White Trash: The most hated culture in America

"Be careful who you piss off. They might just be sicker than you are."
-White Trash Wisdom


"The problem is never the problem."
-More White Trash Wisdom

Everybody laughs when comedians make fun of us White Trash, how we are uneducated and so stupid and live in trailer parks, how we eat macaroni in the morning and cornflakes straight from the box at night. If they said the same things about other people, they'd be accused of discrimination and have to face the wrath of civil rights activists.

But it's okay to make fun of White Trash like me. As the people in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, proved, it's also okay to steal from me and accuse me of crimes I never committed, like stalking.

And it's okay to come to my trailer at night and hide under the darkness of my porch and jump me and beat the daylights out me.

In Wheat Ridge, the police protect their own. They don't protect White Trash. If anything they want to make it so unsafe for us we have to leave.

My White Trash heritage is in the Deep South. My mother came from Mississippi and died in Denver shortly after she gave birth to me. Her spirit went to heaven but her body went to the morgue in a garbage bag and finally she was set to rest in a pine box. And I was shipped off to foster homes for the first years of my life.

Eventually I ended up in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. I ended up the ghetto of Wheat Ridge where all us White Trash lived. It was the corridor along 38th, from Kipling up to Interstate 70. At Kipling and 38th there was a farm with a big barn. The farmer took care of other people's cows and pigs.

Today, the farm is gone and replaced by the Wheat Ridge Wreck Center which houses swine of a different kind. But the barn I used to do chores in as a White Trash boy still stands there.

One day I was in the barn when I was supposed to be at home. When I came in late I received one of many beatings. The Wheat Ridge police never came around and investigated that. But years later they did a detailed investigation of me for drawing cartoons of employees while I worked out at the gym.

The police officer knew my age, women I dated, the hours I came to the gym and left. She even had a zerox of a drawing I did of a life guard I drew only after she gave me permission. She also told me that the employees had been watching my every move on a security camera.

I thought, "who is stalking whom?"

The trauma of my early years caused me to stutter. Unable to express myself with the spoken word, I turned inward and learned to draw. This gave me a way to connect with people and protect myself. When the bullies at school beat me, I drew them and they stopped.

The bullies in Wheat Ridge are very sensitive people. They can brake my bones but if I draw them, the get really upset. Their little feelings get hurt.

At Manning Junior High and Wheat Ridge High School, they called me the bully of the bullies. When a bully beat me up or abused one of the Special Education Students, I drew cartoons of them and they backed off.

My seventh period English teacher at Manning Junior HIgh, Miss Henderson, used to tell me that the pen is mightier than the sword. Also, she used to sneak me out of class five minutes early so I could run home and escape the beatings from the gangs of rich kids who hated white trash.

That's how I survived until I could get out of Wheat Ridge. The only way out I knew was the Army. When I left, the woman who adopted me cried. She thought she'd never see me alive again. Years later I returned to the place I hated to express my love for her by being with her as she died.

Sophisticated types in Denver say "where do I go to see White Trash? Do I have to drive all the way out to Wheat Ridge where they wear those tacky khaki pants?"

I say no. I tell them that the police have pretty much chased all of us out of our homes there. Now 38th has a gated community to keep people like me out.

I tell them if they want to see White Trash all they have to do is turn on their wide-screen TV. White Trash are the many men you see fighting the dirty war for oil so that a few Good Old Boys can make billions since they aren't satisfied with mere millions and millions.

A lot of people think White Trash are Good Ol' Boys. But they are mistaken. The Good Ol' Boy is the enemy of White Trash.

White Trash like me lack social skills. We don't know how to dress and we don't know how to say the right things in the right situations because nobody ever taught us. But we are honest and we have heart. We don't start fights but we finish them. As white trash, I can look you dead straight in the eye and tell you what I think and what I feel. But I can't tell you what you want to hear.

A Good Ol' Boy has social skill. He's a politician. He's dishonest. He'll tell you what you want to hear to set you up so he can stab you in the back, just like the Wreck Center employees did to me. A good old boy will never tell you what he is thinking. And he won't tell you what he feels because the connection to his heart is cut off, probably because he suffers so much guilt he cannot bear to experience true emotion.

Who knows, maybe if he allowed himself to experience the realm of the heart, his self-loathing would gush out like the oil in the gulf of Mexico.

The good old boys can sit around a table and chew the fat for hours and arrive at decisions that make them feel secure but bring mayhem, misery and destruction to everybody else. Maybe you can't fault these emotionally stunted men. After all they really believe what they are doing is right, no matter how wrong it is.

White Trash vets like me have a name for good ol' boys when they get older. We call them Chicken Hawks. A Chicken Hawk is a liberal in his twenties and too chicken to serve his country. But by his fifties he has morphed into an ultra-conservative Hawk who is ready to send your son to war but not his.

White trash are neither liberal or conservative. We voted for George Bush, senior because he was a real vet. We didn't vote for his son because, well, that's a different story. Let's get back on track.

People here in Denver ask me where they can go to see Chicken Hawks.

I tell them to go out to Wheat Ridge. They are everywhere. They are on the golf courses in their nice guy khaki shorts and the bad boy tattoos and Harleys. You'll see them riding down Sheridan Boulevard in their Mercedes with their baseball caps and golf shirts on while the go to eat lunch with their buddies at the Pink Elephant Bar up on Alameda.

One time I was in the Pink Elephant Bar eating lunch with a group of them and a fellow looked at me and asked me a question about a concern and I told him I could answer it by drawing a diagram on a napkin. One of the Good Ol' Boys told me to stop, as if I wasn't allowed to speak. I asked him why and he said, "just stop, Sean." They feel like people like me shouldn't be allowed to speak in their presence.

Just up the street from the Wreck Center, the Good Old Boys took over the last place for White Trash vets from Wheat Ridge to go. In a blue house that was granted non-profit status by Jefferson County, the Good Old Boys now control Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by a vet who survived WWII. In his book he described the difference between real alcoholics like me and hard and moderate drinkers like the good old boys. Now days, the biggest outsider in AA in Wheat Ridge is the alcoholic. This once sacred resting place for people like me has become a social and business network for Chicken Hawks. If you go to AA in Wheat Ridge to get sober, your chances are less than five percent. But if you go there to get married, your chances are better than ninety percent.

Now the Chicken Hawks sit around at the Pink Elephant Bar and eat fattening food and make up rules that not only exclude White Trash like me but, also, African Americans, Hispanics and, of course, women.

These men blame liberals for all their problems yet they get rich off liberal policies like Section 8. They don't like bleeding hearts as people, but without their insistence on freedom of speech, these Chicken Hawks could not operate their porn store called PleasuresXXX at the Dysfunction Junction on 38th and Kipling.

The manager of the Wreck Center is a typical good old boy and the letter he wrote me is a concise monument to the cowardly thinking of Chicken Hawks.

If you read his letter you'll notice how he talks about meeting with his management team to discuss me behind my back. You'll notice how they arrive at a decision that would make them feel save but bring mayhem and violence into my life. You'll notice how he never takes responsibility for anything. He begins by shifting blame to his employees. I was a threat to their safety. But he never says how I was a threat. Then he shifts blame to his management team who made the decision. He was just sort of a passive observer, unable to think for himself. Finally, he shifts the blame to me and the Police. I'm the bad guy here the police are the good guys. Whatever the Police say or do is out of his hands.


What he doesn't say in the letter, of course, is that he told the police I was stalking employees at the Wreck Center. The police officer told me that. He also fails to mention that the employees violated my privacy and snooped into my personal notebook, stole my cartoons and my ipod and watched my every move on a camera for months.

The reason he lied about me stalking employees is obvious.

You see, if you call the police and say, "this White Trash guy name Sean H. is here and he draws cartoons and we want you to arrest him," the police will probably say, "well, why don't you do your job and talk to him? Our job is to protect the public, not manage your gym."

But if you call the police and say, "we've got this guy stalking our employees," then the police have to investigate.

The manager of the Wreck Center knows the game, though he pretends he doesn't. Heck, he'd be insulted if I treated him like half the idiot he pretends to be.

Like the Chicken Hawks in AA, this coward will not say to my face what he said behind my back.

Although I'm not a Christian, I do try to live by the words of Jesus who said, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

I don't like the way these men treat me and I don't want to lower myself to their standards.

So, I have requested numerous times to mediate with them on a level playing field with a third party, objective person present.

But they are not comfortable on a level playing field. They are only comfortable if they have safety in numbers and complete control of the terms of the discussion.


Thanks bye,

Sean H.
White Trash novelist and cartoonist.
abuckandabook.com

Chicken Hawks in AA

"The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking."
--Third Tradition

The 12 Traditions are somewhat to Alcoholics Anonymous what the Constitution is to the United States.

The difference is that civil rights are laws. But don't tell people in Wheat Ridge that. They think civil rights are for other people to obey, but not them.

AA Traditions are but suggestions to help carry the message to the suffering alcoholic.

The founder of AA, Bill Wilson, knew that the quickest way to lose the trust of an alcoholic was to tell him what to do, to cram ideas down his throat. So he designed the program to be suggestive only.

Bill Wilson described three types of drinkers, real alcoholics like me and heavy and moderate drinkers like the non-alcoholics like the self-appointed Sheriffs of AA. A real alcoholics like me cannot stop once I start to drink.

When I drink, the craving for more is so powerful that it eclipses out all other matters like eating food and going home or going to work. The only hope for someone like me is Alcoholics Anonymous.

A hard drinker cans stop if there is sufficient reason to do so, like his marriage or business is at risk. Moderate drinkers can have a couple of drinks at lunch and go back to work, even though they might want another one.

Hard and moderate drinkers struggle with the concept of using suggestions, not commands. They don't understand why they can't go to AA and make up a bunch of rules.

Real alcoholics, however, understand it very well. Just as there is honor among thieves, there is honor among real alcoholics and they know that the most demeaning thing you can do to another alcoholic is insult him by telling him what to do. For instance, telling him things like who he can or can't have sex with, how he should or should not vote in matters affecting AA and when or when he cannot speak at the dinner table.

Real alcoholics are street smart and they can spot a fraud from across the room. Self-appointed sheriffs in AA are frauds and everybody knows it.

The real alcoholic is obsessed with controlling his drinking. The so called Al Anon, started for the wives of alcoholics, are obsessed with controlling the alcoholic. Theses self-appointed sheriffs of AA are Al Anons, not alcoholics. Their entire lives are built around trying to get people like me to follow their rules.

About four years ago, these Chicken Hawk, self-appointed sheriffs of AA took it upon themselves to amend the Third Tradition which states that the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.

They changed it to read more like this: "The only requirement for membership is a desire to conform to our rules, like if you're our ex-girlfriend you can't be a member unless you lie and say you are an alcoholic. Also, if you sit in meetings and draw cartoons that are harmless to us, that's not okay. It is, however, okay if one of us Chicken Hawks takes advantage of a newcomer while she pukes into a toilet. We don't talk about that."

If all this sounds confusing to you, it was very confusing to all of us real alcoholics who had to sit in group conscience meetings and listen to these arrogant clowns attempt to explain it all to us as if we were white trash morons who are too dumb to read the writing on the wall:

Tradition Three

"The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking."

As the Big Book points out, confusion is a symptom of self-will run riot, though they usually don't think so.

After all of that, the meeting fell apart. The real alcoholics left in disgust and migrated to a place in Denver called York Street where the group conscience is built around carrying the message, not making up a bunch of rules to make good old boys feel safe and protected from all of us.

Within weeks of that, the so-called Traditions Sheriff, who always starts all the trouble, took all his U.S. dollars from his government check and moved to Mexico where he supports their economy, not ours.

The last time I saw the Chicken Hawks at the the Pink Elephant bar they were complaining about people from Mexico and how they all come here and speak Spanish and send money down South to feed their families.