Blood and Fire: A Rebellion in Kindness

Or, “Everything I Know About Life, I Learned From The Clash, Part 3,900,116.”

Bob Marley: Every time you say, “I will not become Babylon,” you win a war the world don’t even know is being fought. (📷 Pic courtesy Encyclopedia Britannica.)

Prologue: We need Joe Strummer now more than ever, in these coptic times. This is for you, Joe!

Blood and fire in the laundromat

I met a Rasta today at the laundromat.

I was still holding yesterday’s poison. A slur, flung like a brick to the face. Didn’t show it. Couldn’t. But it hadn’t left me.

Some Detroit version of a redneck called me that word on the phone the night before, while I was grinding away at The Industry of Human Happiness—my day job, slinging surveys.

Yeah, in the home of Motown, MC5 and Iggy and The Stooges, the latter two of whom had deep Black music roots—“n***er.” A word that should never be uttered.

Doesn’t matter that I’m white, just like that dumbshit cracker.

No one should ever be called that word.

Every time I hear it, I see red.

Every time, I want to break something.

Every time, I want justice.

I could pretend I was the bigger person, and did not react to that verbal sledgehammer to the jaw, that I was professional and did not react, brushed it off, moved on to the next call. I didn’t. I replied with something like, “Ohhhhh, what a large vocabulary you have, you good Christian fellow!” Which, believe it or not, could have still gotten me fired by the Industry, if they’d been monitoring. Thank fuck they didn’t!

Honestly, I carried the poison into today. It’s not easily bled out. I’ve been housesitting for my buddy O.T. (so-renamed, because his name is also “Tim”), and he told me to use his apartment complex’s laundry room to wash the clothes that have piled up since our washing machine has broken down. “The machines operate on debit cards—easy-peasy!” he told me. So, I loaded my messenger bag with my laptop and powerstrip, thinking I’ll work from the laundry room. Then I lugged 10-20 pounds of dirty socks and black pearl snap cowboy shirts across the complex…and I didn’t have my wallet!

Fuck me running!

So I hauled 10-20 pounds of soiled skivvies and black stretch Levis back to O.T.’s apartment…and my wallet was not there, either!

It is likely at my house. Fine. O.T. welcomed me to use his loose change in an emergency. So I packed his covert beer can spare coins safe into my bag, pick up my 10-20 pounds of filthy leopard bandanas and plain black t-shirts, call a Lyft, and headed to an East Riverside laundromat. Which has no AC, and it’s 100 degrees out there.

I threw all 10-20 pounds of sweat-crusted black stretch Dickies and New York Dolls t-shirts into a huge Speed Queen machine, which costs $12.50 per load. Aaaaaaand O.T. only had $7 in quarters—the rest was all dimes, nickels and pennies.

Someone, just have a mule kick me in the golden ticket—NOW!

And no one in this laundry spoke English, nor would they change the rest of my change into dollars. So, I left all 10-20 pounds, $7 in credit, and two slots filled with detergent back at the washeteria and ran frantically all over this very ethnic shopping center, finally finding a kind soul at a smoke shop, who got me $5 in quarters with a smile.

So, the Speed Queen finally in operation, I bought a soda with the remaining quarters…and realized I do not have any quarters for the drier.

Please bring back the racist Detroit redneck, so I can punch him without guilt!

Thankfully, the smoke shop changed my remaining pile of metallic currency into dollar bills, so I could go to the hotter-than-3AM-regrets-and-a-stranger’s-bed washateria’s dollar dispenser and get on with the point of all this meandering.

I was standing there, tired, sweat-soaked, pissed off, and wrangling damp laundry, a lack of wi-fi, and a pile of coins like I was some broke-ass Babylonian currency juggler. All because I'd forgotten my wallet. All because OT's washing machine doesn't take cash. All because I was determined to get this damn laundry done today.

And there he was. At the change machine. A Rasta from Mexico, maybe—he spoke Spanish, but the spirit was pure Kingston. We nodded. Fist-bumped. I placed my hand over my heart and said, "One love. Jah live."

His eyes lit up.

He asked if I liked Bob Marley. I told him, "¡Si, Rasta! Y Lee 'Scratch' Perry, y Toots and the Maytals, y Big Youth, y Jimmy Cliff..."

That moment? No shared language. No shared nationality. But a shared rhythm. That’s reggae. That’s rebellion. That’s love. Reggae was the only language we needed to communicate love and respect.

Joe Strummer onstage at Victoria Park, London, April 30, 1978 — the Rock Against Racism all-dayer: “In fact, punk rock means EXEMPLARY MANNERS TO YOUR FELLOW HUMAN BEING. Fuck being an asshole, what you pricks thought it was twenty years ago….We’re all going to have to learn to live together and develop a greater tolerance and get rid of whatever our fathers gave us in the way of hatred between nations.” (📷Pic courtesy Reddit)

Blood and fire in the music that saves you

Reggae is the international language of survival. It cuts across culture, skin, class, tongue. It sings of love and resistance in the same breath. It taught me how to hold a grudge against empire without losing my soul.

The Clash showed me that, as they did many things.

They led me to reggae the way a big brother leads you to your first record store. Joe Strummer didn’t just borrow the sound—he believed in it. He let reggae rewire his punk rock. That was the lightbulb moment: punk wasn’t about destruction for the sake of it. It was about compassion wrapped in noise. Rage channeled through manners.

Joe once said, "Punk means exemplary manners." And I got it.

If Joe were still here, he might tell us punk ain’t just some noise for bored kids or a sneer for the cameras. It’s resistance through love. Through community. Through making sure the weak don’t get trampled while the bastards in suits sell us our own fear back.

Babylon is the machine. The cold system. The one that takes, takes, takes. But punk? Real punk is the shelter you build for someone else when they’ve got nowhere to go. It’s feeding each other. It’s hugging your girl tighter when the sky’s falling. It’s never turning into the thing we were fighting against. It’s for everyone who found salvation in three chords and truth. For every broken kid who needed a bassline more than a sermon. For the lovers who held each other in mosh pits, and the quiet ones who found family in feedback.

And reggae is the gospel.

I know many who hate reggae. They think it’s slow, boring, hippie peace-and-love shit. Sure, hippies adopt Bob Marley like white people of my grandparents’ generation like to boast they’re jazz buffs because they own a Louis Armstrong record. Sure, that’s lame. But just like Armstrong swung harder than Bo Jackson, Marley was not all “One Love.”

Louis Armstrong wasn’t just some grinning trumpet jester for white America—he was swing incarnate, a technical monster, a damn assassin in a tux. And Marley?

Bob Marley was right hard.

He was “Get Up, Stand Up.” (“Stand up fi’ ya rights…Don’t give up the fight!”)

He was “12 O’Clock Roadblock” and “Concrete Jungle.”

He was, “One good thing about music—when it hits ya, you feel no pain….”

That man survived a political assassination attempt, and played a concert with a bullet still in him.

That’s not peace-and-love. That’s warrior energy.

And when the yoga moms slap a Bob sticker on their Subaru, they bleach the revolution out of the man.

Bob knew. Babylon even tried to assassinate him. Then he went to England, saw the Pistols and The Clash, and bestowed his blessings with “Punky Reggae Party.”

Both Armstrong and Marley carried the weight of empire on their backs—and sang through it.

And yeah, they were kind. But they were also lethal.

People forget that because it’s easier to turn fire into incense. Or a Whole Foods playlist.

Reggae—real reggae—isn’t just rhythm. It’s resistance wrapped in compassion. It’s a fight with a heartbeat. It doesn’t flinch from Babylon, but it doesn’t become it either.

It’s rebel music. It’s why punk rockers opened their hearts to it, even if some Rasta might have rejected the crazy baldheads. But not all Rasta did. Hey—Scratch The Upsetter even produced my favorite Clash record, “Complete Control.”

Blood and fire in a word spit by a Babylonian coward

Then yesterday, a man called me a n***er at work.

Right to my face. Like I wasn’t human. Like I wasn’t standing there trying to do my job. Like Babylon needed to remind me that it’s still breathing. That word is a weapon, and this cro magnon fuck used it with the same aim Babylon always has: to dehumanize, to shrink, to erase.

I carried it. Into the laundromat. Into that moment with the Rasta. Into the rhythm that has always saved me.

Because I remembered the words of Jimmy Cliff:

Well, the oppressors are tryin’ to keep me down

Tryin’ to drive me underground…

But I’d rather be a free man in my grave

Than living as a puppet or a slave

And as sure as the sun will shine

I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine

And then the harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all…

Because I remembered the words of Dr. Alimantado:

If you feel like you’ve got no reason for living

Don’t determine my life

Because this is my rebellion:
Not responding to hate with hate.
Not letting the stink of Babylon rot my joy.

Blood and fire. That’s what reggae taught me. Blood for the pain. Fire for the love. Let it burn. Let it cleanse.

I remember the first time I spoke to John Lydon, in 1996. I told him I thought people got the Sex Pistols message all wrong. Everyone heard "God Save the Queen" and thought, "Yeah, no future, burn it down." But I heard: If you don’t take your destiny into your own hands, you will have no future.

Lydon looked at me and said, "It's about bloody time someone got it right."

So yeah. I choose kindness. I choose love. I choose rhythm over ruin.

Make mine blood.
Make mine fire.
Make mine kindness.

I live in Babylon. But I won't become it. One love.

P.S.—Sorry, O.T. I lost your beer can safe.

Postscript In Real Time, 07/05/2025: This was written two months ago. It turned out that this wasn’t an isolated wound. The slur that triggered this work recurred twice more. This, apparently, is the way of the modern world. But I’m still burning with kindness. Be Babylon if you want. I refuse.

🔥 This Isn’t Just Writing. It’s Rebel Music. 🔥

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Bonus: Here’s the complete 1976 Bob Marley “Smile, Jamaica” concert mentioned above, performed days after the assassination attempt – let’s see YOU rock with a bullet in ya!