A man who survived a Nazi concentration camp once wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. He stated that the people who survived tragedy of the camp all had one thing in common: They had something to live for, a family, a career, a higher calling. He had a name for this purpose. He called it Meaning.
And now I have meaning. I want to use this blog to speak out for the lower class in this country, people like me who are vets, artist, musicians and poor White Trash who are trapped in a mental prison and are too injured physically and mentally to escape, at least for now.
I fled Wheat Ridge and now live in Denver.
Denver, along with San Francisco, is the kindest city I’ve ever lived in. I’m around people who are just like me, lower class whites with nowhere else to go. I’ve met many men had to leave their hometowns due to societal pressures and pressures from police. All of these men have gone through the same thing I went through in Wheat Ridge. They’ve been harassed by police, accused of crimes they never committed and made to feel unwelcome in public institutions like gyms.
When I walk down the street in Denver, I feel safe. I don’t have to constantly be on the look out for police. And when I go to the gym, people don’t laugh at me when I walk by and watch my every move on their security cameras. When I work out, I draw cartoons sometimes for my own amusement. People don’t seem to really care. They are more concerned with their lives to worry about me.
I like who I am and where I come from. Lower class whites like me are the most creative and artistic and resourceful people I know.
The modern day White Trash men I know in Denver are similar to the African American men I met when I was a boy hanging around my father’s church in Mississippi. The men in Mississippi I knew felt there was little the world offered them, so they turned inward and found validation in God and Jesus and art and music.
The same is true for all of us here in Denver. We feel like we have replaced African American men as the national projection screen for all the suppressed hatred of the middle and upper classes. So, we occupy one bedroom apartments all over Capital Hill and go to AA meetings and help our fellow vets and alcoholics with the Twelve Steps and we play our guitars and draw cartoons.
Currently, there is a class war going on all around me.
The people in Wheat Ridge had the right not to like me or ask me not to draw cartoons of them. But when they crossed the line and violated my civil rights, then everything changed. Now I feel like I have a responsibility to stand up, not just for me and my family but for countless vets and other men.
And this responsibility has given me the greatest gift of life. It’s a gift that cannot be bought: I have the gift of meaning.
Thanks bye,
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