My Dark Side

You wouldn’t expect a place like Minnesota might be a hotbed of racism, but something seems to be going on. George Floyd died there, giving birth to one of the most misunderstood political slogans in history. Suggesting that black lives might matter seems to really upset people.

GiveSendGo is a “christian” crowdfunding site that’s taking criticism for taking on all the controversial crowdfunding efforts that the other sites won’t touch.

Recently, GiveSendGo hosted an effort by Shiloh Hendrix that has raised almost a million dollars. Hendrix needs the money because someone made a video tape of her calling an autistic five year old Somali child “niger” about fifty times, then performing a ululation.

I feel certain she has no idea of this, but ululation is a vocal trill that sounds something like “lelelelelelele.” It originates in the Middle East, possibly specifically Iran, where it fulfills the same role as Irish “keening,” but also is used to encourage warriors in battle. When Martin Scorsese made “The Last Temptation of Christ,” he used the ululation to signify the death of Jesus Christ. I’m pretty sure Hendrix just thought it was a funny noise.

Hendrix said she was justified in what she did because the autistic five-year-old had looked inside her child’s diaper bag, and added, “They’re like that.” “They,” I assume, means black people. “Like that,” I assume, means she thought the autistic Somali child might steal whatever diapers or lunchables were in the bag, because they’re like that.

Hendrix said she needed the money because “people on the internet” found out who she was, where she lived, that she had no job, and other identifying matters, and have been very mean to her. I’ve been using the internet to call horrible people horrible since there was an internet, and yeah, they will identify you and make prank phone calls meant to intimidate. I don’t intimidate easily. People who don’t feel guilty are hard to intimidate.

GiveSendGo allows donors to use made-up names when they pledge their dollars. Fairly quickly, they noticed how many of the donors used names associated with fascism, racism, and a bunch of other things, so they disabled comments, but didn’t black out the fascist names.

While there were a few thousand-dollar donations, the vast majority were in the ten-to-twenty-dollar range, enough of them to raise over seven hundred thousand dollars, as of this writing. That many people feel it’s ok to call an autistic baby nigger because “they’re like that.”

A while back, I gave up on internet trolling because, even though I felt like I was using it for the right reasons, it brings out an uncomfortable evil in me. In those days, I would absolutely have been one of the reasons why Shilo Hendrix felt like she needed to move. Reading about her story, that was my first reaction. The old evil crept up in the back of my mind, itching to be let out.

When I was younger, the Good Lord blessed me with the physical strength to either hurt or help people. I augmented it with exercise and sports drugs. There were so many times when I lived right on the cusp of doing something evil because of it. When I got old and weak, I didn’t miss having to make those choices anymore, and then he revealed another skill where I can use my knowledge of computers to make evil people wish they weren’t. I rarely ever discuss it. Just let your imagination run wild.

I’ve always believed that the people in America were slowly getting better. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963, it wasn’t hard to see concrete examples of people becoming more humane and visibly less evil. Both my mother and my father were very insistent that I keep my eyes open throughout the whole thing. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe people, despite everything, are good at heart, but they made sure I could see that side as well.

Some did more than others, but all my life, we’ve always had presidents in America who led us away from evil, at least evil towards each other. All my life until August 11, 2017, when the president had a chance to stand up to the fascists and white nationalists that killed a woman in Charlottesville, Virginia, but instead he said there were “very good people on both sides.”

I’m not a historian, at least not a good one, but I believe that future historians will point to that particular moment in time as a switch change in America. The President of the United States said it was ok to be evil.

I try not to be evil, but I can be. There’s an absolutely vicious part of me that doesn’t know when to stop. I’ve spent my entire life trying to train it to be something good, not something evil. That’s the “gentle” part in “gentleman.”

When asked to divine a gentleman, Robert E Lee wrote a long explanation as to why the North should forgive the South, and white people should be good bosses to black people now that they couldn’t own them. When I was a KA pledge, they made me memorize it. They shouldn’t have because it made me wonder what the hell he was trying to say.

Lee spent the last years of his life trying to redeem himself and lead young Southern men to do the same. I think he had some success at that. That’s why KA exists. Faced with no hope in life, five boys saw that Lee was holding out a light that they might be something different. There have been many times when boys in the order forgot that, but, in time, they usually come back to it.

Lee found there was an evil in him, too. Using it to try and save his country, he nearly destroyed it. That’s the danger; once you unleash the thing, it can be pretty terrible.

I don’t know what’s going on in Minnesota. I suppose Shilo Hendrix will move away from there. I’m pretty sure the internet will find out where she moves. That money she raises won’t last long.

Shilo Hendrix made a video of her with her Fox News blonde Hair and her Jasmine Crocket fake eyelashes, holding her white baby and posted it on GoFundMe, who almost immediately said “nope,” so she ended up on GiveSendGo.

She doesn’t think of herself as evil. She thinks of herself as a proud white mom who has “had enough!” Enough of autistic black babies, I suppose. I can’t help but think about the toe-headed baby in her arms, how will he turn out? Evil doesn’t always follow generations. Sometimes it just vanishes. Sometimes it manifests itself in the best of families. I wish only kind things for that baby. I wonder what his life will be like.