Category: political commentary

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Mess with the Bull, you get the horns

Dear Kathy Griffin:

So, you think you went too far in the realm of macabre comedy stunts, huh?  I’ve seen funnier than Trump’s bloody decapitated head.  Yawn.  But the thing about free speech imagery is it’s best not to offend tens of millions of people, well tens of millions of Americans.  And that’s what you did, girlfriend!  As your stunt picture was taking shape, you even conceded you and your photographer would have to leave the country.  And Trump, well he has totally lost his sense of humor since becoming president.   And it’s funny, for someone who relishes free speech ad nauseam, he sure is willing to release the hounds to rip the head off anyone who would dare besmirch him.  [Pssst, “Frontline” did a recent report theorizing that Trump ran for president because of a comedic remark by President Obama who smugly declared Trump would never be called President.]

Famous comedians and entertainers like you whose purpose is to rebel rouse, and as you put it ‘push the envelope,’ should expect a one-time public scorning.  Take Joan Rivers, your dearly departed comedic mentor.  She went through an awful period in the 1980s where she could not get a job.  Her situation was not really based on her loud bawdy comedy—a little too much goading of Liz Taylor for her weight, as I recall—but more of the cut-throat entertainment industry.  The word was Johnny Carson had her banned or had put out a bad word on her, and she was history for a long time until she decided to step back into her high heels and take the bull by the horns.  She remade herself into the comic legend we fondly revere today.

Take the Dixie Chicks and that remark in front of a London audience after 9/11 when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq—two undeclared wars that would last longer than Vietnam, still ongoing in many respects, end in countless ruined lives and deaths and lifelong misery and suffering especially among our young men, and cost about a billion dollars a day at one point, all funded off the books.  But I digress.  Before singing a Texas song, Natalie Maines remarked that the Chicks were “ashamed” the President was from Texas.

Heavens to Betsy, all hell broke out!  Remember?  First, the Dixie Chicks, the hottest country-crossover girl band ever, were banned from country radio nationwide.  Fans were tossing their CDs.  Then the hate mail and death threats came a-pouring in, among the letters one that strongly advised the lady entertainers to just ‘shut up and sing.’  They posed nude on the cover of a major news magazine, their bodies painted with the hateful words and common female epithets from those irate letters.  It was a scary time, especially for proponents of free speech.  Anti-war speech was suddenly verboten.  Lenny Bruce and George Carlin would have taken the right all the way to the Supreme Court.  Nothing to fear but fear, I can hear them say from the Great Mike in the Sky.  But … they were men, not women.  Female entertainers face a more dangerous reality when it comes to personal safety.

And let’s not forget the most important comedian blackballed from late night TV: Bill Maher—again, his ordeal having to do with post 9/11 puffed-up patriotism.  During his political comedy show’s roundtable discussion, he talked about the terrorists being called ‘cowards’ by the president.  He thought aloud that anyone who would drive a plane into a building could be called many things but not a coward—not that the terrorists were brave but that as humans universally fear death, men who would knowingly commit suicide to attack America and Americans were not cowards, in Maher’s mind meaning afraid of death.

Snap.  Oh how our national outrage hit the fan!  Maher was out on his can within hours.  His show was funny, thought provoking and cutting edge.  But our nation at the time was sorely wounded and humiliated and was not about to let some so-called comic slander America or our President’s use of wordery like referring to terrorists as cowards.  The good news is Bill Maher returned in full form where he belongs … on cable TV, where he can say whatever the ef he wants.  And I believe he never apologized for trying to correct the adjective used by President Bush when describing suicidal terrorists.  Did anyone ever get the point that Maher was not taking up for the terrorists or praising them or calling them brave?  No, no one ever considered his thought on the subject of word use and meaning.  The network suits and political pressure cut off his head, so to speak.

I know what you were probably thinking when you participated in that gruesome photo stunt.  Surely you and your photographer saw the cover of Der Spiegel shortly after Trump took over as president?  The image on the German political magazine was of an animated Trump holding the bloody head cut off the Statue of Liberty.  It was a political statement, perhaps not satirical but a realistic European view of the new U.S. President, their concerns that his leadership may threaten democracy in America and abroad.  Very little uproar came from that image, one that surely went viral.

You were thinking along those lines, right?  Maybe trying to say something about Trump has gone so far in his agenda that he’s setting himself up for assassination, or that a lot of people worldwide would like to see him dead?  So you used the image of a beheading because that’s what the terrorists have been doing for years now, uploading  each one online?  That our free speech rights and guaranteed freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being jeopardized by the Trump agenda?  Am I getting anything close to the intent of your editorial photo, not unlike an editorial cartoon?

Well, most people took one look at your picture holding a fake bloody Trump head and immediately freaked out.  It was too real, especially in these dangerous times.  It’s a real possibility that many people the world over have envisioned: Trump’s assassination, his death perhaps in the hope and manner of the Middle East terrorists.  Americans can take a good joke, bawdy, brazen, truthful, politically honest and culturally insightful.  Perhaps your political imagery should have included a short comment so everyone would have understood your point in such a photo.   Instead, you just shocked the hell ought of everyone, well mostly Americans.

There is a price to pay for free speech, isn’t there?  Everyone isn’t going to like everything you say and do.  But you still have the right to make a political statement, violently bloody or not, just like Der Spiegel does every week over there in Germany, several knocking Trumpian philosophy.  For now, take a break from the comedy circuit.  Lay low, just for a little while, like many of your fellow comedians of the past.  [Oh, I forgot all about Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem all off key and crudely at a televised major league baseball game.]  When it comes to entertainers, the American public is fickle and in time always forgiving (if not forgetting).

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Native American one way or another

A Native American tribe made the news when trying to disenroll a woman, the mother of several children, and remove her family from a tribal home at Christmas.  The ‘tribeswoman’ never knew generations ago, one of her great-greats erroneously enrolled himself as a member of the tribe.  Recently the mistake was uncovered and brought to the tribal council’s attention.  Perhaps nowadays every single tribal person is having their DNA checked to confirm legitimacy as a Native American, down to the specific blood percentage.  After all, certain tribes divide casino earnings, maintain tribal employment, and may receive government benefits like housing, college, and some tax exclusions.

I share the woman’s pain of banishment as a former Native American, though her ordeal brings much more sorrow while mine was inadvertent and self imposed.  With a family hailing from Oklahoma, the story had always been we have some Native American blood.  Mom’s side claimed Choctaw then later Cherokee which Dad’s side had claimed, too.  Turns out, the Cherokee ancestry was either misunderstood or bogus, because I had my ancestral DNA analyzed.  I simply spit in a vial and sent it on to a lab at a cost of $100.  Wild with anticipation, eagerly imagining the possibilities, I sincerely hoped to confirm a Native American lineage of eight percent or more.  I would have accepted one drop.

Uprooted

My DNA analysis was filled with surprises to me, even to my mother who half-jokingly responded I no longer seemed to be her child.  Horse feathers!  Not only am I 100 percent European (85 percent Western European), I have not one drop of Cherokee blood.  I knew about the German, Irish and English roots but was amazed to find some small genetic blood lines from Italy, Greece, ‘Iberian Peninsula,’ Scandinavia, and even European Jew.  Mazel tov!

The analysis supposedly goes back 2,000 years—and in my case, did not coincide with my own ancestral online research.  In other words, I had found official government documents to prove at least one ancestral line was indeed Native American: a Chickasaw woman married to an Early American English settler in Virginia around 1768.  Yet my own spit couldn’t claim a drop of Native American heritage.

I checked with the website handling this research and learned that often our individual DNA does not match the ancestral paper trail, mainly because a person only holds so much DNA.  The vast majority of our true multicultural heritage will not show up in our current bodies of very set DNA proportions.  And it gets even trickier.  Siblings and parents may have totally different ancestral DNA in their spit.  In other words, my father may indeed have five percent Native American ancestry or my mother ten percent, yet that strain may not be passed on to me or my sibling.

American Mutt

Right away I stopped claiming to be a little Cherokee or Native American as I used to do to explain a profile with a knotted nose and increasingly round face.  Oh I could go on and on about my Cherokee roots in the old days.  Doing so now would be a lie.  What became true to me, however, are ancestral roots deep in American history from the nation’s beginnings—and no trails to Texas until the very late 1800s.  But rest assured: I’m Texan through and through, born and raised.  I found that three ancestors fought in the American Revolution.  No one in my family would have ever believed that.  And I found a couple who fought in the Civil War, of course for the Rebel side against northern aggression.

The branch of the Chickasaw Nation was unknown to any of my family.  The lone Native American ancestor was only mentioned as an unnamed Chickasaw maiden.  She had a name.  It just wasn’t easy to say or spell like Mary or Ruth.  So she, and even her parents, went down in Early American documented history nameless.  Yet I exist, and my mother exists, and her father existed, and many others before him because of her.

Another discovery from more recent history was back in the 1930s when two of my paternal and maternal great-greats recorded on the U.S. census their race as ‘Indian,’ meaning American Indian now Native American.  Perhaps this is the situation of the former Native American woman who was kicked out of her tribe.  Why were people claiming to be American Indian in 1930 when previous census records indicate they marked themselves as white?  Maybe there were some government benefits to Americans claiming Native ancestry, no questions asked?  For a long time in American history, white-looking folks never claimed Indian heritage because of the ramifications including job and community loss, verbal and physical assault, and lifelong persecution and humiliation.  Maybe the 1930 census takers encouraged folks to mark their race Indian, if they could claim it, for potential benefits to make up for the U.S. government’s treatment of Native people.  American history clearly taught me our country screwed the ‘Indians’ time and again, breaking every promise and treaty.

I think modern Americans like my parents and grandparents never gave much thought to our ancestral past or heritage.  It was ancient history.  This mindset may have begun after the Civil War, with Southerners picking up the pieces of their ruined lives and moving away … to Texas … to California.  The Old West was when I had figured my family ventured to America, like victims of the Irish potato famine or amidst the flood of European immigrants in the late 19th century.  I was wrong.  My roots run deep in the American soil, and not so much in my beloved Texas, ironic given the title of my blog.

Pssst.  The real reason I did the ancestral DNA was due to one dead branch on my family tree.  A great-grandfather presumably was living under an assumed name.  I did find more than one name from his own census data in 1900, 1910, 1920, and he was one of my relatives who claimed to be Indian in 1930.  In the only photo I’ve seen of him, he was dark or olive complexioned with dark eyes and hair.  Maybe he was Native American, or Italian or Greek.  But on all his census records, he never noted the names of his parents.  He remains a mystery, but I thought I might unlock it through my DNA.  But his secrets remain in the grave.

Americanized          

I think all that Native American blood talk among my Oklahoma family may have been from grandparents and great-grandparents who supported the underdog, their self perception of economic struggles linked to being among the underclass, living in a ruling Anglo-centric society and culture but not reaping the benefits of what minorities today call ‘white privilege.’  There is a hillbilly attitude among my kin, proud outsiders who tend to their own.  We are—and have been for many generations—Americans, fighting in every war, independent, with instincts more cowboy than communal.  As a kid I once asked my grandmother about our heritage.  She didn’t know, figuring herself to be Cherokee and Dutch (she was mistaken) and my grandfather “not much, more Irish than anything.”  But she was the one with Irish roots, only one generation before heading to the New World in the 17th century.

The most rewarding revelation from my ancestral DNA was to learn I am 25 percent Irish.  I never knew it … yet always sensed it, deep in my bones, especially around St. Patrick’s Day and singing songs like Danny Boy, a melody so beautiful and lyrics so sad they touch the soul.  If I have some underdog in me, it is mostly Irish.  Weren’t the Irish the underdogs when pouring into America just a little more than a century ago, called epithets unfit to print?

My parents are essentially one-generation Oklahomans, some of their parents and grandparents not born there at all, except that grandma with whom I conversed about our nationalities.  She was born in Indian Territory 1901.  Maybe having grown up in Oklahoma—where the motto is ‘Native America’ and license plates feature a dream catcher—knowing about and living in the aftermath of the injustice, the filthy lies, the historical mistreatment of the Native people by our own ancestors was too painful.  So a little white lie was created and passed down.  My family never relayed a thing about being Irish, German or British but instead boasted or at least mentioned with a smile of pride a belief in a trace of Indian heritage.  Even so, my folks doubted we had much Native blood.  All could be lost with a finger prick.  More honestly, none of us look Native.  Who would believe we were even a bit Cherokee, least of all the Natives themselves?

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Abba dabba Trump

See that man.  Watch that scene.  He is the drama queen.

It’s only been a couple of months now and every day a new drama with this guy, even 3 a.m. Twit storms.  If the intellectual overload is not from the 24-hour news media just trying to report on the U.S. presidency, separating fact from fiction, and assorted televised political pundits spinning in place, then it’s the president himself saying whatever whenever.

It’s got me longing for the previous eight years of relative serenity with our former president: Mr. Calm, Cool and Collected.  President Obama said that was how he would be as president, taking advice from his favorite predecessor, Abraham Lincoln.  The American people, Lincoln and Obama theorized, want a leader who brings a sense of calm, where there is no daily uproar or scandal amidst dozens of investigations, whereby the People can just live their lives in peace and freedom and let their elected leaders take care of governmental affairs.  This is not what we are experiencing now and may never for the next four long years.

Mama Mia

I can’t get this image out of my mind.  It’s when both Obama and Trump met officially in the Oval Office shortly after the election.  Obama and his key commanders met with Trump privately, revealing all the world’s secrets past and present and perhaps U.S. obligations and commitments.  When the two world leaders sat down together for the international photo op, Obama had a certain smile on his face and a knowing twinkle in his eye … while Trump looked like he was sick to his stomach, like he really didn’t want to be President of the United States of America after all.  I’ve seen the cocky Obama countenance in the movie Amadeus.  The look is from Mozart when his secret rival Salieri asks with all humble graciousness for him to look over a new composition.  Mozart takes a swig of wine from the glass goblet in hand and shoots his tongue in his cheek, his eyes smiling with sarcasm.  The Obama look was ‘Checkmate.’  The look was ‘I know all your secrets, man.’  Trump’s look was ‘I’ve bit off more than I can chew.  I’m President, leader of the Free World, the most powerful man on Earth, and it ain’t going to be any fun, too scary’—because the World, the universe, is a very dangerous and uncontrollable place.

Waterloo

How many bets are ongoing about the days left to the Trump presidency?  Or his ultimate demise?  Impeachment?  Heart attack?  Stroke?  Just simply stepping down and leaving it to the rest of us?  There are talk show hosts projecting an itch for war with Trump’s call to beef up the already mighty U.S. military complex.  Trump has managed to offend several world leaders important to the U.S. including those south and north of our borders.  There are millions, tens of millions, of American people hollering to keep ‘Obamacare.’  There is a split among Republicans, some fearing election turnout if Obamacare is killed and not replaced as they all had promised with typical political sincerity.  On the other side are Republicans whose intent always was to dismantle and bury the very idea of affordable health care, hoping no Americans, the ones who matter anyway, would raise a fuss or even miss the humane benefits of universal healthcare.

There is 100% proof from our very own federal investigators of Russian connections and interference in the 2016 U.S. election simply to discredit Hillary Clinton and leave Americans thinking Trump our lone salvation.  And just when Congress is investigating the Russian connection, Trump himself claims President Obama had his New York palace wiretapped.  Obama did insist on a hot and heavy federal investigative report on Russian tampering in the U.S. election whether through hacking the Democratic national website and emails or infiltrating the internet with fake news that passed as legitimate by millions of American readers—Americans not known to take the time and trouble to verify everything they read online.  Obama had this investigation report presented to Congress by the time he left office.  Perhaps that is where President Trump is thinking his home was investigated by the feds.

There is President Trump’s dubious selection of multi-billionaires to lead major tax-supported federal departments, some of these new radical leaders touting their sole intent to dismantle and dissolve from the memory of the American people any benefits from their government programs.  There is the Trump gold-standard budget that would kill federal funding to schools, education, health care, food programs, the arts and humanities, and any type of Democratic program created long ago to help the poor and disenfranchised.  How did Trump ever get away with being a Democrat for most of his very rich life?  And like other former weenie Democrats whose number one goal was to get elected at any and all costs, he proved a turncoat when sensing the rage of angry Americans over global economics and religious indignation—over circumstances they cannot control.  And half the American people bought New Trump.

All the current political upheaval can be blamed on Comedy Central and their Trump roast.  Every single celebrity on the dais told the Big Man over and over again how they hoped he would run for President and what a great President he would be.  This is when the Golden Dream occurred.  But the stars and celebs were referring to the former Cool Trump who was all business and pizzazz and nonreligious and apolitical.

But not only did Trump need to switch parties for some reason, he also needed to go far right.  During the hotly watched televised Republican debates, Trump verbally assaulted every decent contender right in the morals as they were unwilling to punch back.  They could have and should have.  Evidently Americans don’t mind.  Lesson for the future.  The other Republican presidential hopefuls were first gentlemen and second politicians.  Trump came across as the non politician, the savvy businessman whose immense wealth put dollar signs in everyone’s eyes.  Yet he is the consummate politician and displays it and plays it every single day.

It’s been … exhausting—and remains dangerous for all Americans and anyone else living on the planet at this point in time.

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God save us from American idiots

In the aftermath of 9/11, most of us across the nation continued living our daily lives.  Every morning we’d go to work.  The worldwide web was pretty much shut down as far as news sites, so there wasn’t a lot to read online.  Network TV was carrying 24-hour-a-day coverage, so there weren’t a lot of new entertainment episodes to watch, just cable shows and retro TV.  Airports were closed for a couple of weeks, so no one was going anywhere till the skies were declared safe again.  At night many of us just stayed home, after dinner playing board games, thinking the same thing: Wonder if there’ll be another attack on other American cities?  War was inevitable.  Every American was hurt and vengeful.

Deep within our national sorrow—over this sudden shocking upheaval that dared change our daily lives, affecting jobs, business, industry, banking and the future—there were madmen loose.  Each one acted alone with the same crazy idea to harm those who offended us so gravely.  One was a fellow Texan.  Every week or so in the Mesquite, Balch Springs and Pleasant Grove area, there had been random shootings at convenience stores.  The victims were store clerks operating their own businesses.  Soon the crimes were related, caused by the same assailant.  Police suspected a 9/11 vigilante.

A profile of the murderous assailant was not as clear as his victims.  They were men who appeared at first bigoted glance as Middle Eastern and Muslim: America’s new presumed enemy.  But one of the deceased was from India and was Hindu, his body cremated and his wife, new to Dallas suburban life, left devastated.  Another victim was a Sufi, Middle Eastern but not Muslim, shot because he wore the customary turban.  One man was indeed a Muslim but no terrorist.  All of these men had something in common: brown skin and maybe an accent that hinted of Arabic origins.

Eventually the police caught Mark Stroman, a white supremacist from Balch Springs who during his capital murder trial draped himself in the American flag.  He was sentenced to death row and has since been executed.  Rais Bhuiyan was the Pleasant Grove convenience store owner shot in the face by Stroman.  Bhuiyan was left blind in one eye.  A young, attractive and successful businessman, he had plans to marry in a family arrangement with a woman from his native land in the Middle East.  But his fiancée backed out after his horrible attack, fearing life in America would be precarious, indeed deadly.  Any Muslim would be suspect.

A world without love

With lots of time to think about his attack and attacker, Bhuiyan created a website called World Without Hate.org.  He has come to believe American society’s race and ethnic problems are directly related to our love of technology, perhaps reckless.  With each click for instantaneous revelation or messaging, our humanity has lost its compassion.  Stroman was convicted of a hate crime, but Bhuiyan believes mental illness is the cause of hatred and murder.  He calls on families to be aware of loved ones who talk crazy, shoot off their mouths, swear vengeance toward anyone who’s un-American or non Christian.  These would be people who are always hostile, irritable, depressed, vengeful, anti social, brutish, batterers, alcoholics or hard drug users, unemployed or un-employable.  The only salvation to American society is for people to alert authorities of such a person, no matter how beloved and accepting he may be within his own family.  Because Stroman was treated by his family and friends as a madman, he was left alone with his thoughts and perceptions and spiraling insanity fueled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks against America.

Stroman was one of many 9/11 vigilantes, men who aimed at anyone living in this country who they thought were Muslim and therefore terrorists, all enemies of America.  There were dozens of similar hate crimes nationwide against hundreds of people and their property such as mosques and businesses.  It was a national shame.

If you can believe it, Bhuiyan and Stroman became friends after the trial.  The victim went out of his way to visit his condemned assailant on death row.  He wanted to understand this man—who was so unlike the Americans he befriended and knew on a daily basis from his store and neighborhood.  He had to make the criminally insane somehow redeemable because he needed to heal, not his physical wound but his emotional and spiritual wounds.  Add political wounds, too.

Namaste

India has been a friend to the U.S. for a very long time.  Politically we share a love of democracy and capitalism.  Isn’t it funny how practically every kind of modern American business these days has at least one employee from India?  We find the Indians who immigrate here intelligent, educated, polite, gracious, interesting, and most of all accommodating.  That is the Indian way, to defer to Western man.

But since the election of Trump, America has created a new set of vigilantes with murderous intentions.  These are white men who are just following the punch-hard tactics that got Trump elected president.  Trump came across as speaking for the common man, ensuring red-blooded Americans of jobs, making America great again, beefing up the military to bomb the s*&^ out of Muslim countries where terrorists abide.  Never mind the majority of the populations in the Middle East who are not terrorists, just consecrated Muslims who pray several times a day.  Then there is Trump’s stance on illegal immigration, referring mostly to people from Latin America, which gets twisted into the understanding that All Immigrants Must Go.

Presuming Trump’s election as a sign that white is right and white is might, there is a certain group of white men who consider it open season on anyone living in America who does not physically fit the so-called pure American profile: white Anglo Saxon Christian with deep roots in our nation, several generations removed from the last immigrant family member.  To many Americans, those are the real Americans: the white proud pioneer families whose muscle and ingenuity built this country into the greatest nation on earth.  And there is no convincing them that America had any help in the form of cheap human labor.

Recently a white man in a typical American city went on a shooting rampage while shouting ‘Leave my country.’  He was shooting at men who were from India—not Muslim, not terrorists.  This is one of many hate crimes that have been occurring since the election.  It’s like the fall of 2001 all over again.

India is deeply offended and confused (along with most of the world) with this new hard-line, hard-right political direction in America right now, supported and embraced by tens of millions of Americans with chants like ‘America first.’  In fact, educated Indians who had plans and visas to immigrate to America for set jobs have abruptly canceled their plans.  They indeed are broken hearted.  They had such hopes for a bright future in America, even becoming American citizens, the path many from India have taken for decades.

The world is seeing an ugly side of America, one built on fiction past and present, ignorance and evil racism.  People who live here long enough figure it out.  The one thing a certain type of white Americans hate is brown people, even brown U.S. citizens.  In the minds of that white minority, they have a lot of hate to spread throughout America and around the world—practically everybody on the planet … including the ones who were here first.

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To Russia, with Love

I’m a little confused about our love affair with Russia, alias the USSR, alias the Soviet Union, alias the Red Menace.  As a Baby Boomer, I certainly grew up feeling the big chill of the Cold War.  In those decades of the mid to late twentieth century, Americans had one arch enemy: the red communists from the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic.  The Soviets, in turn, saw America as the big evil on the planet, capable of launching nuclear war—just as they could, too.  It was spy versus spy: the freedom-loving Western world versus the Godless communist Soviet Eastern bloc.  We were taught in school the Cold War was about democracy versus communism.  Really the ‘war’ was about economic theory, capitalism versus socialism, than political philosophy.  There was blatant hypocrisy in communism, which in theory sounds Utopian: Everyone is equal, even paid equally.  That’s not how it worked, though.  The rulers were always fat cats while the majority lived in deprivation, just happy to be alive, sort of.  Time and again, history teaches that the human masses will topple governments that just don’t work in the best interest of all the people.

In 1980 President Carter campaigned to continue diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union to reduce the threat of a future nuclear war.  But the Republicans—backed big time by the so-called Silent Majority, the religious right—maintained the USSR would never be a friend to the United States.  Their candidate Ronald Reagan felt the same way, innately distrustful of the Soviet Union.  That year would be my first presidential election, so I discussed the issue with many adults.  And I could not believe my ears: Most folks I knew, all Texans, were voting for Reagan.  I loved Jimmy Carter—despite the gas lines, inflation, lay-offs, energy conservation, and Iranian hostage crisis.  He was a Democrat, and that was good enough for me.  I was idealistic and believed Carter should try to make friends with the Soviets.  I did not see them as people to fear, though I clearly recall their iron-fisted government as foreboding.  Life in the Soviet Union featured food lines; cramped dingy apartments; criminal black markets; forbidden music, art and religious expression; censored news; lots of lies; and mandated job quotas.  They had one thing going for them: Everyone had housing, something America still wrestles with.

While debating my support for Carter with a conservative Christian friend, I explained the one thing I liked about the president was his willingness to talk with the Soviet Union.  Appalled by the very idea, that was exactly why my friend refused to support Carter, because the Soviets were just evil and could not be trusted.  I realized then America needed to maintain the Cold War and dis-ease with the other world power.  Once Reagan was president, he frequently criticized the Soviet leaders and often suggested the Soviet people compare the quality of life in America to their own.  Later Reagan dubbed a state-of-the-art nuclear protection system for our hemisphere as ‘Star Wars,’ and that really upset the Soviet man on the street.  They seemed to view this possible protection shield in outer space as some sure sign we were going to nuke them first.  The ‘shield’ was to keep the nukes in outer space so no harm would come to our side of the planet.

What no one knew during the 1980s was the West had already won the Cold War.  Democracy had won.  Capitalism had won.  How?  Besides the Soviets’ love of jeans (yes, American blue jeans!) and black market rock albums, American television in communist nations probably had the biggest impact.  Glamorous soap operas like Dallas opened the eyes of the masses living in the bleak Soviet bloc.  But the biggest thing that really broke the Soviet Union was CNN.  Once everyone on the planet could see with their own eyes what’s going on around the world and that there was nothing to fear especially from the West, the Eastern bloc dictated by the Soviet Union began to break away, country by country—because the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev allowed it.  Finally the Berlin Wall was busted to smithereens.  It was a beautiful moment in human history.  Freedom had won over tyranny, trust over fear, love over hate.

She sold seashells by the seashore

The Soviets and others who experienced an entire economy based on socialist-Big Brother theory and propaganda were going to have to think differently about every aspect of their lives and livelihoods.  Economically, they were going to have to turn around very quickly if they wanted to emulate what Americans take for granted: supermarkets with plenty of food, houses, reliable fuel and energy, cars, clothes, stuff, honest business dealings and money handling, plus competing for jobs and salaries and even self-employment through privately-owned businesses—all this because of total and complete individual freedom: of thought, word, deed, art and media.  The New Russians tried.  But one generation can’t create what has taken America and Western Europe hundreds of years to develop.  They were starting from scratch.  And an overjoyed America, still chanting “We’re Number One,” did not do much to help the Russians transform their lives in preparation for the twenty-first century.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia became the new-old name of the largest part of the former communist empire.  Maps were redrawn and redrawn.  It was messy for a decade or so.  As the Russians continued to suffer trying to catch up with American capitalism—which in itself is cold blooded and ruthless—the days of the former Soviet Union became glorified memories.  Enter a new leader: Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent with a hard-line penchant toward restored communism.  He has proven to be a leader who insists upon total control and is willing to go to any extreme including imprisoning and killing enemies and of course censoring the media, incredulous in this internet age.  President Obama slapped economic sanctions on Putin’s Russia for a military encroachment into Ukraine, a nearby European country that was begrudgingly part of the former Soviet Union long ago.

But President Trump has some kind of bromance with Putin, speaking admiringly of his counterpart in the First World.  And why does Trump want to make amends with Russia?  Oil, glorious oil!  So both of our conflicting economic and governance theories have come full circle.  But alas comrade, communism supports the government as controller of all mineral rights—not private citizens, land owners or businesses.  Americans, the hardest-working people on earth, crave gasoline.  How we gonna get to work without it?

President Trump is a businessman first.  Putin is a communist first.  America and Russia are like a divorced couple who are dating again.  It’s crazy to outsiders, but the two lovers can’t fight the attraction.  They are the magnet, and we are the steel.  In communist Soviet Russia, there was a saying: You see one thing, hear another, and think a third.  With Trump’s tough talk, twisting the truth, and blasting the American media—with its constitutional role to ensure a lasting democracy—perhaps now the old Soviet adage applies to the New Americans.

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American fear: of guns and immigrants

The only thing Americans have to fear is … more guns than people in the United States.  And most people with a gun in the home are not trained to shoot it.  There are twice as many gun accidents than gun deaths—combined, however, they are in the tens of thousands every single year, and this excludes suicides.  Gun proliferation in our country, our communities and neighborhoods, is more of an immediate threat to our security and sanity than immigrants from the Middle East or Central and South America.

Our own home-grown American crazies who have taken to high-powered assault weapons, the kind used by combat soldiers, are our most pressing concern—screaming for a solution.  The political argument used to center on mental illness or gun control, as if we have to impose on the freedom of the chemically imbalanced or the proud American sportsman.  By now we’d best deal with our own personal national epidemic of gun violence.

And our fearless leaders did just that, by eradicating a late-ordered Obama mandate that would have kept people with mental illness from buying guns.  So the insane along with the rest of us can enjoy our American right to bear arms?  What’s there to be afraid of if’n we’re all packin’?

But it doesn’t work that way.  Time and again, we are caught off guard by a maniac or maniacs shooting up high schools, elementary schools, churches, mosques, playgrounds, cinemas, restaurants, funeral processions, Wal-Marts, shopping malls, apartments, residential streets, Christmas parties, birthday parties, courthouses, police stations, protests, police officers, nightclubs.  Most of these mass shootings had nothing to do with Muslim terrorists and everything to do with easy access to assault rifles and unchecked mental illness.

1980

Remember the issues behind gun control—way back when Americans really thought reason and sanity would win over fear and power and money?  First John Lennon was shot multiple times, then a few months into 1981 President Reagan and James Brady, then Pope John Paul II.  Only one of these men died, another left with permanent brain damage, and two survived—Reagan and the Pope recollecting with a chuckle their brush with death.  Their assailants were carrying only a handgun, and the movement against guns was underway.  No one was safe since anyone could buy a gun even illegally.  Many guns linked to crimes were stolen, usually during home burglaries and then passed down by sale or pawn.  No questions asked.

Oh and then in the 1990s the uproar for the seemingly rational government background check for anyone wanting to purchase a gun.  Those years of heated debate have faded into black and white memories.  A decade later, shooting deaths not only continued (by the tens of thousands every year) but mass killing sprees were accomplished by high-powered rifles to ensure multiple deaths in a frenzied lust for bloody murder.  The movie Bowling for Columbine about the Colorado high school massacre and the student assailants didn’t change Washington or the nation.  Instead, Americans were more vocally adamant for carrying guns at all times anywhere, any place … just in case.  They seemed to be chasing the very real opportunity to play hero, Clint Eastwood with a .44 Magnum—just like in the movies!  Make my day, punk.  It didn’t matter that every police and law enforcement association was against ‘any and every body carrying a gun.’  They had a point, being the ones who legally wear a gun and are without a doubt trained and licensed to shoot one.  They know all about criminals, drunkenness and doped-up delusion, human passion, depression, and how quick guns kill.  Yet society just didn’t feel safe letting cops fight their battles, real or imagined.

Holy terror, Batman  

We got caught off guard by 9/11 and subsequent attacks like the Boston marathon and San Bernardino.  During the presidential campaign, I had tweeted: If Trump wins, it will be because of San Bernardino; if Hillary loses, it will be because she always includes a Muslim-dressed woman among a multi-ethnic crowd of supporters for speeches.  That was a turn off to Americans after two long, hard, vicious wars trying to combat Muslim terrorists.  Call it prejudice, but it’s how Americans feel pain.

The terrorists who attacked our homeland wanted to bring what people in the Middle East deal with every day and have for decades.  Terrorists are usually not highly educated and come from dire poverty unimaginable to anyone growing up in the U.S.  An unschooled mind within a poor family and community is a dangerous thing.  There is no hope … except for religion.  Many Christian families can relate.  The Great Depression drew throngs of folks to church, hoping things would turn around … and we would find God’s favor once more.  Terrible times often bring people to their knees in prayer to God.

In these admittedly dangerous times in which we live … there still is no comparison between the numbers of Americans killed by terrorists in our country and abroad to the number of Americans killed and maimed by guns and assault rifles at the hands of our own.  Many Americans will not part with guns because they have the Constitution on their side.  In the beginning Americans were given the right to bear arms to form a militia—probably because in those more dangerous times there was the likelihood a ruler might attempt to overthrow our newly born democracy.  It’s happened throughout history and still does in nations all around us.

But since 1776, guns have become awfully powerful … and fast!  Our forefathers never could have conceived of such a thing in the days of muskets and reloading powder.  A modern gun’s sudden death and damage today is faster than a speeding bullet—irreparable, perhaps doing more damage to our collective psyche than to the doomed human life.

We are the ones with the sickness, the mental defect, the dangerous and deadly personality quirk when it comes to our ideas about personal safety and guns.  Our nation’s history was built by our own people who had to quickly size up an enemy: from Redcoats to ‘red skins’ then black and brown and yellow.  By  now it’s in our genes, our perpetual need for an enemy.  So we shoot first and ask questions later.

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The give and take in government

Government giveth, and it taketh away.  They get it from the Bible.  So why is anyone shocked about dismantling the Affordable Care Act (passed during the Obama administration and referred to as Obamacare)?  Our Government has a history of creating social and education programs—even lofty science ones like NASA—and then eroding or removing them through budget cuts, often when a new administration comes to power.

Back in the 1960s, old-timers tell of the Republican fight against Medicare and Medicaid.  But since then, generations have forgotten all the fuss.  Today not a single elderly person or the poor and disabled and disenfranchised and, well, everyone living in the middle and lower classes would want to see a single dollar cut from these programs.  [Medicaid might take up less than 5% of the federal budget while Medicare is close to 30%.  The military is around 15% while education funding is not even 5%.]

A quarter of a century before Obamacare, our federal government looked into passing universal health care, whereby no one would be rejected or dumped by an insurance company due to circumstances such as pregnancy (or just being a woman of child-bearing age), chronic health ailments and pre-existing conditions, or a previous cancer battle.  The Clinton administration tried and tried and tried to get something passed along the lines of universal health care—like every modern country provides its citizens except the good ol’ USA.  The President’s wife, First Lady Hillary Clinton, was appointed to lead the charge and instead found through round-table discussions with physicians, insurance companies, hospitals and pharmaceuticals, no one could or would come to a consensus.  Issues of conflict centered on lowering health care and prescription costs, cutting a physician’s salary basically in half, and increasing insurance rates to expand coverage.  There could be no compromise.

Higher ideals

During the Bernie Sanders’ campaign, I learned of an era before my time, 50 years ago or so, when Uncle Sam would pay tuition of any American attending a public university or college.  How kind of our government leaders in those bygone days, how unified they were for the common good:  ensuring fellow Americans a college education.  It had to do with the American Dream of the house, the car, the summer vacation—in short, pulling folks financially decimated by the Great Depression into the middle class.

When I chose to go to college in 1981, the times had changed.   America was on edge with a rough, punk attitude.  No one cared about anybody.  Recession and inflation were common daily language, which for a high school kid left little hope for optimistic dreams or a brighter tomorrow.  Those of us growing up in that gloomy era understood government could not help us.  Don’t even ask.  Nevertheless, I did.

I received a federal student loan to cover my first year of college, plus I took on a couple of part-time jobs.  During my college years under the Reagan administration, budget cuts greatly affected government assistance for college.  By my second year, I was eligible for only half the loan amount with triple the interest.  Later I received a federal Pell Grant (thank God) and was eligible for college work-study.   Throughout the remainder of college, the Pell Grant was cut in half year after year, though it always covered tuition.  Incredulously, during my final year of college, I no longer qualified for work-study.  What kind of crazy government policy was that?  Reagan seemed to support kids working their way through college.

Other college students had government assistance taken away, too, affecting their plans and aspirations.  One student was on the GI Bill, having been a Vietnam-era veteran but not one that saw combat.  That was the new hitch in trying to balance the federal budget, I suppose.  Another college friend had to leave when Social Security could no longer afford it.  The government program used to provide a college education for youth whose parent or parents were deceased.

Those programs benefited millions of Americans until funds were cut.  Education programs like those could only help our nation and future generations.  The Social Security fund for college came from President Johnson whose programs and purpose was to ensure that any American who wanted to go to college ought to be able to do so.  I grew up with that mindset, a natural assumption (maybe because I am an American) that I could go to college even if my parents could not afford it.  I was grateful for the federal government supporting young people to achieve a worthy goal and a bright future for all.

Here we are today.  Our federal government and millions of Americans do not support tax dollars funding a college education.  Not only do we have a generation of college grads who cannot pay off their loans in their lifetimes, we have the same generation and younger disbelieving in college as the only way they can get ahead in life even if they are living in poverty.  They are affected by negative government, family, TV shows, movies and pop culture with sarcastic online references that play down a college degree as making any difference.  This cynical worldview has penetrated school kids who do not see the benefit of education or even a high school diploma.

Here’s the truth: Work options for people with a degree are much better than the vast number of jobs that do not require higher education whether from college, trade school or military training.  Here’s another fact: Businesses desperately need workers at every level who can read, write, calculate and think to make quick assessments and decisions ON THEIR OWN.  And businesses continuously lack the kind of employee who is overall intelligent, self sufficient and well rounded.  For decades businesses have complained workers with only a high school diploma or less are not smart enough to keep up with technology.

Government budgets reflect what’s important to people already in power.  It’s up to us Little People to let Washington know: We know how our tax dollars are spent, how the budget is divided, and what the government’s priorities are—because we know what used to be important back when America was great indeed.

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Bedmates and Politics

Like a nation divided, so is my marriage.   I’m a lifelong liberal Democrat married to an equally dedicated conservative Republican.  But somehow for 15 years, we’ve managed to keep the peace that seems to have eluded our fellow Americans especially at this point in time.  My background is in liberal and perhaps dreamy-eyed causes and insecure professions: newspaper reporter and music teacher, the latter having suffered two job cuts as a choir director in the public schools.  Admittedly, a decade in the public schools has opened my eyes to many a Republican’s perception and stereotypes of minorities and the poor: crime, gangs, drugs, run-down neighborhoods, broken homes, perpetual chaos and drama, overworked parents, tough kids feeling unloved and unwanted, and an overbearing collective sense of despair and more urgently a disbelief in education making any difference.

My husband, also a college graduate, works in an upscale community as a cubicle cog within the tech industry.  A recent cancer battle meant he would have to take on an additional part-time job.   He would describe me as altruistic, the last of the bleeding-heart liberals.  I would refer to him as the consummate Angry White Man.  Yet together we have seen our income not only shrink as taxes increase but our growing medical needs and household bills escalate while salaries remain stagnant.

We know we work hard.  He has taken few vacations.  I completed a master’s degree, hoping that might open doors for a salary increase.  Still we float along together on the ocean of life, holding tightly through storms and managing to laugh along when an unexpected wave slaps us silly.

We’re both 54 and have lived through many presidential elections (my husband voting in all local elections, too).  So during the summer when the political dust cleared and we knew the choice was between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, without saying a word we agreed to disagree.  He put up with my ferocious laughter during “Real Time” while I held my tongue as he listened to right-wing radio and FOX News meme about crooked Hillary.  Time and again, he allowed me to call Trump a lying sack of *()& to his TV face while I accepted my husband (and just about everyone I knew on Facebook) referring to Hillary as, well, the worst kind of woman.

Working where he does, he assumed everyone nationwide shared his views.  I the same.  But we were both equally alarmed and surprised at the election results.  I was seething the next morning, clearly foreseeing the worst recession ever and bracing for another music teacher job loss.  Yet he refrained from an ‘I told you so’ smirk.  He really could not believe his guy won.  Like the rest of the country and world, we were reeling in shock and maybe uncertainty.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day he offered to take us out to eat, a sign between us that we, like the country, will go on.  Over dinner he remarked with a pleasant surprise about my lack of anger or even tears.  I wasn’t crazy for Hillary to begin with.  She’s no Obama.  But I did not believe Trump should or would win the election especially the way he did.  With a sigh of resignation, I told my husband I’ve lived through Republican administrations before.  After all, the America I know elected Reagan twice, Bush I, and then Bush II twice.  Nothing is shocking. Nothing lasts forever.  I think half the country had forgotten that.  It’s our deal.

So what advice could my mixed political marriage offer to help bring together fellow Americans, seemingly divided more emotionally than politically? First I’d say we win some and we lose some; deal with it.  I and millions of people will be watching the new president like a hawk.  A review of American presidents, 99% rich white men, will reveal Trump is nothing unusual and nothing our nation hasn’t dealt with before.

Finally I would say politics is not as important as marriage.  In a country with a high divorce rate, maybe we forget this.  Plus, our democracy allows us to throw away presidents every four years, and that’s how it should be.  The people are in charge, not the president who represents always only about half of us.  Marriage, if at all possible, should not be thrown away after four or eight years, especially over political views or affiliations.

Our divided nation is going to have to find ways to get along, to not let emotions overrule knowledge and truth, to not take American politics so devastatingly serious.  We’re still living in the land of the free and home of the brave.  (A marriage like mine proves it!)  And by the way, humor goes a very long way in bringing people together, including married couples, because laughter is a product of love.