One Generation Away From a Tent

OK, last week I posted on my Facebook page my upset about Obama canceling the National Day of Prayer, and the offensive timing of the newly instituted Islamic Day of Prayer on Capitol Hill. With that, I have had a great epiphany: Do not, through guilt or any other cajoling, allow anyone you don't know relatively well into your slew of Facebook friends, and do not speak out against a regime wherein anyone has immortalized them in songs taught to Kindergartners, or emblazoned them across Hanes Beefy-T's in a very adulating, idolizing way.

See, I just feel that I am too jaded for that sort of adulation, but some are clearly not, and though I voted for George Bush in previous elections, I would never even imagine myself wearing a shirt with his multi-colored image silk-screened on it. I might be apt to wear my children's faces on a t-shirt, but anyone else would seem ridiculous to me. In fact, I've said for years - YEARS prior to ever knowing of Barack Hussein Obama, that if ever a future president came up with chanty songs, or big Kim-Yong il posters, I'd be the first to freak out at the mere whisper of such dictator-type love. Well, I'm just saying, I said that for years - years upon years, and nothing has changed. I am freaking out, because now when I mention that I don't like policy change, guess what? I'm a racist.

That's what one guy called me on my Facebook. I have since de-friended him. I mean, I voted for George Bush. How many people hate THAT man? I live in California, so if I walked into the busiest mall, or into a packed stadium and threw a stone into a crowd, every single time I would hit a George Bush hater: Everyone hates George Bush, and they don't just dislike him with a dullish passivity, they despise him. They wish him death, illness, and meanness the likes I've never seen before. They wish ill upon his family, his children, and his wife. When it appeared that Dick Cheney had a scare of cancer, there were people saying they wished he'd die, and not just die, but suffer and die!

What kills me is that it was open season on Bush and his administration. Unleashed hatred due to mere disagreement from liberals to conservatives is a protected sport, but disagreements voiced from conservatives to liberals is now deemed racist. I don't think anyone can know how offensive I find that claim.

I mean, it's important to be clear I don't hate Obama for the mere sport of it, or because it impresses my fellow conservative friends, or because it's expected of conservatives. I don't like the majority of Obama's policies, which I expect would have been the same outcome with any number of Democratic candidates.

Can I tell you why the racist thing bothers me so? It's because that while I know statistically I'm supposed to be in the majority, I've never felt that. Scoff if you want, but you have to know just a few things that define me to understand that statement. Just like any person who has been treated like a minority at any juncture in their life, the things that define me go back a generation or two.

I can think of no better place to start than with my paternal grandparents: They were key to my upbringing. First of all, all I can say for all four of my grandparents is that they were fierce. They faced challenges that would emotionally paralyze any person nowadays, but instead, it made them profoundly strong.

With my paternal grandparents, they came to California on the prompting of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. I'm pretty sure that would be more profound if kids were encouraged to read about it nowadays in John Steinbeck's, "The Grapes of Wrath," but at our local community college, the required reading for English 101B are materials pertaining to Arab Studies. So, when I say that my grandparents arrived in California with little more than a broken down car, no one in current day California gives that any merit or consideration of what that means. In fact, there is this profound ignorance that anyone in the United States has ever faced difficulty, though history, if people knew it, conveys such a different picture.

When my grandparents arrived in the San Joaquin Valley, they worked in the fields. They worked in the fields picking anything from apricots to prunes. They were migrant farm workers. They were the people given the lowliest jobs, and mistreated as the people taking all the jobs away from the locals (remind you of anyone?). Being pregnant, my grandmother gave birth to my aunt in a tent in the San Joaquin Valley. Then, my uncle was born and delivered by a drunken and impaired doctor who tugged at his poor breach body until he was permanently handicapped. They drove hours to have my uncle treated at the Oakland Children's Hospital. Sometimes, they would have to leave him there alone for days without visits.

When my father was born, my young teenage aunt cared for them all in a drying shed that a land owner had given them to live in. My dad told me that my grandfather pulled two sheds together to make one larger one for their makeshift home. They still had a dirt floor, but they were thrilled to have a larger place to live. My 64 year old father did not have running water in his house until he was in high school, and he has yet to be offered free college scholarships, free housing, or free anything. My dad is probably the hardest worker I've ever known, and he is still working a very physically challenging job today.

As for my maternal grandparents, they had equally trying lives. My grandfather said that he was so poor that when he lived in Arkansas, his parents could not afford shoes for he and his sisters. For fun, boys he went to school with would drive their bicycles close to his feet to make him scurry and hop around. As a gift for his youngest five year old sister, he brought her a stray cat he'd found one day. That cat had diphtheria and it killed his sister. Suffering from severe and potentially deadly asthma attacks, his parents moved their entire family from Arkansas to Idaho in hopes that the change in weather would encourage his health problems. They too, worked as farmers.

My maternal grandmother had my mother at eighteen by my grandfather, a man who was not her husband. In a small, backwards town in Idaho, she was judged and ostracized. Her own family would not speak to her. Rather than give up my mother, as many encouraged her to do, she kept my mother, worked hard and even bought a small house for the two of them.

When I went to college an unsuspecting classmate asked me where my parents went to college. When I told him that they had never been to college, he prodded, wanting to know more. When he learned that I was the first in my family to go to college, he told me in a clinical, examining way, "Really, you shouldn't even be here." After that, he let me know every time we had required study units together that I was beneath him, intellectually, and in every other aspect, as well.

Even now, I will not concede that I am immune to such judgment. Now, it comes in different forms, but in an earlier blog about where I grew up, I know this ridiculous attempt to pre-judge me exist. Let's face it, the world lives on stereotypes and ill-based judgment calls.

When a woman moved into our neighborhood a few years ago, I went over to meet her. In the first few moments of our meeting, she told me that I would probably not understand her, because her parents still lived in San Joaquin Valley and had been migrant farm workers. Having found a commonality, I exclaimed, "So was my dad!" She looked at me in disbelief. I explained that my family had come here from Oklahoma, and my dad had worked his youth in the fields picking prunes, cotton, walnuts, and apricots. It was as though she never heard a word I said, because there was this strange contradiction in terms: This blond, blue-eyed woman could not be the same as her, and yet, our backgrounds were abundantly similar.

Look, I'm not saying that I know what it is to be black, or Hispanic, or any other nationality, but American. I do, however, know what it is to have someone judge me based on the color of my skin. Being white and blond, I assure you people make plenty of their own assumptions. I also know what it is to be judged based on someone's false assumption of where they think I came from, or what privileges they think I've received. Because of that, I will never be comfortable with being tagged with the non-illustrious accusation of being a racist.

I would even assert that I have a more diverse group of friends and acquaintances than anyone who casually accuses others of being a racist. It's not differences that bother me, it's the intolerance of differences, even the loss of civility among friends when you disagree that profoundly bothers me. I can, not just be around, but enjoy people who have vehemently differing views than me, and I have never felt the compulsion of calling them names. Also, I have gay friends, and frankly, I am maybe as surprised of them being nice to me, as they are of this devoutly Christian woman being nice to them.

Shutting someone down from their opinions and views, by calling them a derogatory name is, to me, shameful. It is a bizarre attempt to stifle individual freedom and thought, and really, I find it frightening. I'm all for learning and embracing our differences, until it becomes an overly aggressive bear hug that seems more like an attempt to suffocate me until I pass out.

Luke 10:27
'Love your neighbor as yourself.'