Lazarus
Prediction error
I haven’t had the time to miss an old life. The algorithms won’t let me, I fled a falling empire. I thought I was coping, I wanted to be wrong. I thought I was fooling myself into feeling better about my choice to leave it all behind. I made a YouTube video around a year ago, I filmed it the day before inauguration. I felt silly hitting upload. I watched it the other day. It made me sad that I was so right. That a place I once loved, will never be the same and not because I left it, but because the people who it “belongs to”, let it go to where it’s going.
I don’t have the flowery language to describe the anguish that comes from watching something die a slow death. A preventable death, there is no way to justify cognitive dissonance. There is no way to combat ignorance. “Do it the right way”, is doing it the right way not done on foot? It’s not our brownness that makes us different, it’s our brownness that proves we’ve been here the longest. We, the nomadic people that walked from the Dakotas to modern day Mexico city. That went from indigenous to Mexican in the blink of a brutal imperialistic Spanish conquest of an eye.
To do it the right way must one come by boat? “Go West, young man, go West”. How do you manifest your destiny? Were we not destine to come from the land that we came from. Is indigeneity abstract within the concreteness of white supremacy? They settled the land to make way for trails of tears. 534 years later, what’s changed? The plague of the Americas has always been white.
I went south old man, I went south. Oh interconnected world, I saw the shots to her face online, the revolution will not be televised, it will be suppressed on Tiktok live. I’m watching the greatest country on earth on fire during a polar vortex from the safety of my “cartel run narco” country, ICE on the streets. Violence is all they’ve ever been good at. Violence against minorities, against women, against children. Give me Greenland, give me Maduro, give me oil, give me genocide. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Arrest them!
