Letter to My Children: Whitey On the Moon

Dearest Beloveds,

I almost guarantee this poem is not one you might encounter in your academic career. If not, I salute your teacher. If so, well, you chose to come down and join this family with me as your Momma, so you’re welcome - you get to read it twice. (I can feel the future adolescent eye rolls.)

Courtesy of The Emerald’s June 23 2020 podcast entitled Space Hex: The Curse of Restlessness in Worldviews of Perpetual Escape, I have been exposed to Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" released in 1970. Here is the full text (and you can hear Scott-Heron performing it below*):

A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey's on the moon.
I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon.
Ten years from now I'll be paying still
While whitey's on the moon.
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey's on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon.
I wonder why he's upping me?
Cause whitey's on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
And now whitey is on the moon.

Taxes taking my whole damn check.
The junkies make me a nervous wreck.
The price of food is going up.

And as if all that crap wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon.
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain't got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.
Y'know I just 'bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I'll send these doctor bills
- Airmail special -
To whitey on the moon

“I can’t pay no doctor bills, but whitey’s on the moon”. Oh my loves… there are so many LAYERS to this.

Aside from the very true racial component, this poem speaks to our entire culture that normalizes the hoarding and use of finite resources by the few often at the detriment of the many. “No hot water, no toilets, no lights.”

I talk about plastic crap, voting with our wallets, inequality, racism, and privilege - but the phrases I have been using can elide the bodily viscera of such choices. There is no shying away from the human wail of rage that rightly belongs to those who are “not on the moon” as it were - beset by sharp painful rat bites, doctor bills, high food prices, and taxes.

Taxes - nonconsensual government funding whereby all of us are complicit in 5.98 TRILLION (in 2025) DOLLARS of spending. Spent where, you may ask? Let’s see.

We spend the same percentage of the budget on killing people (National Defense) as Health. Whoppee, I guess that balances out.

Oh look!

Natural Resources and the Environment gets 1%, which would be the lowest, but Other is beneath it at 3% (which makes no sense mathematically, but is understandable from a marketing perspective).

Natural Resources and the Environment - from whence all of the above categories EXTRACT what they need - receives scant resources/attention/funding. Bed pads for Medicare, medicines and plastic gloves for Health, metals for making guns/ships with guns/planes with guns/bigger guns in National Defense, paper books for Education, paint for the walls of the VA hospitals, all of these RAW MATERIALS come from Natural Resources and the Environment.

Speaking of raw materials that come from the environment - let us talk about water and air. It pains me to include those two ELEMENTS in even the category of OBJECTS. Our very bodies are comprised of air, water, fire, and earth - calling them natural resources makes my skin crawl.**

If we do not take care of the elements that are - blaaagh moan of despair - included under the rubric of National Resources and the Environment let’s see how long we care about allocating money for NASA’s “human space exploration of the Moon and Mars”.

Yes, I know, I hear you - another tirade from your mother about the ways our society needs to shift so your grandchildren will have thriving planet with pure water, clear air, healthy soil, and thriving flora and fauna.

The issue for us in the global north is we are all “on the moon” as it were - automobiles in every driveway, tvs in every room, plastic food in individually wrapped pre-weighed units. We don’t even have to get dressed to consume stuff that hurts us all.

Consume this and be distracted from the HEART of the matter. Which is what this poem - written, woof, FIFTY-FIVE years ago - puts front and center.

Our consuming is hurting other humans. We are One. Which means we are hurting ourselves.

We are hurting ourselves.

*As he says in this clip, the poem was “inspired by some whiteys on the moon. I want to give credit where credit is due.”

**I remember teaching Bean about natural resources vs human resources in our Oak Meadow curricula for homeschooling. We did a unit on it in second grade and repeated it with more details in third grade. Bean, I taught you that air and water are natural resources because that how our culture treats them - as objects - which is clearly ludicrous (have you read what I wrote about Gaia’s Invisible Labor?)

Kudos to the Ecuadorians who include the Pachamama in their constitution. According to Arkan Lushwala’s in The Time of the Black Jaguar, Ecuadorians refer to natural resources as “Earth’s Blessings.”

Damn right.