces of the community that exists now would wither and die. Our community would have become an urban, hipster paradise at the expense of the families and individuals who live here now. The desert would be reinvigorated into a booming white metropolis of the empire. But the desert wouldn’t actually be gone… only removed, forcibly relocated in a disguised death march.

So while it certainly would have been fun to host the Olympic games, I for one am glad that we lost the bid. A community should not operate according to a philosophy in which ends justify means. What is good for an privileged sector of society at the expense of a marginalized sector ultimately hurts the community as a whole. Good for all, or none at all. We should never ignore the hurt and hardship that we inflict on others in order to benefit ourselves.

Shots fired

We witnessed our first shooting in the neighborhood today. Sara and I were down at the corner getting Italian ices. Suddenly I am aware of sirens. It’s a fairly commonplace sound around here, but this was different. There were a lot of sirens. We turn around to see police cars swarming on our block like hungry mosquitoes on a bag of blood. Two teenage kids come sprinting out from between two houses. One takes off up our street, the other crosses and heads between a couple houses to the next block. Within a minute or two, there were two or three dozen cop cars buzzing up and down the streets with sentinels at each intersection. Three have boxed in an green sedan, recently abandoned in favor of fleeing on foot.

We walked back down the block, eating our Italian ices. We stopped to ask Stacey, who was standing on her front porch with a furrowed brow, what had happened. She said she’d heard about six shots from a block or two west and immediately went inside. Policemen and squad cars continued combing the streets. She cautioned us to get back inside, and we heeded her warning.

As we were opening our front gate, a policeman walked past. He stared at us a moment, then asked incredulously, “You live there?” We told him we did, and he replied, “You’re brave souls.”

Sara and I went inside, pulled up the chairs to our front-row seats in the sun room, and tried to make sense of it all. We marveled at the speed at which an innumerable number of cop cars suddenly descended upon our neighborhood. We were also both troubled by our interaction with the officer.

He clearly singled us out because we were white. We’re brave souls for living here, he said. Why? What about the other hundreds of people in our neighborhood? Why are they not brave souls, too? Is it because they aren’t brave or because they don’t have souls?

I’ve heard people call what we are doing a number of things: really cool, crazy, dumb, admirable, reckless. We’re now adding “brave” to that list. We are not brave simply because we live in this neighborhood. The officer didn’t congratulate everyone he passed on being brave. He congratulated us because we were white. A black person living in a lower income neighborhood in Chicago is normal. A white person living there is brave.

I guess more than anything else, my heart grieves over the incident. It only seems to reinforce what I have heard said, that racism didn’t die with the end of Civil Rights movement. It only changed form.

It is for reasons such as this that I am here.

What do you want to hear more of?

So, I’ve never really asked what you enjoy reading on my blog. Of course, I will continue to write about whatever I want to. But if everyone seems to enjoy my political rants or hearing about my personal life, I’ll try to focus in more on that. So… what do you want to hear more of?

I’m racist.

Our university newspaper recently printed an letter to the editor. The author claimed to have the solution to racism. Wow! To think that our nation has wrestled with this issue centuries, and all we needed to do was ask this punk college sophomore from Podunk, Indiana. Well, shit. Give him a Nobel.

His argument is that organizations and events that celebrate minorities are counterproductive in bringing equality. He makes the case that institutions like the NAACP and Black Heritage Month perpetuate racial differences. He argues that it isn’t fair because one would be branded as a racist if one tried to have an association for the advancement of Caucasian people or a Caucasian heritage month.

Let me pull out my favorite quotes from the article:

As a Christian, white, middle-class, American male, I feel discrimination, too.

Aw. Do you? Sorry, Pooper.

Of course, historically our country was built on (mostly black) slave labor. While slavery is done and gone, many people alive today can remember segregated drinking fountains. And don’t forget that we lied to, abused, stole from, starved and murdered the vast majority of Native Americans. Women didn’t have the right to vote less than one hundred years ago. But that’s all history, right? It doesn’t have any influence on the present. That’s what’s so great about the United States of Amnesia!

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, white people are 57% more likely to have a college degree. White households earn on average 63% more than black households. Based on those statistics, I can think of two logical conclusions: 1) Black people are biologically less intelligent and less capable than white people, or 2) white people benefit from a system that discriminates based on race. If you want to argue the first conclusion, go for it. I’m more likely to believe that these inequalities exist because our society functions to benefit white people.

So perhaps Podunk Punk was right; it’s not fair that blacks have a whole month to celebrate their heritage while white people don’t. Then again, maybe our country celebrates white heritage for the entire rest of the year. See, the problem is that Podunk Punk assumes that our societal system is already fair. He assumes that inequalities don’t exist. This simply isn’t true. If the system were fair, disparities wouldn’t exist.

My tone thus far has been cheeky and sarcastic. I’m need to shift gears here. I have a confession to make, so let me speak honestly and with humility.

I benefit from a system that values me more because of the color of my skin, and that is absolutely wrong. That makes me racist. Sure, I’m no Klansman. My racism is a more subtle, passive complicity than overt violence, but it is racism nonetheless.

It makes me angry that the system works this way. I get defensive because I am a part of this system. I know it’s not right, but I don’t know how to change it.

If anyone has ideas, I’m listening.