Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll meditates on the MARGINALIZED AND UNDERSERVED. She writes:

Here are two of MANY stupid, basically made-up words that have slithered into the lexicon for a couple of decades now. We are all supposed to get all hot and bothered if some individual – and especially some GROUP – is “marginalized” and probably also “underserved.”

Well, who the hell isn’t? In the plaintive words of marginalized recluse Emily Dickenson, “I’m nobody. Are you nobody too? Don’t tell, they’d banish us you know.”

No, I’m serious! Wherever the seat of power is, 99.9999% of the people I have known my whole life are definitely on the margins of that seat, if not in the next room. I have some relatives that are in the next county from the margin.

I know quite a few retired people who are “comfortable,” maybe even have one or two million dollars to leave their kids after a LIFETIME of work, saving, and investing. I know ONE person who has several tens of millions of dollars. And not a one of those people has any real political power, despite being white and well-off.

Not a one of those people, even the multimillionaire, could afford to give half a BILLION dollars (pocket change for Zuckerberg) to distort the election returns. Even though I bet a forensic audit would turn up well over half of Zuckerberg’s donation was just stolen. Good. Who’s keeping track of five hundred million dollars without dipping in?

Setting aside the butcher paper over the windows at vote-counting time, and the sudden giant leap of late-breaking machine votes ONLY for Biden, and the “toilet malfunction” in Atlanta, just having half a billion dollars to do whatever is claimed they did legitimately to “get out the vote” is a horrendous amount of power wielded by one homely, expressionless dweeb. Not to worry about his half-billion, he has $134 billion MORE. There’s somebody firmly on the INSIDE of those elusive goldarned margins.

Back about forty years ago, give or take, when SNL was last funny, there was a good sketch wherein a very young Eddie Murphy tried to get a bank loan and was turned down. Then he played a guy in whiteface who went in and immediately the loan officer was just THROWING cash at him! Literally. And the idea of the sketch, of course, was that’s the way black people see the “white privilege” ALL people of pallor, to a person, have.

Yeah? Tell it to the farmers in rural America who have a couple of drought years or flood years or the bottom falls out of some crop market. See how well they do at the bank. My maternal grandparents lost the farm they share-cropped when they couldn’t come up with $8.00 for rent for several months in a row during the Depression.

When we tried to buy our house in the Dusty Little Village during the great Fannie/Freddie debacle in 2010, we approached the bank chain in which Max was actually employed, sporting a credit score of over 800, with no mortgage, no student loans, no car payments and no credit card debt. And even with our bright shiny white skin, we couldn’t get a mortgage. We liquidated some stuff we had hoped to keep solid and paid cash.

Just by the by, a pleasant, friendly black guy down the block whom I actually liked a lot personally, was finally foreclosed upon after about four years. To our neighborhood’s astonishment, we found out that he had never made a single payment! That was when the Democrats were giving out mortgages in Cracker Jacks boxes and all you had to do was show up and be black. As you remember, that went well. Thank God at least several Swamp Things running the program became multimillionaires!

And what is the definition of “underserved”? Who is doing the serving? My parents were lifelong Republicans, but even they were impressed by the great JFK speech in which he said, “Ahsk not what your country can do for you, but what YOU can do for your country!” We listened on the radio in real time. And felt proud. Not quoted a lot today, is it?

Growing up, never once did I hear anyone say that we had any right to be “served” or how we could determine whether or not we were being “underserved.” (Although on a few occasions, I feel I have been “overserved” in a bar…not MY fault. Nothing is my fault. Like you, and the poor, late Princess Di, I am just a “candle in the wind” with no agency whatsoever.)

In my small town growing up, we had one ceremonial mayor who might have had the power to change the Christmas decorations on Broadway, two cops, and a Chamber of Commerce made up of everybody with any kind of business. We had a handful of bankers and a wealthy guy who owned the Red Owl. We had a few ministers, a priest, a sheriff, a game warden and a couple of guys who were on the radio. When I was 12, we finally got a television station, so I suppose THOSE guys that read the news and pointed at the weather map were inside the all-important “margins.”

Other than that, the only other possible power-wielder might have been the editor of the local Park Region Echo which featured items like: “Mrs. Lundquist entertained Mrs. Larson, and Mrs. Nelson for coffee and Mrs. Lundquist’s sister, Mrs. Thompson, poured.” Pulitzer stuff.

My favorite part of Dr. Jill’s brilliant Ed.D “thesis” on how to retain the Affirmative Action students was when she called them “undeserved.” Which was about the only accurate thing in the sophomoric and very brief thesis, which had clearly never even been proofread.

A few weeks ago, Ann Coulter did an impressive takedown of the monstrous racist grift that is the Build Back Bigoted Bill. Ann found the definition of “underserved” on page 111 of the Rules Committee summary. The bill itself uses the term “underserved” 99 times and the term “underserved community” 19 times. The summary definition set forth for one of the key sections reads: “This section also defines an ‘underserved community’ as a group of people who have been systematically denied the full opportunity to participate in aspects of economic, social and civic life. Underserved communities include Black, Latino, Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, other persons of color, etc.”

Boy, that is a powerful lot of underserving. I don’t know what “other persons of color” entails, not even to mention the “etc.” Is that like a Player To Be Named Later? They have already listed Black, Brown, Red and Yellow. What color is left? Puce? Ecru? For sure, not white. We are read out of the bill, if not the human race. Fine. Who needs to be “served”? Whatever they are serving, I’ll pass.

Here’s what I do know. I have had it with this racist stuff. I am talking back. I am sick of hearing about white privilege. I have earned every single thing I have. Nobody gave me, my parents or my grandparents anything we didn’t work for. I am not a racist, not a white supremacist and definitely not fragile. As anyone who called me that would soon find out.

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