Step back or I’ll kill this white man!

I’m a 66-year-old white man, and I’m more or less retired. I do a little writing, and I do a local news podcast.

Most of my income is pretty much handed to me. I get Social Security. I receive investment income from a nest egg I spent 35 years grubbing up the way a French pig grubs up truffles with his nose. I receive a pension from a newspaper chain that went bankrupt some years ago. The company ceased to exist, but a federal agency took over the pension fund, and they pay me every month.

If the federal government defaults on its debt, all three of those income sources could disappear.

The immortal question in these situations is, “What the hell’d I do?”

And the immortal answer is, “I didn’t do anything.”

However, members of America’s Republican Party are so eager to finally get at Black welfare moochers, Black moochers in housing projects, Black moochers whose kids are in Head Start programs and a whole nest of other Black moochers who live off the government that they will cheerfully choke the living hell out of canned-bean-eating old white men like me.

Because that’s what this is: yet another chapter in the Republican’s national crusade to “get at” everyone who is darker than an Irish guy with a tan.

Never mind that the country is full of white people living on welfare and SNAP benefits. Those white people don’t count for anything. You know why? Because the very act of receiving government benefits means those white people live like Black people, and that is a sin. No doubt the white people in question absorbed the laziness of Black people by listening to rap music, which is also the reason why your copy-paper-white granddaughter has been made pregnant by a Black man, which is also a sin.

In return for raising the debt ceiling, Republicans would like to cut every program that buys food or pays rent for any poor Black person anywhere. If they don’t get those cuts, they’ll refuse to raise the debt ceiling, crash the economy, and there will be no more money for social leeches like Black welfare moochers, elitist school teachers and school lunch programs for the children of Black welfare moochers.

Either way, it’s a win for Republicans because it’s a way to get at the poor Black people and a way to get at the poor white people who are so degraded that they accept the same social services that Black people get.

If you live far enough from Black ghettos and white ghettos, and you’re infuriated because your 8-year-old came home from school with a book called “Harry the Hamster Likes Girl Clothes,” you may be happy that your Republican surrogates have finally found a way to “get at” the Black moochers whose unearned income and “special rights” land on the open wound of your whiteness like a thousand stinging flies.

And me? Well, the Social Security might be gone, and the crashing stock market will wipe out my nest egg, and the pension will vanish, and all I’ve done is work at some job or other for 52 years.

And I’ll be proud as I starve to death because with my last rattling, choking breath, I will know that we finally “got at” the damn Black moochers and their welfare and the one word they tell us we can’t use.

If you live in a duplex, and you hate your neighbor, don’t set his house on fire to “get at” him.