Fully Present Post 50

I am always talking to myself.  I make comments to myself when I discover something I like or dislike.  I affirm myself.  I judge myself.  I convince myself, push myself, and even scold myself.  I forgive myself.  Sometimes, when things aren’t crystal clear, I dialogue with myself as if there were two of me.  Because there are: the emotional me and the rational me.  What I do know is that what I say to myself impacts my decision making and ultimately my well being and my self-esteem. Continue reading “Powerful self-talk”

I would venture to say that most white people are not white supremacists, Nazis, or hood-owning members of the KKK.  I doubt most would see themselves as racists or bigots either.  The majority are decent people who just want to earn a living, raise their kids, and enjoy their vacations.  But that is the problem when they fail to censure or hold accountable the few who are active racists and bigots.  It is the problem because white people are the majority in this country who also hold the reigns of corporate and political power.

History has shown that it only takes a few well-placed and well-funded loud mouth bigots to make the lives of minority populations in this country and in countries around the world miserable.  They need only fill the heads of decent white people with fabrications that dehumanize or make villains of their targets.  These wealthy bigots have a perverted sense of superiority and are motivated by greed and power.  We’ve heard the baseless protestations that “Indians are savages who rape women and kill children without provocation” in order to raise enough fear and ire among the populace so that they could forcibly steal Indian lands.  We’ve known about how the false claims that “Blacks are lazy children and only 2/3 human” made it acceptable to steal their labor to build this nation; and how the ridiculous accusation that “the Jews killed Jesus and have a plot to take over the world” was enough to silence the masses that allowed for the holocaust.

Today the rhetoric is, “Mexicans are rapist and drug dealers”; “Muslims hate Americans and are terrorists”; “Immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans”; “Black males pose a threat”; “Jews are taking over”; and “transgender women pose a danger in public bathrooms”.  These are the daily messages whites are being fed on a daily basis through media outlets and now there is a bigot in the White House.  Remember President Andrew Jackson had the consent of whites as he made war upon the American Indians who only sought to defend themselves .

When wealthy bigots fund  bigoted media moguls who then join forces with bigoted politicians who enlist bigoted armed forces (police, military, and self-appointed militias) then disaster quickly follows.  Examine the decimation of the 500 Native American nations, the enslavement of millions of Africans followed by Jim Crow, the murder of 6 million Jews, the exclusionary immigration policies, and the internment of Japanese Americans.  These events began with wealthy funders of the media who then fooled the masses in believing their lies, giving political cover to political leaders who then sanction weapons to enact their will.

Bigots are not stupid people.  They are strategic and not to be underestimated.  Let me repeat myself:  they seek out like-minded individuals of influence who then sell their fabricated grievances against minority groups to the  unsuspecting white masses in order to give bigoted politicians cover to do their dirty work.  And it is easy to do because the masses are either apathetic, gullible, ignorant, or uneducated.

On occasion, I will turn on C-Span’s Washington Journal at 4am to hear what callers across the nation are saying about a particular current issue.  Yesterday morning, a particular caller identified herself as a strong Trump supporter and she said that it was now confirmed that President Obama’s birth certificate was a fake.  That neither Barack nor Michele were actually U.S. Citizens.  I would classify her as the gullible white person who is willing to believe conspiracy theories from fake news outlets. Another caller, a white male, also a Trump supporter, wants us to all chip in to pay for the wall because of all the dangerous people coming across to do us harm.  But the majority of the callers were apathetic.  They just wanted to give the president a chance and thought only that the liberal media and the democrats were out to get him.

Thankfully, there are whites who oppose the bigots.  We saw them last Saturday in Charlottesville and yesterday in Boston (Yay Boston!).  They are the whites who are paying attention. Educated whites are typically the first to recognize the lies and the motivation behind them and they are the first to raise the red flag in protest alongside the targeted minority group.  They try to sound the alarm for their otherwise sleeping neighbors.  Eventually they may successfully rally enough people of good will to the side of justice and liberty.  But too often it is only after the devastation.  Educated whites have to be brave as they face down other whites who have been so duped into believing  lies and conspiracy theories that they are willing to resort to violence on behalf of the bigots behind them. Heather Hyer was one of the brave (RIP).

Now is the time to wake up white people!  Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News is bad enough, but Steve Bannon just told you that he is back at the wheel of his media outlet, Brietbart News, funded by billionaire Robert Mercer (read more  ).  Brietbart News  traffics in conspiracy theories and claims itself as an outlet for the alt-right movement.  Bannon is ready to go to war against the ideals of freedom and justice for all.  The question is, will educated white people of good will fight now, before the damage is done and before violence breaks out in earnest?  Will they educate and challenge their white friends and family members who are too busy to pay attention to what is real and true?  I hope so.  And the 20,000 people (mostly white) who showed up at Boston’s Anti-racist rally yesterday gives me greater reason to hope.

 

I knew Saturday’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia wasn’t going to be well received by decent people around the country.  It was billed as the largest white nationalist rally ever, joining such groups as Neo-Nazis, alt-white activists, and the KKK.  I thought there would be a handful of anti-racist protesters there too, and that they would be kept separated by the police as they held their signs (and their noses) while these haters marched through the streets.

But this turned out to be something very different.  These young white supremacists showed up with guns, bats, and pepper spray, itching for a fight. And they got one.  With only a small police presence, they physically attacked the counter-racists protesters.  And vice versa.  I watched on television from the beginning as few police could be found and those who were present, did little to stop the attacks.  It was strange.  I can only surmise that the police had miscalculated the ensuing violence and were waiting for backup before they finally intervened.

I am most disturbed by the youth of the people involved.  It tells me that my generation has failed!  As a parent and an educator, I ask myself how my generation allowed our children, now these young men and a few young women, to hate Jews, Muslims, black and brown people?  We somehow failed to teach them that America is a nation of immigrants that belongs to all of us.  Why did they revert to the bigoted past when America was first and foremost for white people? Did they think that was America at its greatest?  Do they really want to revert back to the days of genocide of the American Indian?  Slavery or perhaps Jim Crow for black people?  Exclusion for everyone else who is not white nor Christian?  And most importantly, my peers failed to teach these young adults that violent confrontation is unacceptable.  My generation bears the blame for yesterday.  And you can see the kind of failure that led to yesterday’s shameful display in the words and actions and began with the campaign of President Trump and now his cabinet members: Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Jeff Sessions.  This President couldn’t even condemn white supremacy and white nationalists when he addressed the situation yesterday.

A young woman lost her life.  She was only 33 years old.  She was murdered at the event by a 20-year old white male nationalist who turned his car into a weapon and ran over a crowd of anti-racists protesters.  Two police officers  were killed when their helicopter crashed and many others were injured in the violent clashes.

I have to admit that as a black woman, I can’t begin to understand how one group of human beings actually believes that they are better than other human beings based on the color of their skin.  Science already proved the eugenics experiments wrong.  Nazi Germany learned the hard way that they weren’t superior.  And I can’t wrap my head around the reasoning that claims that this nation actually belongs to white people and that Donald Trump was elected to give it back to them.  What about the Native Americans?  That’s like saying a thief who enters your house, kills you, and then claims that God made him the rightful, true, and only legitimate owner of the house.

What I do understand is fear, self-preservation, and greed.  These are base emotions that I believe to be the fuel that these young white nationalists are tapping into.  They fear having to compete in life with the talented youth from other ethnic groups, like the “Jackie Robinsons” and “Barack Obamas” in the country.  They fear being irrelevant because they can no longer take it for granted that they presumably have the best ideas and the best athletic ability.  They want to preserve their privileged place where opportunities to attend Ivy League schools, to apply for the best jobs, and to obtain investment capital,  were all set aside for them alone.  And they want as much of everything that they can get for themselves without having to share with others.   And by others, I’ll include women.  Just look at what happened at Google last week where a young white male engineer announced in a memo that women naturally lacked the technical ability of men.   I call that fear, self-preservation, greed and delusion.  The question is, how are we going to reach this generation before it is too late?

 

 

 

The other day, a companion and I watched a news story about how someone had broken particular laws, causing financial injury to several people.  My companion immediately proclaimed that the perpetrator needed to be locked up.  I objected. Why should we taxpayers foot the bill to lock this person up? I’d rather the perpetrator repay the people he harmed and also render a public good to society in retribution for his crimes.  I think we lock up way too many people and I think there is a better way to exact justice. Continue reading “Debt to Society”

I have no great love for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  I think he is moving the justice system away from “justice” in his approach to immigration, civil rights in policing, women’s rights, and criminal justice sentencing.  That said, even I was taken aback by President Trump’s repeated public ridicule of the first senator who supported his bid for president when no one else did.  And then the nastiness got worse. Continue reading “Is being mean our new cultural norm?”

I readily admit that I have no idea why 30-35%  of the U.S. population continues to support President Donald Trump.  In my mind, their continued support defies all reason.  I need to be empathetic and compassionate towards my fellow Americans, not angry at them.  It starts with trying hard to understand their point of view.

I’m thinking that perhaps they haven’t had anyone try to reason with them.  Maybe they have been too busy trying to live their lives to pay attention to any news besides Fox.  Maybe they remain in a bubble, surrounded by other Trump supporters.  Maybe they truly hate American government and want to rebuild it into a dictatorship (I hope not).  Or maybe they are just lying to themselves, too stubborn to admit the reality of the situation.  In any case, I’m compelled to lay out reasons why this President no longer deserves the support of any patriotic American. Continue reading “To Trump Supporters”

It’s July in Southern California.  It was around 100 degrees outside and according to my new Charger 2 Fitbit, I was another 5,000 steps away from my newly established daily goal of 10,000 steps.  I had already finished 35 minutes on the treadmill and the house was clean from efforts to reach the prior day’s goal.  While there is always gardening to be done, I’m a wimp when it comes to heat and so I only garden when it is cool, meaning early morning or early evening.  So, I did what seemed reasonable:  I headed for the mall. Continue reading “Escape to the Mall”

I planted American flags in various pots around  my backyard in preparation for a 4th of July barbecue with a few family and friends.  The early part of the day while cooking, I was glued to the History Channel’s retelling of our nation’s history from the reasons and events leading up to the July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence and the subsequent War for Independence.  I watched episode after episode up through the Industrial Revolution.  So much in our history made me proud and made me angry.  I learned that a third of the cowboys were black and brown men.  I marveled at the bravery of the “rough necks” who built the first skyscrapers and bridges and the Chinese who bravely handled the nitroglycerin to enable the building of the railroad passages.  I was impressed at the ingenuity of Americans of diverse backgrounds whose inventions greatly improved life as we know it.   But at times, I was downright sick with sadness, like at the treatment of slaves and the payment for that horrible sin in the carnage of the Civil War. The decimation of the buffalo and the story of Wounded Knee brought me to tears.

Even though America has too often gotten it wrong in its treatment of humanity and nature, this is my country and I love it.  It is worth fighting for in word and deed.  For many, it was and is worth dying for.  We have always struggled to live up to our own ideals upon which this nation was founded.  We continue to struggle to get it right, arguing though protest movements, Supreme Court cases, a Civil War and now everyday protests and debates.  Today, with this President, we must fight as patriots to insist that we live up to those high ideals.  On my mind today is the fight over immigration since one of my son-in-laws is about to become a U.S. Citizen on July 14th.

It seems that some of us have forgotten that this is a nation of immigrants.  Some would like to ignore the Statue of Liberty and the poem, “The New Colossus”, written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 to raise public funds that were needed to build the base for the statue (a gift from France).  The words of the poem are now engraved on the tablet and it is good to remind ourselves of them:

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.

From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your
poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

I topped off the 4th watching the Macy’s Fireworks show on television.  It was beautiful.  Maybe next year, I’ll go to my hometown show again on the 3rd.  It just wasn’t the same watching them from my bedroom window this year.  Being there to celebrate with my fellow Americans makes a world of difference.

 

My father was an abusive husband when he drank.  And he drank a lot.  He was an alcoholic who got into enough car accidents that his license had to be revoked.  Thankfully, he didn’t kill and injure innocent people while behind the wheel.  Surviving in a household with a mixture of love and affirmation, violence and terror, occasional affluence followed by poverty, all resulting from one parent’s alcoholism takes some resilience and work to achieve and maintain emotional stability. Continue reading “Daddy Issues”

On occasion, I could see why my mother was attracted to my father.  He was a brilliant man, highly educated, and ambitious.  He was very handsome, too, and charismatic.  I’m certain she had no idea that the man for whom she left college to  marry and bare three children in quick succession would turn out to be a man who would only grace his children with precious few moments of real  fatherhood.   Continue reading “Those Precious Few Fatherly Moments”