Tag Archives: Xenophobia

Why Humanity Is Undeserving of First Contact

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

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Cassini’s last full Saturn shot, September 14, 2017. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Jason Major via https://www.newscientist.com).

Last week, NASA gave the Cassini probe a glorious death. After twenty years of travel to and trips around Saturn and its 60-plus moons, NASA plunged Cassini into Saturn’s atmosphere. It was a fitful end to a very successful mission to a planet roughly 750 million miles from Earth.

NASA and various teams of astrophysicists, cosmologists, exobiologists, engineers, and mathematicians in Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and other parts of the world have been working diligently for breakthrough moments. Probes like Voyager have trekked toward the expansive Oort Cloud, inching ever closer to the edge of the Terran System. Between Hubble, Chandra, Fermi, and so many other space telescopes, the universe going back nearly to the Big Bang has already started giving up its secrets. All toward the ultimate goal of humanity reaching the stars, and meeting sentient beings from civilizations far more advanced than the one led by the West on 2017 CE Earth.

But is humanity truly ready to meet extraterrestrials from elsewhere in the Milky Way, or even beyond? Are humans prepared to make contact with beings with technologies that help them traverse a radiation-filled void in a fraction of the seven years it took Cassini to reach Saturn? Do humans have the emotional, psychological, moral, and spiritual capacity to cope with such a history-altering event? Are Homo sapiens humble enough to meet the challenges that will come after finding out that first contact with an advanced civilization is both an end and a beginning?

Of course we’re not! Here’s a short list of leading people and recent events that prove humans are as ready for first contact as a newborn baby is for a seven-course meal. (At least, a meal that would include filet mignon wrapped with bacon and key lime pie for dessert.) Donald Trump. Marine Le Pen. Vladimir Putin. Theresa May. Kim Jong Un and North Korea. Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. Capitalism. Neoliberalism. The very need for Black Lives Matter. The limited response thus far to man-made climate change. Hollywood. Las Vegas. The endless fighting over resources and enslavement of peoples for a narcissist’s dream of independence, freedom, power, and wealth. That’s already enough for me to not want to meet humanity, and I’m knee-deep in this muck and mire!

Can anyone who possesses a reasonable amount of empathy and knowledge imagine what the most powerful and learned members of an advanced alien civilization would think of humanity and our stewardship of Earth? They’ve heard and seen us in action for at least a century, since humans started broadcasting on wireless radio. In that time, there have been been two World Wars, ethnic cleansing and mass murder (e.g., Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot and Cambodia, and Rwanda), the Cold War, and the nuclear arms buildup. Powerful nations and corporations have repeatedly exploited indigenous peoples, the most poverty-stricken in Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere, and the planet’s biosphere. Yeah, I am sure sentient aliens have seen us and feel just as welcome to visit Earth as migrants from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East feel in the US and Europe right now!

Is it possible that sentient extraterrestrials might find some exceptional humans potentially worthy? Sure. Science-y folk like Michelle Thaller, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Hakeem Oluseyi, and the late Claudia Alexander come to mind. One might be able to make the case for humanitarians and social justice activists, for the best writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, vocalists, and actors out there. But from a sentient alien’s perspective, why should any of these people be exceptions? These beings are likely able to use dark matter or dark energy to power faster-than-light spacecraft. They may be able to fold space. They may even possess the ability to convert matter to energy and back again at a whim, to make food and weapons out of thin air and bio-waste. There’s no way they could see any humans as deserving of first contact.

James Cromwell as Zefram Cochrane making first contact with Vulcans screen shot, from Star Trek: First Contact (1996). (http://www.startrek.com/)

There is also the real issue of what it would take for an alien civilization to become advanced without blowing itself up in the first place. These advanced beings would be collaborative and cooperative to a fault, would’ve long ago assured equity and inclusion as their reason for existence and exploration. They would likely avoid war-loving civilizations like the ones on Earth, while looking to break bread (or the alien equivalent) with more stable, peaceful, and advanced civilizations out in the galaxy.

They may make exceptions, though, for the most vulnerable of sentient beings and other species trapped in warring worlds like our own. These aliens may decide someday to “rapture up” indigenous peoples, vulnerable minority groups, the poverty-stricken, certain women and children, to save them from the leading Western nations and other developed countries on this planet, who seek to oppress and exploit them. It’s something writers like Octavia Butler and Derrick Bell contemplated for Black and Brown folk. It would be the human thing — maybe even, the godly thing — to do.

As for the rest of humanity, we’ll have to wait for a more just, verdant, and glorious age before first contact will work out well for us. We are just too elitist, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, and life-destroying (read, too primitive) to be worthy of prime time on a galactic stage. We’re not ready.

The #45 Mix Tape

28 Sunday May 2017

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Then candidate 45 hugging US flag at campaign rally (remember, he’s the anti-Midas, everything he touches turns to crap), Tampa, FL, June 11, 2016. (Chris O’Meara/AP, Times Free Press).

I’m changing it up a bit this weekend. With so much focus on the apocalypse that is 45 and his band of greedy, racist, misogynistic, Islamophobia, and Russia-helping yes-men, I have something goofy and meaningful to say. There are already several comprehensive syllabi on Donald J. Trump out, though, so adding my scholarly musings and sources to this almost inexhaustible topic would be a futile exercise. Instead, I have a mix tape (sort of), one that highlights the changes in my music tastes over time and a group of songs that I mostly despise. Just like I loath most of America’s knee-jerk arguments over 45 and his minions from the past two years.

1. “Little Lies” (Fleetwood Mac, 1987). From their Tango In The Night album. Christine McVie sounds like a shot dog on this song (and Lindsey Buckingham doesn’t sound much better). But this was a Top-5 hit on Billboard in 1987, around the same time Trump was likely being turned by Vladimir Putin and the KGB in the former USSR. And, the song’s theme is pretty obvious.

2. “Live to Tell” (Madonna, 1986). Not exactly my favorite artist, but a one-time favorite song from the one-time “Material Girl” for me three decades ago. After several sources quoting the deposed Michael Flynn, “he has a story to tell,” I remembered Madonna’s lyrics, “I have a tale to tell.” Come to think of it, doesn’t Jared Kushner have a tale to tell about his and 45’s “thousand lies?”

3. “Spies Like Us” (Paul McCartney, 1985-86). Proof positive that Baby Boomers will vote for anything, this piece of poop was a Top-10 hit in January 1986. It’s also emblematic of the theme of ineptitude and macabre humor that runs through the song, representing the movie by the same title, and Flynn, Kushner, Carter Page, Roger Stone, and the rest of the monolithic bloc of 45’s White men.

4. “Russians” (Sting, 1985-86). Why? Because Russians (maybe with the exception of Josef Stalin and Putin) “love their children too” — didn’t you know? But they love messing with our corrupt democracy even more.

5. “Oops!…I Did It Again” (Britney Spears, 2000). God, I have no idea why anyone would’ve ever liked this zit-popper. But the then-eighteen-year-old Spears was prescient with the line “I’m not that innocent.” Neither is 45. He made be a narcissistic buffoon who can’t put two coherent sentences together with a pen, two pieces of paper, Scotch tape, and a flashlight. But he knows where his money’s coming from, no?

6. “Just A Friend” (really, “Jus’ a Friend,” Biz Markie, 1989-90). Same theme as Britney Spears’, with a twist of crossover appeal, a ridiculous baroque get-up, and off-key singing that could only be topped by NBA Hall-of-Famer (and internalized racist) Charles Barkley. But it captures perfectly the love affair between ditto-headed supremacist Americans and 45 (it doesn’t go the other way, of course).

7. “White, Discussion” (Live, 1994). A bit of my favorite grunge, which I have used before. It applies to the folks, the so-called American liberals ready to blame non-voters, third-party voters, and Trump supporters for the rise of 45. Still, many of them are to blame also, because most of them aren’t liberal. If you supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 based on principles, and not out of pragmatism, you are not a liberal, and have been voting in center-right candidates for decades. As the song goes, “look where all this talking got us, baby.”

8. “Stranger In Moscow” (Michael Jackson, 1996-97). Jackson’s introspective song applies here as well, because, well, he uses Russia and the theme of isolation throughout. Except in 45’s case, he likes it that way. And apparently, so does Russia.

9. “Lies” (En Vogue, 1990). Trust me, it fits! (s/o to Dawn Robinson).

10. “Thug Paradise” (Capone-N-Noreaga/Tragedy Khadafi, 1997). The lyrics below say it all:

I twist the truth, I rule the world, my crown is called deceit
I am the emperor of lies, you grovel at my feet
I rob you and I slaughter you, your downfall is my gain
And still you play the sycophant and revel in my pain
And all my promises are lies, all my love is hate
I am the politician, and I decide your fate

Supporters and sycophants beware: 45 is coming for you, in a steamroller with a 700-horsepower engine going one hundred.

11. “Fake Love” (Drake, 2017). I’m a Aubrey Graham fan. I can’t stand Drake. Still, this release from More Life should be required listening from 45 supporters who think they’re not racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, or narcissistic. He also has a song on this album titled “Portland,” though I seriously doubt he was thinking about this weekend or Richard Collins III.

12. “Waterfalls” (TLC, 1995). Yep, yep, yep. Both 45 and MAGA-types have been chasing illusory rainbows and torrents off jagged edges, and damning everyone who they perceive as a threat along the way. And they’re both on a one-way trip.

13. “Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone” (Glass Tiger, 1986). This is the song 45 should play whenever he finally leaves office, whether by resignation, impeachment, and/or force. As everything 45 touches turns into crap, Glass Tiger’s Top-10 schlock cannot be made any worse. Plus, not even Glass Tiger would complain about 45 using their crappy music.

14. (Bonus Track) “No Bravery” (James Blunt, 2006). 45 is part of a continuum, one that stretches through all of American history. On the international stage, though, it has been one of constant chest-thumping while killing innocents in the name of freedom or national security. Though Blunt’s was about fighting for the UK, the song has much more applicability in the US. We have so much blood on our hands, and 45 means to add to this fetid river on the domestic and international frThe #45 Mix Tapeonts.

If Blacks Should “Go Back to Africa,” Whites Should Go to Australia

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

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Go Back to Africa! Go Back to Mexico! cartoon, 2003. (Luis Castellon; http://google.com).

Go Back to Africa! Go Back to Mexico! cartoon, 2003. (Luis Castellón; http://google.com).

It is part of the racism, narcissism, and stupidity of many US Whites to respond to protests, die-ins, boycotts, and even the most minor criticisms of systemic racism and oppression with “Go Back to Africa.” Or, “If you don’t love America, then leave,” as if most Blacks have a real choice. The amount of ignorant cruelty in these knee-jerk responses says as much about the individual racism of these supposedly right-standing Americans as it does about their comfortability with systemic racism and the psychological — if not material — benefits these Whites draw from Black suffering. Or, Native American suffering, as has been the case with the response of Whites to the Dakota Access pipeline protests over the past couple of months. Or Latino suffering, with chants of “Build that wall!,” “Send them back!,” and “Kick them out!” by Donald Trump’s exclusively White supporters for more than a year.

A few years ago, I had a White student in a World History course who was upset by my lecture about the historical consensus that the American Revolution wasn’t as transformational an event as Americans pretend. The student was so caught up that told me to “Go back to Africa” after the class. The lecture was about the nature of revolutions, and per usual, I compared the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, and used various measures to compare their impact on the social order, on political systems, and on the social mobility of the citizenry after the fact. And as usual, I showed that there was much more change in France and Haiti (the latter the first successful slave-led revolution in modern history) than there would be in the new US until the Civil War.

But I had shattered a student’s worldview of America as always good, and the American Revolution and the US Constitution that followed it as part of some predestined, divinely-inspired, genius-infused plan of greatness. The result was the student yelling at me, “You’re anti-patriotic!,” “You don’t love America!,” and “If you don’t love America, you need to get out!” I mostly ignored the student’s racial Tourette’s, and got to the heart of their issue: a mediocre grade on a paper assignment and their complete misunderstanding of US history in the context of world history.

23andMe sample results, November 2, 2016. (http://ForumBiodiversity.com).

23andMe sample results, November 2, 2016. (http://ForumBiodiversity.com).

The student’s issue, though singularly unusual for me in a classroom setting, is something Blacks hear from Whites in everyday settings literally every day. Like selfish, brattish five-year-olds, many Whites claim everything and everyone as their playthings, and if we disagree, we should leave, we should suffer. But “Go back to Africa?” Even without DNA testing, demographers know half of the 44 million Blacks in the US are partly White, and about one in eight are part Native American. In my case, should I go back to Nigeria, Ghana, or the Ivory Coast, and to what group? Igbo, Yoruba, Wolof? Should I drill down, find that I’m at least one-eighth Choctaw, and apply for tribal membership, so I can live on a reservation in Oklahoma? Or should I sue the estates of the Scotch-Irish assholes who came to the US between 1795 and 1818 for owning my ancestors, for their crimes against humanity and for reparations, and then move to Edinburgh or Dublin?

No, I don’t have to leave at all. As James Baldwin said, “I insist on the right to criticize” the US “perpetually”. But if the White folk who firmly believe Blacks, Latinos, and even Native Americans ought to leave, maybe they should buy a one-way ticket to someplace that will make them feel even more at home than Europe. For these “Leave America [insert racial epithet]” people, they should seriously consider Australia. Seriously. Australia is perhaps the closest America’s Whites-first people can get to a “White man’s country” or a White person’s utopia they can find. Sure, there’s also Europe, but European immigration policies would likely lead to a high-rejection rate, due to lack of skills, higher education, and no need for political asylum.

Then Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard not welcoming migrants and asylum seekers cartoon, June 30, 2012. (Bill Leak, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/).

Then Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard not welcoming migrants and asylum seekers cartoon, June 30, 2012. (Bill Leak, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/).

In Australia, the image of the rugged White individual remains in full bloom. Their immigration policies are very much the ones Trump’s almost exclusively White supporters would go for. In Australia’s case, anyone without a passport or a visa coming to their shores by boat finds themselves in detention centers in the remote Southwest Pacific island nation Nauru or on Los Negros Island in Manus Province, off Papua New Guinea. For those with visas who’ve committed minor crimes like a traffic violation, those visas can be revoked automatically, and those people can be sent to deportation centers on Christmas Island (off the southwest coast of Indonesia, but an Australian territory), or in remote parts of Australia (less likely). Everyone from asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, and Syria to Britons and New Zealanders arrested for misdemeanors have all been caught up in Australia’s Migration Act, its Pacific Solution, and its post-Pacific Solution solution.

Now this is a country for American White folk who want a country mostly in line with their values. You just have to leave for Australia. One caveat, though. In 1996, Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement, which restricted ownership of semi-automatic and automatic weapons. But that shouldn’t matter. Whiteness should trump all for Whites who would take up my offer to leave for Australia, a continent and country of 24 million, a place that is 92 percent White.

We Were Never United

11 Sunday Sep 2016

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9/11 Memorial reflecting pool (w/ reflection of Freedom Tower off building straight ahead), August 5, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

9/11 Memorial reflecting pool (w/ reflection of Freedom Tower off building straight ahead), August 5, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

The media trades in archetypes, stereotypes, and tropes the way an alcoholic can become drunk by just smelling ethanol from a block away. It’s been so true around every 9/11 anniversary that it’s somewhat sickening.

There are two tropes the mainstream media has used to keep Americans in a perpetual state of fear and hyper-patriotism since that gruesome second September Tuesday in 2001. One is the theme of “Never Forget” (and the most obvious Twitter hashtag ever). The only other times the mantra of “Never Forget” normally comes up is either in reference to Jews and the Holocaust or to the systematic genocide Native Americans experienced. It should also come up for Blacks and Africans regarding the Middle Passage and slavery, Aborigines in Australia, and other groups who’ve experienced the wanton destruction of their lives and culture in the relatively recent past. Of course Americans shouldn’t forget what happened on 9/11. Nearly 3,000 people died on that tragic day. But 5.9 million Jews, 8-10 million Native Americans, untold millions of Africans, Aborigines, and other groups? Not exactly a fair comparison. If we cannot consistently have empathy and sympathy for the plight of others who suffer and die in the thousands or millions — like with Syrians, Iraqis, South Sudanese — then what does “Never Forget” really mean beyond an extravagant display of navel-gazing?

The second trope the media sells Americans every year is the idea that we “came together” in the weeks after 9/11 like never before. This is some high-grade bull crap. Maybe White Americans did. Maybe Americans who saw Arab Americans, Sikhs, Black and Latinos who looked like they could be Arabs united. But to say that the US “united” in a common bond to bring each other peace in a grand display of patriotism belies the reality of what happened in the six weeks between the attacks and the passage of the USA Patriot Act.

The most poignant moment of my own 9/11 experience was on a fifteen-hour Greyhound bus trip I took from Atlanta to DC after the government grounded commercial airplanes. There was a Sikh man on our bus, who got on somewhere between Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina. Two men, one White and one Black, tried to get in the face of this man and blame him for what happened in New York, in DC, and in Western Pennsylvania. I literally had to get in between these dumb asses to keep them from doing worse than their ridiculous name-calling. If this is what the media meant/means by Americans “uniting” after 9/11, then, yes, we did, if only to show our religious and ethnic ignorance, to vent our not-so-subtle hatred and intolerance.

This was some of what I wrote in the days after 9/11 and my wonderful bus trip up I-85/75.

If we as Americans continue to commit and condone through our silence acts of hatred against Arab Americans, are we much better than the tortured souls who flew four Boeing jets as weapons of mass destruction, all in the name of Allah? If we are to defeat terrorism as a nation and a world, we must also defeat its roots, fear and hatred. If we are to be one undivided and multicultural nation united against terrorism, we can no longer tolerate incidents of terrorism against one another, no matter how much we hurt.

Welp, I was wrong. We would “Never Again” condone acts of terror against our own citizens, right? Whether through the systemic use of law enforcement as death squads against Blacks or Latinos, or the occasional White vigilante dispensing their own form of racist justice? We would unite to stop White supremacists from blowing up mosques, synagogues, and temples, to stop other Americans from harassing Arab American citizens and Sikhs for their open display of their First Amendment religious freedoms, no? We Americans would stand up for the rights of those who protest in opposition to existing examples of lethal oppression, because the American flag is about much more than the US military? Yeah, right!

Americans have proven that “united” and “never forget” are proxies for our societal narcissism. It runs as deep as anything that has taken root in American culture, including racism, individualism, and xenophobia. For me, at least, it is why media mantras like “united” and “never forget” ring hollow, despite my memories of the week that was 9/11.

 

“Fear of The Unknown” or “Other” = Inhumanity

09 Saturday Jul 2016

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A black box with question mark, a certain "fear of the unknown," July 9, 2016. (http://socialcapitalmarkets.net).

A black box with question mark, a certain “fear of the unknown,” July 9, 2016. (http://socialcapitalmarkets.net).

The phrases “fear of the unknown” or “fear of the other” has been something that I’ve been familiar with as long as I’ve been in the classroom. So many essays, so many discussions, so many presentations where these stock phrases have greeted me in my capacity as instructor, professor, facilitator, administrator, and public speaker. Ultimately, the use of these all-too-often used phrases reflects the inability of the people who speak and write them to see other people as Homo sapiens, thus diminishing their humanity in the process.

The first time I seriously encountered either phrase, though, was in my second semester of teaching History of American Education in the College of Education at Duquesne University for MAT students. It was the fall of 1998, and I was teaching a required education foundations course (I was also doing Multicultural Education that semester). To be sure, there were a couple of veteran teachers who didn’t like having a twenty-eight year-old Black man telling them about the marbled history of their profession and the institutions for which they served as K-12 teachers. Some of their bigoted evaluation responses disclosed as much.

It was the week I lectured on the Southern and Eastern European immigrant experience in America’s emerging public school systems between roughly 1880 and 1930. In going through the efforts of educators to literally beat out of these children the language of their mother countries (e.g., Italian, Yiddish, Greek, Polish, etc.) while sorting them into lower intellectual tracks within public schools, I noted the anti-immigrant xenophobia among WASPs at that time. One of my students during discussion tried to explain it away as a WASP “fear of the unknown.” I asked, “What was the unknown? Were these immigrants aliens?” — in this case, I meant “extraterrestrials.”

Data Mining/Fear of the Unknown cartoon, Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News, July 6, 2013. (http://adamzyglis.buffalonews.com/2013/07/06/data-mining/).

Data Mining/Fear of the Unknown cartoon, Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News, July 6, 2013. (http://adamzyglis.buffalonews.com/2013/07/06/data-mining/).

The student didn’t really answer my question, as if “fear of the unknown” needed no explanation. But on the paper related to the experiences of the children of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, Black migrants, and working-class women, over and over again, the phrase “fear of the unknown” kept showing up. What made this use of phrase even more disappointing was an even more sobering Western Pennsylvanian reality. Most of my students were the descendants of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, some of whom were old enough to have had contact with grandparents who must have recounted their experiences with xenophobia in public education. That these students couldn’t possibly see the inhumanity of the phrase “fear of the unknown” made me question whether these current and future teachers should be in a classroom at all.

Luckily, I did manage to reach a few of my more skeptical students around these sorts of issues as this course progressed. After all, most teachers really do want to help their students. A couple even wrote me notes after slamming me in their evaluations about how my History of American Education course had opened their eyes to inequality and social reproduction in K-12 education.

Since then, I have remained keenly aware of when students, colleagues, public speakers, and fellow administrators (specifically in the context of the nonprofit world) have said or written the “fear of the unknown” or “fear of others” phrases. Mostly, it’s not in the context of White ethnics from an era in which “White” mostly meant “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” Over the past fifteen years, I’ve seen and heard “fear of the unknown” in reference to Blacks, Latinos viewed only as free-loading immigrants, and Arab-Muslim Americans as US-hating terrorists. There have been students who have justified the race riots of the not-so-recent past (the ones where White mobs stormed into Black neighborhoods and burned them out while maiming and killing Black men, women, and children) with the phrase “fear of the unknown.” Or co-workers who’ve explained away their xenophobia or homophobia as a natural “fear of the other.” Or public speakers who’ve explained Islam as if it were a magical black box that churns out terrorists the way Detroit used to turn out automobiles.

Caravaggio's Narcissus (1594-96) , May 15, 2011. (Masur via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1594-96) , May 15, 2011. (Masur via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Stop it. Just stop it. What does “fear of the unknown” really mean? That you didn’t know that Black Americans were human beings with a need for work, education, housing, sleep, air to breathe, and food to eat? That you couldn’t conceive of Latinos as a group of folks who’ve been part of the American landscape (specifically Texas and the southwestern US) for far longer than there has been a US? That you can’t contemplate the idea that Arab Muslims have just as much right to exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, religion, and assembly as any “red-blooded American?”

Using the phrase “fear of the unknown” says more about the people using it than it does about the “others” they attempt to describe as “unknowns.” All anyone really needs to know is that the so-called others are human beings. To say “unknown” or “other” means than you think you are superior to these “unknowns.” Or, conversely, that these “other” humans are not “normal,” that they are defective or not quite your equals. When groups of humans attempt to justify inequality or their fear with phrases like “fear of the unknown” or “fear of the other,” it means they have little or no empathy for the “unknown” or “other.” And when we as humans can cut ourselves off from other humans in this way, doesn’t that make us less humane, more “other” because we believe ourselves to be normal, even special, and therefore, better, than these “unknown others?”

Of course, there are tremendous psychological and material advantages to seeing other humans as “unknowns” and “others.” This week of #AltonSterling, #PhiladoCastile, and #Dallas has been proof positive of the value of some lives versus “unknown others.” The truth is, no Homo sapiens live in black holes. Unless those with the power to cut off empathy to their psychological and material advantage make a mental home for us there.

Aside

“And There’s Winners, And There’s Losers…

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

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“But they ain’t no big deal/’Cause the simple man, baby/Pays for thrills/The bills the pills that kill” – John Mellencamp, “Pink Houses” (1983).

Donald Trump’s entire campaign might as well be called “The Ultimate Narcissist Does The Pink Houses” Tour, complete with Def Leppard, his kids, and Omarosa going to bat for him on CNN. Trump and his angry band of supporters see the world in the simplest way, like an indoctrinated twelve-year-old forced to be part of a religious cult (I can definitely relate). Trump sees himself as a “winner,” the US as a country that used to be a “winner,” and anything or anyone who doesn’t fit his narrative as “losers.” Of course there’s a contradiction here. Trump doesn’t have the courage to call many of his supporters “losers,” though there are about four decades’ worth of his actions and statements that would serve as evidence of his thoughts about his base.

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump meeting with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Gillette Stadium, Foxboro, MA, October 21, 2012. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald;http://bostonhearld.com).

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump meeting with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Gillette Stadium, Foxboro, MA, October 21, 2012. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald;http://bostonhearld.com).

At the “Big Boys” RNC debate a couple of weeks ago, Trump couched everything in terms of “winners” and “losers.” President Obama was an “incompetent loser.” The US is “losing to China” economically. Mexican immigrants are turning the US into “a nation of losers.” The US has to “win” against ISIS (I prefer the term Islamic State or IS that most news agencies use outside the US, but that would make me a loser). Trump’s pronouncements at the debate and since have been about more than sound bites of “us” vs. “them,” as the more progressive media elements have said. It’s been about presenting himself as America’s winner, as the one at “the top of the heap, king of the hill, A-number-1.”

In a nation full of narcissists, this has a real appeal, even if the reality of Trump’s life contradicts both the winner image he portrays and the lives that most of his supporters actually live. The most obvious is Trump’s net worth being more like between $1.4 billion and $4 billion (Oprah Winfrey territory), and not the $10 billion he says it is. Or that he has — or, as Trump would say, “my companies” have — filed for Chapter 11 four times in the past quarter-century. Or his multiple divorces. Or his ridiculous comb-over in 20+mph winds.

I guess all of those falsities and setbacks should be more nuanced, as part of life’s long and bumpy journey. By Trump’s own definition, because his net worth — though envy-inducing — is hardly #1 (still between Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Michael Bloomberg), he should see himself as a loser. Because Trump has seen multiple business ventures crash and burn, the “loser” moniker could fit. Oh, but narcissism allows for those suffering from grandiose inflations of themselves to see their failings, their losses as mere bumps in the road, and not part of the “winners and losers” narrative.

Picture of abandoned Palma Nova mobile home park, where the last of the 900 families had been evicted in 2009, Davie, Florida, February 15, 2010. (Mike Stocker/Miami Sun-Sentinel; http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-palma-nova-davie-pg-photogallery.html).

Picture of abandoned Palma Nova mobile home park, where the last of the 900 families had been evicted in 2009, Davie, Florida, February 15, 2010. (Mike Stocker/Miami Sun-Sentinel; http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-palma-nova-davie-pg-photogallery.html).

The same goes for Trump’s supporters, most of whom couldn’t hope to be PTA president at their neighborhood elementary school, much less run for POTUS. The US is so replete with narcissism that it’s in the bloodstream of ordinary low-income Americans (the majority of the working population, by the way). And as such, their reasons for supporting Trump are as sad as they are predictable. They see him as a winner, even though he was born into wealth via his real estate magnate father (or as many New Yorkers saw him, slum lord), Fred Trump. The Donald was born halfway between third and home plate, and somehow ordinary Americans see him as a quintessential American?

Trump’s supporters also see him as someone who “tells it like it is.” Really? Ready to be fooled again, just like with so many numbskulls and wing-nuts who’ve sold Americans the magic of tax cuts for the rich and for corporations and endless prosperity in the past? Some of these narcissists are like gambling addicts, taking their last dollars to a slot machine on the hope of making it rich with crusty toenails. It both a real shame, and pitiful to watch.

Didn’t We Never Have It All

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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Whitney Houston, "Didn't We Almost Have It All" (released August 1987) Single 45rpm, from 2nd Whitney album (not exactly a favorite), June 4, 2015. (combined/cropped by Donald Earl Collins; http://musicstack.com and http://rapgenius.com).

Whitney Houston, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” (released August 1987) Single 45rpm, from 2nd Whitney album (not exactly a favorite), June 4, 2015. (combined/cropped by Donald Earl Collins; http://musicstack.com and http://rapgenius.com).

I’ve been thinking about this for nearly a year. It started for me last August. Melissa Harris-Perry had a segment on her MSNBC show regarding the multiple hats women of color have worn over the years in taking care of their families, immediate, extended and non-biological. In response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s July/August 2012 piece in The Atlantic about “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Harris-Perry and her guests made the point that feminism for women of color has been about far more than having a successful, sexist-free career. That throughout American history, women of color have found themselves wearing multiple hats as primary breadwinners, primary caretakers and primary childrearers, often in ways that traditional feminists don’t discuss or recognize. All without fanfare and with many setback along the way.

What I’ve witnessed and been a part of in my own life reflects much of the conversation that Harris-Perry led on her show. The physical, mental and psychological scars from caring for family, friends and children, while struggling financially and dealing with racism and misogyny often manifests in disease and depression for so many women of color. There’s so much more, though, in terms of how my own mother’s multiple hats and habits led me to so many of my own. All initially to help her, but in the end, helping myself become self-sufficient. Not to mention making myself more understanding of where all the wear, tear and lack of care that wearing so much for so long can lead.

My Mom’s Hats and Habits:

The Anne-Marie Slaughter image of multitasking/wearing multiple hats (just think what this is like for poor, low-income, women of color), February 4, 2015. (ALAMY; http://telegraph.co.uk).

The Anne-Marie Slaughter image of multitasking/wearing multiple hats (just think what this is like for poor, low-income, women of color), February 4, 2015. (ALAMY; http://telegraph.co.uk).

Before I turned thirteen years old, my mother had been far more than my Mom. She’d been a dietary supervisor at Mount Vernon Hospital, just outside New York City, since 1968, the year before I was born. She had been a high school basketball player, a caregiver to her eleven brothers and sisters, and a cotton-picking breadwinner for her family in segregated southwestern Arkansas, an area located in the Red River Valley, part of the larger Mississippi Delta region. She had become our family’s primary breadwinner in the years after she gave birth to my older brother and me. Not to mention a married young woman now living a thirty-minute train ride from Midtown Manhattan, between the Hudson and Hutchinson Rivers, on the border between affluent Westchester County and the Bronx.

Life didn’t treat my Mom too kindly once she married my alcoholic father in 1971. And it actually went from bad to worse as she divorced him for my stepfather in 1978. By then, she had become a cigarette smoker, a one-time adulterer, and an abuse survivor. My Mom did everything she could to shield my older brother and me from her habits and the realities of our tough life in Mount Vernon in the 1970s and early 1980s. But by the end 1982, as I turned thirteen, all the hats my Mom had worn began to fall to the ground. In taking on the role of a strikebreaker, all of our lives would change forever.

In response to concessions made to the union, who left her unprotected, Mount Vernon Hospital cut her from full-time to part-time. My Mom became the besieged one. She was the old woman in the shoe, with six kids — including four under the age of five — and a cheating, abusive, unemployed, sometimes-at-home husband. It was my Mom’s job to take care of us all. Yet no longer was she a breadwinner. My Mom had become one of Reagan’s alleged welfare queens, pulling in $16,600 in AFDC payments per year from April 1983 until I left for college in August 1987. With all of that, I became a hat juggler myself.

Once Her Hats Became My Own:

For a while during my teenage years, my Mom had been my friend, one in which I could usually confide, albeit out of anger and frustration. All while taking on more and more of what had been her duties, including the brunt of her second husband’s rage and fists. I’d become an everyday grocery shopper, a frequent family cook, and a sometimes provider, the last mostly through tracking down my own father for a few extra dollars every Friday or Saturday at one of his favorite bars. Or, by the time I was sixteen, through working part-time. I provided childcare on afternoons, evenings and weekends. I washed clothes with my older brother on Saturdays or Sundays every week without fail from October 1982 on.

Hat stall at a Sunday fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 31, 2008. (Jorgeroyan via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC BY-SA 3.0.

Hat stall at a Sunday fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 31, 2008. (Jorgeroyan via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC BY-SA 3.0.

By the end of high school, I realized too who my Mom wasn’t, maybe for the first time. She wasn’t an encourager, a person who pushed her kids to pursue their dreams. With so many “Are you sure…?” questions my last two years of high school, it’s a wonder I applied to any colleges at all. Mom wasn’t a nurturer either, especially after I became a teenager. My Mom had only said “I love you” to me two times between my twelfth and nineteenth birthdays, including at my high school graduation ceremony in June 1987. She also wasn’t easygoing. Any mistake with money or my time would get a “Serves you right…” sermon about never screwing up.

The Toll Caring For Others Can Take:

All of this has made my Mom a conservatively cautious perfectionist, one living with depression and in constant denial about our shared past. I guess that it was all too much for her, like reaching the Jordan River, but not being allowed to cross it. Our shared experiences had also made me cautious and perfectionistic in my dealings with myself and the world, as I had to wear so many of my Mom’s hats and cross so many of those rivers with her. My mother tried to be all things to me and my older brother especially, and failed more than she succeeded in the process. For that and so many other reasons, despite her mistakes, I love her very much.

It’s been more than twenty-seven years since I moved away for the greener pastures of the University of Pittsburgh. Yet it’s only been in the past decade that I’ve learned to stop striving for perfection in all the things I say and do. It ultimately takes a lifetime to unlearn all the bad habits and prejudices and give up on juggling all the ideas and roles that our parents have put on us. My journey with and without my Mom has been no different. Now that my Mom’s in her late sixties, I just hope that the only hat she tries to wear these days is one to keep her head warm on the coldest of days.