"omar coming"
(part one)


it's time for another series.

after the newtown massacre, we did the micro-blogging series on my feelings on guns and gun control.

over a couple years ago, we did a meditation on the epic propagandhi album, supporting caste.

over the last several months, i've been kind of obsessed with the best television show my world has ever seen, the wire.

the wire tells the story of two baltimores and, depending how willing you are to extrapolate the themes, two americas. one "baltimore" is the one that you and i and most of the rest of the white people like us live in. born into lower-middle to middle to upper-middle class families, we are conditioned and trained into certain institutions. we go to middle class schools around where we live. if we don't want to go to school with too many black people want a more intimate or religious based education, we find a local private school. we likely begin our religious education and spiritual formation in whatever church institution our parents or grandparents decided long ago we would attend. we are trained to believe our local, state, and federal governments are worked by "the people", "for the people". we vote because we think it matters. we work, likely, in a corporate institution that continues to fool us that there is still a middle class in our america. in our jobs, we are socialized with the idea that if we work hard, we will move up the ladder. if we work hard, we will earn standard of living raises, we might earn an end of the year bonus every three or four years, and we convince ourselves that this standard of living is what we are meant to do. by the time we are adults, we invite the obligations of family and children and mortgages and car payments into our lives, further limiting our life equity and further narrowing the window of flexibility and happiness that every human allegedly possesses at birth. we go to school. we get our education. we look for a job. we find a 9 to 5. we work. buy a starter home. and we work. to the weekend. and then we work. and then we grow up. we hopefully live long enough to retire. and we live out the rest of our days with far too little health and physical ability to properly appreciate our hard earned golden years.

if we are lucky, we are shaken out of our ignorance at a still relatively young age. we realize that this "baltimore" is bullshit, nothing more than an "oz" perpetrated upon us by the very few people in the city/country with real or or inherited wealth, perpetrated upon us with such skill that we continue to vote these people into office and let them control our lives and allow them to brainwash us to the point that we shit on other human beings because they are gay or because they are poor or because they don't have insurance or because they are on welfare or because they are on drugs or because they are black don't like the wire.

again, this "baltimore" is all bullshit, a manufactured matrix that we are okay with because the world around us, the rich around us, have conditioned us to be fine with just being "fine".

on the other side of the same coin is the other "baltimore". the side of the city where the more black colorful characters are born. the avon and deangelo barksdales. the stringer bells. the omars. the prop joes. the wallaces. the randys. the michaels. the namonds. the dukies. the marlo stringfields. the slingers. the hoppers. the heroes in this baltimore are born into their own broken institutions. they go to school, too, but their schools are for shit. glorified daycares that don't care about learning as much as they care about getting the kids to the next class to the next day to the fuck out of my classroom to the next grade to hopefully the eighth grade before the next dropout. they go to church, too, but only because the matriarchs of the family have already witnessed too many of their children the subject of burial services services from those pews. religion is not a way of life. it's an escape. from hell on earth. falling into the habit of slinging drugs and joining the gang that will have you are not questions of "if?" but "when?". on this side of baltimore, the only ladder is life, and you are graded by how long you live and how hard you live. everything else is peripheral bullshit.

both sides of baltimore in the wire have their institutions. and the tragedy of the story is, no matter what side of the city you live on, the characters are likely to be betrayed by the institution they claim as their own. superiors on both sides of the tracks will use soldiers as scapegoats when scandal or street war erupts, and the likelihood of any major players that hold any real power being affected is slim.

i am headlong into season four (of five) of the series now, the season in which the producers of the show take on and take down the city's education system. i already feel drawn to the four kids we've been introduced to, and i am already nervous about how the show will likely destroy them in some cruel and unusual way.

as i think about and reflect on this piece of entertainment, my mind goes in a couple of different directions. obviously, i've been living out my own story in my own church institution for 14 years. i want to use some of my favorite themes from the show to approach my church experience in different ways than i have on this blog up to this point in the last six years.

secondly, we are living in a depressing and fascinating time. based purely on the parts of themselves humans put on social media, we are living in a time where good people, smart people, shit on other humans all the time. we've created terms like "makers" and "takers", the takers playing the role of the black bad guys. the makers are those that feel like they've worked hard and deserve what they have and how dare such and such bad guy take my tax money or my job or my place in line at mcdonald's if they aren't willing to submit themselves to a drug test.

it's all very cowardly. it's all very against the way of christ. against the moral responsibility of shared worth and equal value. and it's all very sad.

and it's all very human.

and so, we'll go.

just like the show's creator, david simon, i have grown to be "cynical about institutions", but, like the show, i'd like to believe that i am humanistic about the characters that are trapped inside them.

just be warned.

omar coming.