And Now I Take on the Tea Party

"...and I want you all to remember--that you must not dream yourself back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one."
-Kim Malthe-Bruun, Danish Resistance leader against the Nazis, in a letter written to his parents the night before his execution.

I have mostly kept silent on the Tea Party. I was hoping we could ignore them and they would go away. But the recent rash of elections in the past year (starting with Scott Brown's in my current home state of Massachusetts) shows that this is not a mere marginal group that will exhaust itself any time soon. The media and public have done a good job of propping up and inflating the movement and it has grown into its own and gained steam. And now I find myself increasingly disturbed with the rhetoric coming from the Right, and the swelling of prejudice among the Tea Partiers.

The quote above is from a man who was executed for smuggling Jews across the sea to Sweden (which remained immune to the expansion of German imperialism during the second World War) during the occupation in Denmark.

We all learn in school that the Holocaust was horrible. But I think we forget how it began. So I want to remind any readers that happen across this page that have either forgotten their history or never learned.

Due to their loss in the first world war, Germany was experiencing a lot of financial hardship. The public were frustrated with their nation's sliding on the totem pole of world power and their own struggles to make ends meet. Frustration gave rise to a need for an outlet, a scapegoat.

When Hitler rose to power, he tapped into that frustration and channeled it toward an easy scapegoat: the Jews. Many Jewish people were shopkeepers and business people, and didn't seem quite as scathed by the economic situation as their non-Jewish German counterparts. And so, the anti-Semitic sentiment rose. It started at first with milder cues, a general debunking to second class citizenship. It started with just some words, a branding. But despite the mantra of sticks and stones, these words eventually evolved into the worst violence of our modern history. The scapegoating also expanded to include homosexuals, the handicapped or disabled and Catholics, among others.

But we shouldn't forget how it started. As with almost all things, it started with something small. The seeds of frustration and prejudice, which bloomed into full blown fear and hatred that then begot genocide.

Now, if we fast forward ahead, I see the same seeds being planted or organically taking root in the minds of many Americans. We have here in the U.S. a failed economy and a shrinking (or I should say, a disappearing) middle-class. People see manufacturing jobs shipped overseas, and they are struggling. So it seems it's time again for some scapegoats.

I have read and listened a lot on the radio to the Tea Party rhetoric. I've seen pictures of a lot of the signs being waved at their rallies. And though I am sure there really are some salt of the Earth type of people who are just exasperated at the economy and government spending, in the end, the loudest and most virulent voices in the movement confirm my suspicions and fears. At its core, the Tea Party is a movement of collective xenophobia and prejudice of the dreaded "other."

The Tea Party is a backlash against a president who is dark-skinned and has a funny name, who was born out of wedlock and raised by a single mother for a time, and then--gasp!--spent a part of his childhood overseas mingling with other children (who also happened to have brown skin). It probably doesn't help that his wife is a successful and brilliant lawyer who has made more money than him.

I am trying not to simplify, but encompassed in the Tea Party movement--a movement of which the demographic is notably (highly) disproportionately skewed toward white and middle-aged individuals--is the faction known as the birther movement. Though not always outwardly embraced, the tolerance of this faction within the movement by the higher ups in the Tea Party confirms its root sentiment of prejudice.

For the record, I will say I am not a hardcore Democrat or Obama apologist/fan. In states I've resided where I am allowed to be registered as an Independent and still partake in primaries, I have been. In more local elections, I have voted for third parties. In the larger elections, I've tended to vote Democrat by default--not so much proudly, but because I feel like they are slightly less indebted to large corporations and are generally more socially and racially tolerant, as well as more dedicated to environmental protection. If you look through the roll call of Congress, the Democratic party has more women and minorities among their representatives. The idealogy of racial and gender inclusion that is more inherent to the Democratic party resounds with me.

In the 2008 election, I voted for Obama. I had reservations about him based on his voting records. My feelings since the election can most accurately be described as ambivalent. I think he's done some great things that I am proud of, but I also am vastly disappointed in some of his choices and in places where he has more or less (whether formally or not) continued on with Bush era policies.

But getting back to the Tea Party: I just don't buy their bullshit about their true concern being government takeover and spending.

Because is that really is their angle, then where were they when we spent a half-trillion dollars and sent several thousand young men and women to their deaths over in Iraq based on an utter lie? When we were wiretapped and our credit card and library records scoured under (and even outside of the legal limits authorized by) the Patriot Act? When our rights under freedom of speech and press became much more limited than any time in recent history? When the Bush Administration loosened trade regulations and offered tax cuts for millionares and corporations that are largely responsible for creating the huge debt and deficit that contributed to our economic collapse? And have we forgotten that it was indeed the Bush Administration that began the bank bailouts? Do these things not reek of wasteful spending and of a federal government overstepping it boundaries and taking over?

Of course they do, but Bush didn't fit the profile for an easy scapegoat because he is a white Christian male of an affluent background and with a fairly passive homemaker of a wife.

Let's get down to brass tacks. The Tea Partiers, in their bones, are afraid of becoming a minority demographic in this country. They are afraid of what is different and they are afraid of change, completely regardless of whether that "change" will save more lives, or the economy, or create a better health or educational system for the greater good of their nation. They have latched onto demagogues to scapegoat easy targets and divert our attention from the truth, and have tapped into our pathetically transparent fears.

And now, we have our scapegoats: immigrants, Muslims, and homosexuals.

We need to start speaking the truth and that is this: many of the jobs that formed the backbone of the middle-class are gone. They are gone not because of immigrants and Muslims, but because our government and corporations created an incestuous affair with each other and now the government has offered to look the other way as corporations looked for cheap and even sweatshop labor elsewhere. Both parties have been funded by the industry and have had their votes bought (though I will say the Republicans on the whole are more susceptible to this). Our economy will continue to remain in a rut as long as we rely on a system that has been tinkered with to concentrate and maintain wealth at the top 2-5% of the population. To continue concentrating wealth means we need to continue taking it from the bottom 95%, and so the rest of us will continue to suffer.

Until we are bold enough to adjust our tax code to a fair prorportion where corporations and wealthy individuals foot a larger share of the bill needed to support our national budget, we will continue to flounder.

In the meantime, the politicians know this, and so they have diverted our attention elsewhere. It's hard for our minds to grasp economics and the larger issue of the caste system, but so much easier to blame a party because their skin color, or gods, or accent, is different from ours.

I work as part-time as an educator. The other day, an 11 year-old student of mine told me she is a Muslim. Or rather, she confessed she was, while adding sheepishly, and APOLOGETICALLY, that she doesn't like to mention it as she knows people "don't like" that and could "hate" her for it.

Shame on you Tea Partiers, for making a young girl feel like she needs to keep her religion and ethnicity a secret for fear of becoming a victim of hatred and persecution in the country she and her parents were born in. This country was founded on the principals of religious and cultural freedom and tolerance.

Like Mr. Malthe-Brunn, our Founding Fathers aimed to create an ideal of human decency, that we should working to advance instead of systematically destroy. It is a distraction from the real problems we need to face.

When Writing Really Is The Only Way to Survive...

I haven't written on the blog for a few weeks. Last month, my mother died. It was an expected surprise. My mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January 2005 after a relapse from a five year remission from her first bout of cervical cancer. She was told she'd probably only have a year to live. Since then there were a half-dozen close calls, where the phone rang and my brother told me "this is it," only for her to pull through and go another year or more before her next close call.

I stopped believing it was ever going to happen, even as she lost the ability to digest solid food, and needed a wheelchair. My mother was only 52 when she died. As mentioned the other day, her passing coincided with the second week of a new job and the crunch time of a deadline. I couldn't focus on my freelance work, so took a brief hiatus from it to attend to logistics and her funeral. At my other job, with the exception of my boss (who I told only to excuse my sense of preoccupation and to take a day off), I did not inform the other co-workers.

I didn't tell a lot of people to avoid the usual condolences, the displays of sympathy that are inevitable with such news, but don't really fit this situation. My mother was not a nice person. She was abusive and manipulative. She was an addict, and has been one since I was seven.

I grew up surrounded by drugs and addiction, where any and all of my dreams or desires for a better life (starting with going away to college) were not only openly dismissed and mocked by my mother, but were under constant attack. My mother seemed determined to destroy any future for or will I had to achieve something. I've tried to desperately to make sense of this...to understand how a mother could so willingly and violently try to take the light from her own child, to want to mold her own child into herself, while knowing herself to be diseased and despicable.

The only conclusion I can come to, and have come to again and again, is that my mother needed to validate her addiction by proving it was an inevitable outcome in the family, due to genetics or our class, or whatever other excuses she came up to justify herself to us. By doing this, she could avoid the responsibility of changing or seeking true rehabilitation. Also, of course, misery loves company. She was a sinking ship and wanted us on board all the way till the water was above our own heads.

When I was a child, I loved my mother, despite the almost constant onslaught of cruel abuse. When I became a young teenager, and the abuse became too much to bear, I almost lost it all. I started thinking about ending it all, while still desperately wanting to live. (I think about the recent rash of bullying-induced suicide. I was also bullied, both at school AND by my mother when I came home from school. It was everywhere for me. There was no escape).

I wanted to live, just not with her. But I was stuck. The thing that had to happen, is that I had to hate my mother to survive. When I loved her, her words and fists hurt. But I started to see her as someone who wasn't the woman who gave birth to me, but a stranger who was, for whatever reason, trying to destroy me. And something stony crept under my skin, and gave me some kind of strength to survive. For the next four years, until I went to college, our small apartment was a battle zone...when she spit at me, I spit back. When she hit me, I hit back. I grew taller than her (if only by an inch), and stronger. She even became a little scared of me. At the same time, I took my new attitude to school. The other students' words bounced off me, as I locked them into long menacing glares and a few cutting rebuttals that made them look away first. I stopped caring what they thought. And they knew it. They became powerless.

I lived in a neighborhood where it wasn't that exactly safe to go wandering around at night, so I didn't have the luxury of going out for walks when things got rough at home (often after dusk). I didn't have a car (couldn't afford one of course, and the age for driving in NYC was 17 anyway). I didn't have my own room, or even a door. In fact, my mother slept only about five feet from me. Of course, it was not a necessarily a 24/7 situation. When you live in quarters that close, it can be exhausting to be enemies the entire time. But bad things happened on fairly regular basis. To go longer than a week or so, without a large fight full of screaming, cursing, broken glass and at least an attempted swing or two, was a miracle.

I did what I could to survive. When I was a bit younger (10-12), I took up music. I played the flute and the keyboard. My mother sold my $400 flute that my grandmother saved up a year to buy me for my birthday for $50 worth of crack.

I then took up writing.

Paper and pens are cheap and have no resale value. I had loved words and reading and had also been dabbling in poetry for a couple of years prior, so I then turned to it full-steam. I joined drama club at school, which not only allowed me another artistic outlet that couldn't be stolen and sold without my knowledge, but kept me out of the apartment longer and often till later at night, but somewhere safe and off the streets.

When I was home, I slept a lot. When I was awake, I kept my face constantly hidden behind a book or journal and kept headphones on. I even slept with them on, so that I dreamt in musical refrains that took me somewhere far from there. My living and dreaming worlds were all about the words on the page, on the stage or being crooned to me on the radio. In bed, I often kept my journal under my pillow, with a flashlight, in case I woke up and needed to write something in the middle of the night.

My passion evolved to a career goal. I wasn't going to become another welfare mom with a bad habit living in a tenament in Brooklyn. I wasn't going to just become some regular Jane either. I was going to be a writer. Just like I my feelings toward my mother had to no longer be love but not anything lukewarm to survive my home situation, my dream had to be big enough to wrap a large rope of hope around me and pull me toward the dawn of a different day.

I had to be something that mattered in a way that mattered the most to me. Words had saved me, both the ones I wrote down and the ones I read from other writers. And now I wanted to use words again and again to save others, whether those in sad scenarios like the one I grew up in, or the wildlife we victimize with stigmas that have the same grounding in the prejudice we show to people, or in the larger world. I want to use words as both weapons to destroy hate and helplessness, and as medicine to offer hope, comfort and strength.

When I say I am writing for survival, I mean it down to my bones. It saved me and gave me meaning and sense when nothing else could have. It still does today. And even when things seem dire, as the thermostats continue to rise, as wars and genocides ravage on, as we turn up the violence on ourselves and on the animals we share this world with, I will continue to write to make sense of it, to shine a light on the injustices, and to extend it as a lifesaver to those who need it as much as I did and still do.

Won't you join me and support me in my efforts?

Apologies and Explanation for the Hiatus

I apologize to my readers if you are out there. I've been absent, I know. My mother died a month ago, and it messed with my head. Her passing coincided with my second week into a new job, and during the crunch time of a major contract deadline for a freelance assignment, so I had to deal with the aftermath while also pressured to keep a polite face on and try to do work.

I will be back this upcoming week though. There's a lot to write about. The West seems to be declaring an all-out war on wolves (again), and this weekend there was the 10/10/10 Global Work Party to raise awareness and increase political pressure about addressing climate change. What I'd really like to do, though, is hear from you all, what do you want to see covered here? What problems am I not addressing in the realms of the environment, social justice, and struggling as a scribe? Please let me know!