An Ongoing National Lynching

"If I was talking about White Trash, I'm merely be another torchbearer in an ongoing national lynching."
--Jim Goad

"White Trash, old man. Stay out of the Wreck Center. And if you call the cops this time, we'll kill you and your cats."
--voice of one of my attackers

Like I've stated, I'm a member of the most hated class in America today, White Trash.

If Rick Swanson, the supervisor of the Wheat Ridge Wreck Center, sent a letter like the one to the left to any other minority in this country, he'd be in deep trouble. He would be called a bigot and a racists and respected less than the Klu Klux Klan who at least are honest about their sick prejudices.

But as Jim Goad states, we White Trash are the only cardboard figures left in the ethnic shooting gallery. It's so uncool for sophisticated and educated types to hate anybody but us. We are the objects of your jokes and the fodder for you wars. Just sign us up and send us out to the desert to die while you drive your Mercedes Benz down Colfax on the way to Sears to buy your twenty dollar khaki shorts or you fourteen dollar Dockers.

But if I were anything but White Trash, the city officials in Wheat Ridge would not tolerate and vague letter like the one above. If I were any other minority, Rich Swanson and the management team at the Wreck Center might have given me the chance to defend myself before they tied my hands behind my back and put the rope of slander around my neck.

The Mayor and the police surely know what everybody knows, that there are two sides to every story, not just theirs.

But when you are White Trash, nobody wants to hear your side of the story. That might mess up the stories they make up amongst themselves.

Sure, I was wrong to draw cartoons that made fun of employees.

I don't like them or respect them and maybe I could have expressed that in a more adult and appropriate way.

Not only were they consistently rude to me, but they stole my cartoons and my ipod. They violated my privacy and read my personal writings and left my notebook out on the counter for everyone to read.

When I'd walked by them I'd hear them making jokes about old men and how they snore, among other insults. And the police told me they watched my every move for months.

Later they give out my personal information to good ol' boy thugs who came to my home and used me as their punching bag.

Sure, any manager of a business has the right to ask me not to draw cartoons that offend. He even has the right to ask me to leave his establishment if I'm harming his profits.

But did Rick Swanson and the police have the right to violate my First and Fourth Amendment Rights?

The only people I know these days who study the Bill of Rights are White Trash. We have to know our rights to protect ourselves. If I had not known my Fourth Amendment rights, I'm certain the Wheat Ridge Police would have arrested me at the Wreck Center on the night they interrogated me.

The High School's nickname is the Farmers. The city was build by men who plowed the Earth on the same strip of land that is now gated off so that White Trash like me cannot even put the soles of our feet on the same soil we grew up on.

My mother lived in Wheat Ridge for over thirty years and worked hard and payed her taxes. Maybe a few of her tax dollars even helped build the Wreck Center.

She even died in a hospital in Wheat Ridge, the one on 38th, just down the street from the Wreck Center.

Other Blogs by Sean H.
Don Juan de Colfax
12stepart