Animal Rights Protest South Beach by The Underground Man (1)
I ventured out of my miserable hovel in paradise today because I needed to take a break from brooding at length on the disadvantages of Medicare Advantage. I strolled up Washington Avenue and purchased a can of lime-flavored Take Five, one of the last items priced at a dollar at the Dollar Store. Having thus spent a dollar of my $15 daily budget, I walked over to Ocean Drive, stopping briefly at the cheap sandwich counter in the alley to look at the menu with prices averaging $15 for sandwiches. Then I went on my way and sat down beside the Barbara Baer Capitman 1920-1990 Writer Artist Preservationist memorial on Ocean Drive, where I proceeded to drink the hard seltzer.
“Nazi Niggers! Nazi Niggers! Nazi Niggers!” shrieked Sybil nearby as she sprawled on the grass.
Sybil is famous for denigrating pants-down black guys from over the bridge, calling the police on them during the day and having sex with them in the park at night.
She is not the only peculiar or queer person around. South Beach is a mental hospital without doctors. The totalitarian mayor, a former district attorney and legislator accustomed by trade to just saying no except to big developers, does not believe in live and let live. He has reconstructive therapy in mind for the Entertainment District, prison and Medicaid for the unruly.
Mind you, I have mixed feelings about Medicaid; it seems almost everyone in my neighborhood gets Medicaid, which has better benefits than my Medicare, and many of them have cars to pick up free food. No, I do not despise them; I despise the injustice of it all.
“Nazi Niggers! Nazi Niggers!” Sybil started up again.
Officers looking for violations
She seemed to be looking right at me, paranoid as I am in my role of frustrated underground man. Even worse, she was looking right through me, to pale-faced Code Compliance and Police Officers, all dressed in black, the non-color worn to look scary. I heard them speculate on whether the colored smoke bombs set off by the demonstrators was a violation or not.
I remembered a union organizer whom I had a Black Russian with many years ago in a bar across Broadway from Lincoln Center after we attended Rimsky-Korsakov''s Scheherazade. He hated Chainsaw Al Dunlap with a passion, cursing him roundly for "firing the niggers.”
“How can a black man like you use that word? Besides, they''re mostly white office workers with computers, not black field hands.”
“Because they are technology niggers, that''s what they are, and they don''t know it. Their consciousness must be raised. I tell them that they are all niggers in the meetings, regardless of race, color or creed.”
He had a point. “Neger” was in some parts of the world an endearing, romantic term for black, yet it is debatable whether either black or white are really colors. However that may be, fascists and Nazis in black uniforms make black as frightening as a moonless night. Further, black people have complained that black makes their real selves invisible even in broad daylight. That being irrelevant or not, all too many police and code officers inside of black uniforms and black and/or white cars look down on us with disgust, despise us, and even think of us as ants or cattle, and they get mad when they are despised in return.
So, we are divided within and without, I mused. I am a divisive, critical part of we myself. I live in crisis in a crack in the Wall. The elite think I am crazy for dropping out, yet many know better and work like crazy to drop out themselves. Three-quarters of the population have been or knows someone who has been “mentally ill.”
But I am not nuts. I am still together, me, myself, and I, Three Stooges in One. A civil war may ensue from mutual contempt. I do not know where I shall stand in that event, if I am still alive and can still stand. Ideologues do know where they stand, because, as John Adams said, ideology is idiotology.
By the way, my dear reader, there may be blood. Jimmy has $14,000 of heavy weapons in his little apartment in South Beach. I encountered him at the Publix buying diapers. He says we shall be killing each other for food before long.
“Will you protect an old man like me?”
“No, it’s a free market. Buy grenades for the killing field,” he replied and showed me photos of the corpses of Africans he had killed on his mercenary mission to Africa.
“None of them are in uniforms or armed,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter. We did what we were paid for.”
“Aren’t you ashamed?”
“I could care less. Being in a cage in Vietnam turned me into a sociopath.”
How depressing! Suddenly, however, the gloom lifted from Lummus Park. It was not only my gloom. A woman passing by with three little dogs felt it too. She looked at me, smiled and shrugged her shoulders. I smiled and lifted my arms quizzically to Heaven in response. Everything was beautiful and quiet for a few moments. Had peace finally come to Earth? And then we heard a line of demonstrators approaching. Were they singing hosannas? Had the Messiah landed?
As it turned out, they were chanting animal rights slogans as they marched down Ocean Drive. They could have been vegetarian Nazis like Hitler as far as I knew. I followed and joined them where they stopped to congregate across the street from several restaurants best known for their meat dishes.
“Don''t eat animals! Don''t eat animals! Stop killing animals! Stop killing animals! Don''t eat meat! Don''t eat meat! Free the animals! Free the animals!”
“Humans are animals!” I chimed in on the fringe. “People are meat! People are meat! Free the people! Free the people! Down with cannibalism! Down with Medicare Advantage! Down with Medicare Advantage! Down with….”
My chants were drowned out by the noisome crowd. A man near me was dumbfounded by my interjections.
“Sir,” he said, “Cannibalism is species specific, limited to humans eating humans. We''re protesting against eating lower animals.”
“Animals are animals, cannibals are cannibals. I do not see Soylent Mocha or Soylent Chocolate among you.”
“Soylent what? You''ve confused genus with species.”
“It''s a metaphor.”
“What does Soylent have to do with Medicare Advantage?”
“The headhunters are consuming our corpus.”
“Headhunters?”
“Capitalists.”
“You''re nuts,” he concluded, and rejoined the chorus to chant.
“Don''t eat meat! Don''t eat meat!”
"Don''t eat me! Don''t eat me!" I shouted, but nobody heard me.
To Be Continued
(1) The Underground Man is a nom de plume of David Arthur Walters
I'm helping my partner with second thoughts about her Medicare advantage program rethink it and sign up with a group that I found gave top-notch care with very little monetary outlay. But you're right, for those who are willing to sink low enough, or are being forced into poverty by greedy capitalists Medicaid gives more health services for no money and low taxes to boot.
Ron