I am hardcore
Yep, I admit it, proudly. Not because my foot hurts and I ran 5 miles on it. Not because of all the marathons, or anything like that. It has nothing to do with sport, accomplishments, or anything of the sort. What is “hardcore”? It’s not some fucking marketing slogan for “extreme athletes”. It’s not how many tattoos you have, the clothes you wear, the piercings in your body. None of that makes anyone hardcore.
Hardcore crosses most barriers, culturally, socio-economically, religiously, and on down the list. It’s about who you are and how you look at the world, and your place in it and those around you.
When I was growing up, they called us “latchkey kids”. Our parents were either divorced or together, widowed or widower, but either way, kids were pretty much left to their own after school while their parent(s) were working. It was lower middle-class nonsense. What happened was us and those like us would congregate, we’d figure shit out on our own. Usually our guidance was whatever music we were listening to. My friends and I found groups like the Bad Brains, Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law, Agnostic Front, Madball, Minor Threat, Warzone. What they were saying in their music spoke to our experiences. The conclusions they drew were of the same ideas we were forming. Some of my friends found Straight Edge, or veganism appealing to their ideas, to their morality, others were about beers and barbecues, some became devotees of Krishna, but that didn’t matter. We kept our bond to each other. We were, and still are, brothers and sisters.
We learned that this brother and sisterhood extended past our immediate circle. We shared that with any and all who wanted to roll up their sleeves and get to work doing the right thing. What was the right thing? Whatever lifted everyone up and out of the shit we saw happening in the world around us. Was all this perfect? Did we find some sort of Utopia? Nope. Nazi fucks, fascist skinheads, fake motherfuckers would come around. They’d come to shows and start shit, trying to recruit people who didn’t know better, or were there for the wrong reasons. Fights would happen. We did the best with what we had and what we knew. Some of them had a change of heart, deep down I don’t think most of them did.
Yeah, we were outcasts because of how we dressed, the music we listened to, the tattoos, piercings (I never really participated in the tattoos until I was older and never was keen on piercings). Yes, most of us are working-class people who struggle because so many of our co-workers don’t look on us with brotherhood, they don’t stand with us, they don’t work together they work for themselves. But does that make us oppressed? For the most part no. We have our problems, we have our struggles, we don’t forget them, but we always have brothers and sisters to lend a hand, we are always there to lend a hand too. There’s always a benefit show, or some event to help out.
The weird thing about being hardcore is, you’ll always be hardcore. I see plenty of people who take the style, affectations, maybe cover themselves in tattoos and piercings for a time to “rebel”. But so many of them will one day take out the piercings, cover or even remove the tattoos, and go to work for themselves. At the time, so many in the “scene” will have thought them to be so hardcore, but in reality, they were there for their own reasons. You can’t be hardcore if you’re only in it for yourself.
That’s the thing, we aren’t an oppressed minority, we are kids who find their own way and find out, as much as we bust balls with our friends and even say mean shit to them, we actually like people and we want to improve our lots in life. But still we have people who come in and “cosplay” (for lack of a better term right now) hardcore and then take the makeup off and go about life like it never happened. They appropriate our subculture for however long they want and when it doesn’t serve them anymore, they leave.
This is the problem when real oppressed groups have their culture imitated by the oppressors. Why it’s so offensive for oppressed people’s is this:
When you take the makeup off, the dress off, the boots off, or whatever, you go back to your everyday life where you are not a part of that experience, that culture. People may ohhh and ahhh about how well you represented whatever romanticized version of whatever person you were pretending to be, but at the end of the day you don’t deal with any of the negative aspects of whatever.
However, every day, the people from that culture have to constantly deal with the negative aspects. Negativity, usually thrust upon them by the culture you are “escaping” by romanticizing some small part of theirs.
Simply put, when you’re done being “Pocahontas” for the weekend, you go home and are Sally Smith. You go to your job, go about your life and that’s that. About 22% of the 5.4 million native peoples living in the United States today live on reservations. With poor Healthcare and little to no aide from a federal government who historically eliminated native peoples and forced them off their lands and into reservations with no resources to speak of in the first place, unemployment is very high, 40-80% on most reservations. 28.2% of all natives, regardless of where they live, are below federal poverty standards.
Any minority culture you try and “honor” with your costume, has statistics and stories like these. You want to “honor” people, how about you demand they get equal protection under the law, equal opportunity, maybe look into why they are oppressed, maybe challenge your friends who blame the group’s problems on (insert racist reason like “drinking problems” or “laziness” or “lack of father-figures” here). Get in their faces about it! Tell them to fuck off with their nonsense, motherfucker in Sandy Hook didn’t have his father around, no one blamed his lack of a “strong male role model”. No he was just an “unstable, lone-wolf”.
Point is, the people you are imitating are who they are every day, all the time. I only gave one example, and general statistics. Why, because I can’t know the psychological trauma which must come with knowing only 100 years ago the United States Government was still trying to remove you from land that was always yours, because there was some resource on it that some European man was going to come and commodities, and you weren’t going to get a dime of it. The trauma that must be felt as the citizens of Bismarck, ND voted against having a pipeline run through their community so now the government is forcing it to run through yours. Even though you’re told it’s your land and you can be autonomous on it.
I can’t imagine the psychological trauma of centuries of being treated like property, even having that codified in law. To then be told you were getting your freedom, only to be placed into an apartheid state, still treated no better than property for another 100 years, then when you finally have at least the law stop allowing it by word, still being 7 times more likely to be murdered by a police officer during a traffic stop. Then when you get upset about it, you’re told to calm down, just do as they say.
I can’t imagine these feelings, because I’ve never experienced it all the time. I’ve had instances where someone momentarily thinks I am Hispanic or Latino, I’ve had moments where people think I am Arab Muslim or sometimes have gotten Pakistani Muslim. But often these instances are fleeting and the tension passes as soon as my ID is seen or my voice is heard. I don’t deal with it every day. When I go home at night it doesn’t make me feel like I don’t belong, and I have only once feared for my life. I have no idea how the constant pressure must feel. And neither do you.
So whatever the culture, whatever the obstacles they face, don’t cheapen the beautiful things they have, and don’t try to make the beautiful things your own. Unless you’re willing to take on all the ugliness they must face as well. And it can’t be for your profit or well-being like Raquel Donutholes (Rachel Dozelal) who had no problem suing Howard University for rejecting her for “being white”, yet now claims to be “black”. She’s not, she’s just looking for a cross to nail herself upon to make a profit.
That’s basically what appropriation is: I’m going to take this good thing and pretend it’s mine, but you can keep all this bad shit. Or, I’m going to profit off this good thing from another culture but they can go fuck themselves and it’s their own fault they don’t profit off it, even though when they use it, we look down on them for it. This is what’s happening, this is why appropriation is a problem.
Now, you want to do something, be hardcore. Get dirty, fucking help people. You might lose some friends along the way, but don’t worry, you’ll make new ones. Life isn’t about making friends anyway, it’s about finding truth and sticking with it. Don’t put on a front and don’t take things from people when you have no skin in the game.
Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!
Just in case anyone has trouble with the lyrics:
Putting on an act that just isn’t working
You stole from your friends when you thought they weren’t looking
Your whole fucking life, you put on a front
You pushed it to the point when my trust slips through your hands
Trust
You don’t understand
Trust
Slips through your hands
Oh thought you were the one
It’s what you haven’t got
Try to play it cool
Why be something that you’re not?
It’s just the fucking point that you steal, that you miss
You pushed it to the point when my trust slips through your hands
Trust
You don’t understand
Trust
Slips through your hands
Trust
Slips through your hands
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