It seems that racism still exists despite all of our good work last weekend, and so here we are again. This time we're in Alamo Heights so it's a more localised deal than the previous Saturday. Alamo Heights somehow counts as a city in its own right with its own town hall within the limits of San Antonio. The city of Alamo Heights covers an area of roughly two square miles with a population of around seven-thousand, so really it's just a neighbourhood. I still haven't quite got used to the American application of the term city which seems more to do with legal status than volume or population density, but the shorthand version is that Alamo Heights is the affluent, mostly white neighbourhood, the place where all the local millionaires live. Naturally the news that Alamo Heights would be having its own Black Lives Matter march was greeted with a degree of sneering and scoffing along the lines of how yes, we're sure they're all very much concerned about the well-being of the guy who mows their lawns; but, as my wife pointed out, inverted snobbery doesn't really help anyone and, if anything, a march to raise awareness in Alamo Heights might arguably be more on point than one in a more economically challenged neighbourhood wherein the residents already understand the whole deal with cops and black people.
We're assembled in the HEB parking lot on Broadway. It's a little after ten in the morning. The march seems to be a couple of hundred people - big enough to make a noise, yet not big enough to stop traffic - and they're already heading down to the high school about half a mile away. Placards wave, voices chant the now familiar call and response slogans, and Bess and I hurry along the sidewalk to catch up as we were about ten minutes late. There are a few less mobile demonstrators at the side of the road, an old black guy holding a sign at the bus stop clenching a fist in cheery solidarity as we pass. I expected the march to be mostly white given the locale, but it's pretty much an even blend of everyone. I also expected armed and overmoneyed shitheads protecting their front lawns from Antifa terrorists such as ourselves, given the locale and the thrust of our President's most recent addresses.
The recent rioting, so he appears to believe, has been orchestrated by Antifa, a terrorist organisation formed by snowflakes, snowflakes being people who want to ban everything because it offends them - it's a word they use because they're worried that they might get in trouble if they just called us faggots, which is what they really seem to mean; so somehow we're both snowflakes and terrorists. I therefore propose that we're actually terrorflakes which is easier to remember and is arguably funnier.
Anyway, thankfully I'm wrong, and the usual defenders of freedom have failed to show thus allowing us to get on with our unconstitutionally holding of slightly different opinions unmolested. One car slows so that it's driver can bravely yell all lives matter from the window, thus teaching us the error of our reverse-racist ways. A minute later, a monster truck cruises slowly down Broadway - well, not a monster truck so much as simply a ludicrously inflated vehicle of a kind resembling a Jeff Koons version of a kiddie's toy and which is traditionally driven by overcompensating men with tiny, tiny penises* - with a massive flag in the back, the stars and stripes but all in black but for a central red line. I'm familiar with the variant featuring a central blue line favoured by those who think the cops are doing an amazing job, but I'm not sure about this variation beyond that it seems potentially provocative.
We arrive at the high school, which seems a little lacking in ambition as a destination given that we can still see HEB simply by looking back along Broadway. The word gets around that we'll be walking a little further to Alamo Heights city hall, so that's what we do. We're there and duly milling around in about another ten minutes or so. Something seems to be going on, but it's hard to say what, but I'm distracted by the sight of some bloke in a Queens Park Rangers shirt.
'English?' I ask, because it's obvious that I am.
He isn't, but tells me he's an international fan.
'I used to know the bloke who did In the Loft, the Queens Park Rangers fanzine,' I tell him. 'This was back in the nineties, mind.'
The editor of In the Loft was the younger brother of one of the people who edited the Millwall fanzine, The Lion Roars. I used to work for The Lion Roars, and regularly found my work pinched and reprinted without either permission or even bothering to tell me in the pages of In the Loft, whose editor I therefore regarded as a bit of an arsehole, but there doesn't really seem to be much point going into the details; and the guy asks me who I support.
'Millwall, I suppose,' which is as good an answer as I'm able to give, and my support is vague and based mainly on how many Millwall fans I still consider friends. I could have said Gillingham.
'I'm just glad to see you're not a Manchester United supporter,' I add, because it's always Manchester fucking United.
He laughs, and I'm relieved that he gets the joke.
Some guy hands me a leaflet and starts talking about what all this means to him, then suggests that we might like to think about what Jesus said, and if we're not sure what Jesus said, then he knows some people who would be happy to explain. Both Bess and I stare at the city hall as he rambles on, waiting for him to get the hint and fuck off. Later it turns out that one of the organisers has officially told him to fuck off on the grounds that the permit secured on behalf of the march said nothing about the distribution of Jesus leaflets. Personally I'm slightly irritated that someone thought it would be cool to capitalise on the gathering in the hope of recruiting. It's just plain rude.
One of the organisers talks about why we're here today with the aid of a megaphone. He talks about Breonna Taylor, shot eight times in her own apartment back in March for no reason that makes any sense whatsoever. As with the march on the previous weekend, the cops maintain a low-key presence.
Eventually we march back up Broadway. Another monster truck passes, this one full of muscular young men with baseball caps and shitty bumfluff moustaches, and with two giant flags flown from the rear. We see the same truck again a couple of minutes later, and again at the intersection after that. Either the driver is lost or, as seems more likely, is trolling the march, because we Terrorflakes hate the sight of the flag and the thought of the freedom it represents, or summink. Bess takes a photograph and we look up the license plate. The vehicle is owned by someone who lives way out in the sticks, and who has apparently driven all the way here so as to share their mighty flags with us. I guess they're probably just bored jocks or shitheads who figured it would be hilarious. At least I haven't seen any openly carried assault rifles today.
The march has been small and relatively quiet, but it felt like something worth doing.
*: This sentence may appear to be racist against men with tiny, tiny penises but is in fact ironically mocking racism against men with tiny, tiny penises, I rather think you will find.
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