I thought I’d drop you a few lines since this week makes five years since we left Iraq.
I know you say you ain’t the same without ur leg but I hope
ur feeling better.
I’ll feel hella better when I throw out these pills for crazies.
Why does the fuckin’ V.A. give me pills when I say I need food?
Why don’t shrinks know people go crazy from hunger?
My partner died of AIDS last year so I got no one to talk to so I went to Reno last month.
That was a big mistake, but the ticket was a free one way so I figured I’d go see family.
My sister wouldn’t let me meet my nephew ‘cause I came out gay.
Her holy roller husband kept sayin’ he’d shoot me for Jesus.
So I spent the rest of my food money for a one way back to Frisco.
My family can kiss my faggot ass!
Oh well, that’s life for crazy fags and stupid war ‘heroes’
I keep hoping you’ll send me a card so I know ur alive.
I’d call but I can’t buy a phone.
I get $300 a month disability and it costs $200 for a week in a crap hotel, so’s I won’t have a place for the next three weeks, but please write to that address I sent anyways.
Please.
Love,
Zack
The writings of the homeless men and women who sleep on Clarion Alley in San Francisco
“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
― Malcolm X
“I am just one of the people who is sick of the social order, sick of the establishment, sick to my soul of it all. To me, America’s society is nothing but a cancer, and it must be exposed before it can be cured. I am not the doctor to cure it. All I can do is expose the sickness.”
― Nina Simone
“If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal”, then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”
― John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage
There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.”
― Frank O’Hara, Early Writing
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying. Simone de Beauvoir
What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn’t see Negroes hanging from its branches. Jean Genet
Disclaimer: To the best of my knowledge the images on this page are in the public domain.
Header photo, Portrait of Malcolm X, by Rob Goldstein (c) 2016
I’m an American; my country is built by every race from every nation in the World
Padre
As of 2015, 14% of the United States’ population is foreign born, compared to just 5% in 1965. Nearly 39 million immigrants have come to the US since 1965, with most coming from Asia and Latin America.
