So said the scruffy young paleface from behind his filthy mask as he walked past me and I tied on my bandana.

I said, “Yeah, this is like science-fiction.”

He then went on, as we walked through the produce display patrolled by a tall ebony doll in Safeway uniform, mask, with cleaning gear, who inspected us to make certain we wore masks and stayed apart.

He was a tall, wiry man of perhaps 26 years with good testosterone levels, “I was in here with my two-year-old daughter and she kept taking off her mask. So they put me out. You try and keep a mask on a two-year-old, especially mine, and you’ll have a hard way to go. Now I have to come back and kiss their asses…”

I walked through the Safeway to the pharmacy, where the same petty brown girl who helped me out last December, gave me every courtesy, including the big house wink.

As I waited in a chair for her to let me know my prescription was filled, an ebony couple my age, out shopping, approached me with some concern, the man asking, “Are you okay, sir? Is there anything I can do?”

I thanked him, assured him I was healthy, and they went on their way wishing me a blessed day.

Since Juneteenth the effusive kindness of the newly elevated knightly class has been a thing of wonder. I had two women in Virginia look me in the eyes and say, “I’m so sorry for everything you must be going through, sir,” and “I know you never did anything to me—you got no blame coming from me, I just want to be left alone…”

While the guilty whites on one side bask in self-hating abasement and crusade for a supposedly helpless people, and un-guilty ghosts rage at the ebony martyrs raised up before them like gods to worship, the only people that seem to get the point, are those darksome folks who did good for themselves within the very system they now see being ripped apart, supposedly for their own good. They also know that the folks being raised up as representatives of their hard-working plight, are the very criminals who have hunted them out of their home towns and into the suburbs. Working people of the martyred hue, provided they have not been programmed in universities, understand that what the guilty ghosts really hate is anyone who works for a living. The Guilt Ghost Cult has only room for priests of plenty, martyrs of color and the ever-toiling and despicable enemy.

In America to work is to hate and to hate is to be a saint.

A comet just streaked by us a week ago, the unrecognized near miss surely a sign that God retains a cruel sense of humor where the worms of this hateful earth wriggle in the filth of their collective worth.