Hope: A Novelette

25 thoughts on “Hope: A Novelette”

1. Wow! Thanks Walt.

   Peter

2. I am thinking you must be thinking of one day publishing – book length, hard copy. Your education (formal and informal) experience, subsequent perspective and talent almost demands it, you know. It must be cathartic, getting things in black and white and pushing it out to be interpreted, outside of your control. Perhaps redemptive (not suggesting that is needed or wanted) but at the very least, it is a gift, and I appreciate it. Thank you.

3. Great!

4. Great article, H!

   Not many people can incorporate a thoughtful and educational discussion around racial disparities with BMF, Jeezy the Snowman, and EST Gee.

   Thanks!

5. I applaud Walt and all he says about this serious societal problem.
   But I do wonder how those same Black voters feel now with the hard crackdown and end to DEI, Affirmative Action, Critical Race Theory (haven’t heard that term in awhile) and other attempts at righting past wrongs. Whether you like these attempts or not, at least they tried to do something about this issues raised, and the conversation and awareness were growing because of them.
   Or are Black people just happy there will be fewer Brown people?

   1. And I applaud gdhalpha, for this demonstrated ability to lump people by color so neatly after H tried so hard to disaggregate them for us, into individuals, into friends and family, into characters instead of caricatures.

      1. Ease up, Btfl. That’s not the intent of the comment. Since you have insight into Black issues, my question remains: how do Black Trump voters view what’s happening to programs that were designed to right some wrongs?

         1. I have insight into my own views, no one else’s, let alone some grouping as nebulous and undoubtedly diverse as Black Trump Voters.

         2. I feel like you didn’t actually read this piece. At least, I hope you didn’t actually read it.

6. Thank you sir. Very well written and it engendered some deep reflections on my part while reading.

7. Great timing Walt as I just broke my coffee cup of 10 years! Look forward to receiving it.

   1. I need to do rocks glasses. I don’t know why that hasn’t occurred to me until just now.

      1. Or a Stanley (that’s all I heard grandkids talk about at Christmas). And I add my thanks and appreciation, hoping this vein has more life. Enjoy hearing the counterpoints of the left and right hand.

      2. I’d be first in line for rocks glasses etched with the ballerina from Hustle.

         Without the red hair, I can tell my wife I bought it because it reminds me of her. Wouldn’t even be lying.

8. Thanks Walt.

   For better or worse I could identify with much of what you wrote about and unlike many of our compatriots I was able to take advantage of my privilege to
   come out the other side relatively unscathed.

9. As your subtitle for section III is headed, the problem truly does feel “Hopeless”.
   The chart that you included of the net worth divide between blacks and whites in America going back to 1983 is embarrassing for our country- and “says it all” in one chart.

   I don’t know what the answer is; but clearly what our country is doing and/or has tried during the past 50 years is not working. Time to try something else.

   I looked at your current Tshirt offerings- I am proud to say that I own a Heisenberg “vintage” edition Tshirt (a style no longer offered). I will say it washes well. I use the dryer, too.

   1. Yeah, that one sold out finally. I’m doing some 10th anniversary stuff that’ll be available later this month and next, as I get it. 2026 makes 10 years of Heisenberg Report! I was going to roll the anniversary merch out all at once, but the logistics are tricky on that. So I’ll put it out periodically in the store. I’m going to put more effort into keeping new stuff in the store going forward. It has a lot of potential, but like anything else, it has to be done predictably, regularly and right.

10. Amazing piece with so many insights to you as a person and how you view the world…I truly love your monthly’s and as others have said your writing style in this format lends itself to publishing a book which I would read by the way!

    You often talk about being “reformed” from distributing hard right propaganda in years past. Given what sounds like real personal accounts of interactions with folks from all races and socioeconomic backgrounds I’m curious how you ended up creating and distributing the right-wing propaganda that you did in the first place?

    Did you agree with some of the dog whistle racism often implied in the content and subsequently become reformed or was it just for a paycheck at the time?

    From you writings you seem to have such a rich and varied lived history shrouded in a bit of mystery and I’m genuinely interested to learn more if you’re willing to share.

    1. Purely paycheck. And it was 95% geopolitical propaganda. It wasn’t really cultural propaganda. I mean, it was, but only when that angle helped push a geostrategic agenda. It was a lot of anti-USD, anti-West type of “analysis.” By early 2016, that stuff was what I’d call “MAGA adjacent,” but that wasn’t necessarily because the people who paid me were Donald Trump supporters. They just saw, in his candidacy, a way to make money and a way to advance the same geopolitical narrative they wanted to advance.

       I talked about it in two Monthlies. You might’ve read them already, but here they are in case you missed them:

       https://heisenbergreport.com/2024/12/12/the-consultant/

       https://heisenbergreport.com/2024/07/17/dances-with-wolves/

       That was a very short interlude in my life’s legend, which is why there are only two Monthlies about it, as opposed to dozens about everything else. That period was 2015/2016. It lasted approximately 16 months.

       1. “Baby gotta eat”
          -Antwon Patton & Andre Benjamin

          Understood H-man. As you could see by the timestamp on my question I couldn’t stop until I finished. 🙂

          I appreciate the response.

          1. Glad it was a good read. The point with these — particularly this one — is to really put people into those rooms (or in those cars, in this case, or at the bar tops, etc.) so you can almost “see” it and almost feel it like you’re actually there.

             1. At some point the unequal, and growing, distribution of wealth plays a significant role in this. As one cross section of the bottom moves up to the middle, the numerical trends show another takes its place. At least since civilization became a thing, humans have fought over rungs on the wealth ladder. While some part of the middle tries to right a few injustices further down, the majority of the top tier continue to focus on acquiring more wealth. I might be losing hope.

11. As a foreigner I can’t necessarily relate to the specifics (I’ve been to the US a few times at most) but we have comparable, if lesser, social fabric issues in Sweden, albeit with rather different immediate causes. In particular, being a racist anti-racist (or is it the reverse?) has been a thing here. As far as sweeping generalizations go, Swedes were generally extremely positive towards immigration until recently, and Sweden has ranked as the “least racist country in the world” in dubious polls I don’t care to look up for a one paragraph online post. However, when push came to shove, Swedes weren’t willing to live next to (especially non-white non-English speaking) immigrants at scale. What’s worse, Swedes weren’t self-conscious of this ahead of time and attributed it to being better than everyone else. That exemplary sanctimony finally started to shift with the Syrian refuge crisis.

    1. And of course, thanks for the great read, if that was not implied.

12. And now we’ve come full circle. Apparently, “Love Sosa” — the song immortalized dubiously in this article — is the go-to soundtrack for America’s military. Here’s Anna Paulina Luna celebrating it: https://x.com/RepLuna/status/2012214537248784472

    This is a good time to go back and read this piece, folks. The shift in culture I discussed here has now spilled over into the MAGA sphere, and the irony’s completely lost on them: They’re celebrating the song which, 14 years ago, put Chicago gang culture on the map, the same culture Trump and his top brass and acolytes on the Hill habitually cite as an excuse for militarizing Chicago’s streets.

    It’s incredible how surreal some of these Monthlies end up sounding, not so much in the sense that they’re prescient, per se, but just in the sense of being eerily in tune with — I don’t know — eerily in tune with something.