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From Obamacare to don’t care

What must the world think of Americans now since reneging on expanded public healthcare—and once again going alone from what works in every modern nation on earth?  They can think what I’ve come to know: Americans do not like taking care of other people—and by that I mean they only want to take care of themselves and their own families.  In fairness, I may be too hard on my countrymen.  After all, the rest of the world really can’t think of Americans as the unkindest people on earth.  Americans are usually first to donate to world catastrophes like typhoons, hurricanes, earthquakes and famines.  We probably raise more money and send more tax dollars than any other country in that regard.  Didn’t we practically rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II?  What about all the global goodwill from our Peace Corps volunteers?  Isn’t that the kind of altruism for which the world knows us, holding Americans in the highest esteem, the very best of humanity?

Chaps and spurs

Where did Americans get the idea that everyone should just take care of his own?  Well, from wearing blinders for one thing and never seeing how nonwhite people are treated in our own country and have been mistreated here for centuries: Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Italians, the Irish, Jews, Eastern Europeans, Muslims, Mexicans, etc.  But mostly, I have a hutch, this ideal of proud American self sufficiency evolved during the late 20th century … from watching TV shows like “The Rifleman,” “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza,” “Big Valley” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

America is the only country with a cowboy heritage.  And we’ve romanticized our pioneering Western spirit to the point that fiction has become reality in our minds.  None of us, our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents really know how life was lived way back when, how men treated women, how parents treated children, how communities of mostly one race and religion treated others who did not fit in physically or socially.  We don’t know why Wyatt Earp hung up his guns in public places.

One thing we can assume is within the hundreds of small rural communities that cropped up across the American Western frontier post Civil War, people cared for one another.  If one family lost their home to a fire, the community probably helped rebuild and donated clothing, food and furniture.  Seems like our kin would have done that.  Seems like that’s what the Good Book tells us to do, to help our fellow man especially in time of need.

Modern times

There are a few reasons why Donald Trump won and Hillary Clinton lost.  One was Obamacare.  Democrats liked it; Republicans hated it.  Universal healthcare, like any policy President Obama tried to create, was blocked by Republicans.  President Obama had to take his healthcare policy all the way to the Supreme Court.  The Court found that health insurance was a right of every American citizen, not just for the gainfully employed.  So, expanded Medicaid was crammed down the throats of every American.  Americans don’t like being told what to do now.

From small business owners to young single adults, millions of Americans did not like Obamacare and its punitive clause to collect money from anyone not insured one way or another.  It did not matter that every single doctor, hospital, pharmaceutical and insurance company, and the entire medical profession supported the new law because it meant healthier people through immediate diagnoses and treatment—and maybe assured salary and career future.

Typical of Americans, the good ol’ days was romanticized as the better situation: when anyone who could afford insurance had it and the rest could just rely on Medicaid—which we all have to pay into anyway.  Self reliance and rugged individualism, that’s what built this country!

T’ain’t true!  What built our country was Americans working together, multicultural Americans working together, being allowed to work together.  Having strong charismatic leaders, more father than friend, and one goal at a time built this nation, made America the greatest place on earth.

The world probably still thinks America is great, probably believes in America more than Americans do themselves these days.  Our history is unique, yes built on self sufficiency and reliability and determination and total liberty.  But our nation was not built on mass disdain toward the down-trodden and underprivileged—the poorest, weakest and sickest among us.  Whatever their demographic number—10 percent, 25 percent, half the nation and more if we include the over-50 crowd—a nation is known for how it treats its own people.  That’s certainly how America judges all the other countries—often why we get involved overseas, to make things right, make a difference, improve the lives of our fellow man.  It’s the American way.

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Of Holocaust and street riots: What’s wrong with people?

The last week of April brought together two horrible memories in modern human history.  One was Holocaust remembrance week, the other the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots.  Both events have one thing in common: mob mentality.

The Holocaust didn’t just happen overnight.  It can’t be blamed singularly on Hitler either.  For centuries, before and after Christianity, Jews were a persecuted people.  Migrating to Europe and regions that would form Germany met with even more persecution.  For generations Jews could only hold certain jobs.  Non Jews would not associate, trade, or do business with Jews.  Sound familiar in our own American history?

Given where I grew up in Texas, I have known very few people who were Jewish.  One was through college, a piano teacher from Queens New York.  I have been privileged to have met a couple of Holocaust survivors.  One was a Jewish Christian; another was speaking on a lecture tour, his premise about how hate turns into evil.  He was 15 when his family was sent to concentration camps.  He still bore a tattoo of numbers on his forearm.  He said the Force put it there.  When he was 19, his camp was liberated.  He ran to a nearby house, was fed soup and allowed to shower.  He weighed 80 pounds and did not recognize the old man staring back at him in the mirror.  He ended up coming to Dallas and became prosperous in the scrap metal business, a trade his Nazi captors taught him as he had to take apart Allied planes downed by the Germans.

Words of hate

There was a phrase, a racial epithet, spoken throughout Europe that as a Texan I had never heard: dirty Jew.  I cannot recall any member of my family or friends ever saying it … or for that matter even the word ‘Jew’ other than quoting the Bible or speaking of Jesus.  We did not live in or near a known Jewish community.  Our only reference was from TV shows like “All in the Family,” Jewish comedians, movies or news from major cities like New York.

I grew up in a part of Texas where Jews were never spoken against but were never known, too.  They were a cultural mystery.  Only after high school did I realize there were a couple of classmates who were Jewish and kept it to themselves as the rest of us openly celebrated Christmas with presents and music and loving sentiments.

In recent years I learned of the centuries-old offensive phrase ‘dirty Jew.’  I could not imagine why anyone would say it or think it.  From my background, Jewish people were never ‘dirty.’  What could that have meant?  What’s the reference?  Why the word ‘dirty,’ meaning filthy?  Why that judgment against those people, a religious people, a righteous biblical people?  Why was it such a common thought throughout Europe and in some large multi-ethnic American cities with a notable Jewish population?

The only people who made Jews filthy were Nazi captors in the concentration camps where the only shower Jews may have been provided was a gas chamber to kill them.  Now who were the real dirty people—with ugly thoughts, filthy mouths, stained heart and soul?

There is a phrase, a racial epithet, spoken throughout the United States, maybe more so in the South.  I’ve heard it all my life.  I have family and friends who still use the word, the description of a people.  It is offensive to a lot of us in the middle-aged generation.  Yet the word is a source of pride somehow among some black youth and had become a notable lyric in rap songs, however still bleeped from public air waves on radio.

When the Los Angeles street riots happened in 1992, following a not guilty verdict of white police officers who beat a black man under arrest, Americans were shocked.  And that would have included me back then.  Turned out, only white America was surprised.  The black American experience is so different, so Bizarro World from white America, that it is and remains unbelievable.  Why would blacks riot, shatter glass on cars and business strips and then loot and set them on fire?

For three days white America could not understand, called it a shame, a pity, very sad.  Blacks understood.  They may not have a Holocaust tattoo on their forearms.  But they are born with a racial designation that has kept them down throughout American history—and many still insist keeps them down to this day.

Why can’t we all just get along?

Racial and ethnic segregation is created by the people in power.  It is innate and cannot be helped.  It comes from the brain, the primitive part of the human brain, the fight-or-flight part of the brain, the part that is fully developed in early childhood and never really changes despite higher education and continuous addressing of and focus on the issue especially at work and by law.

To most Americans, Los Angeles meant Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the movie and TV industry, posh, wealth, glamour.  For decades it’s been portrayed as the best America has to offer: sun and fun, money and privilege, youth and promise, clean and beautiful.  The other side of L.A. was never featured in the movies or TV shows because America did not want to see it.  Maybe I’m talking 1950s America.  But the same could be said of 1980s America.  What we put before our eyes on TV or the movie screen was what the people in power wanted to see.

Twenty-five years ago I saw the L.A. riots through live TV coverage.  I’ll never forget ‘rioters’ attempting to kill people, in particular that long-haired man dragged out of his delivery truck and smashed repeatedly with cinder blocks.  He could have been killed.  And we would have witnessed a real murder on live TV: blacks killing a white man.

Then a year or so later, we saw the trial of those caught on tape during the riots trying to stomp that man to death.  And we had to listen to the defense use ‘mob mentality’ to explain how the human brain reacts in such conditions: that people caught up in a raging riot just go along with whatever the majority is doing–and in that regard are not responsible for their actions.  Sound familiar in German history of the 1930s?

Anybody believe this?  The L.A. jury did.  The rioters were found not guilty of attempted murder.  Even more incredible is that the man they tried to kill—seen on tape just like the Rodney King police beating—forgave his assailants in the courtroom.  He held no grudge.  He remembers absolutely nothing of his brutal beating and near death.  Unrecalled memory is his blessing from God.

For the rest of us who saw it and remember, there is but one solution.  The solution is: Think before acting.  Don’t we teach children this lesson:  If your buddy is throwing a brick on another guy’s head, would you pick up a brick and do the same thing?

From Nazi Germany to modern-day American street riots, people have the power of personal responsibility.  We can blame people and circumstances for perceived miserable lives: from parents to teachers, schools, bosses, society, guns, gangs, drugs, police, racism, bigotry, poverty and prison. Yet there is no escaping the fact that each of us holds the power to control our tongues and thoughts, attitudes and behavior … before a hateful majority rules.

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Marijuana: all together now

Quietly—with little notice or even controversy—Dallas passed a new marijuana law.  Called ‘cite and release,’ the ordinance allows citizens to possess up to four ounces of weed without having to go to jail.  Like, wow.  This blows my mind.  Finally the Man gives a wink/wink to all the people, young and old, who smoke pot … who are never ever going to stop smoking pot … for the past fifty years or so … whether it’s legal or not.

We are seeing nationwide a huge shift in the marijuana debate.  There is no debate anymore.  NORML is normal.  Just breathe, breathe in the air …

It was bound to happen, though I figured it would be rather late in my lifetime.  I remember when Ann Richards was given a hard time by the mass media for not answering the drug question as she ran for Texas governor.  George W. Bush never had to answer the drug question either.  Barack Obama answered and still was elected president twice.  So our nation has changed.  The majority of Americans do not care about this particular drug being illegal anymore.

The ’70s show

You will not believe this but … back at my old suburban high school, there were two outdoor smoking lounges for the students.  Before my arrival, the campus had conducted a big debate and vote to allow a student smoking lounge so kids would stop smoking in the restrooms.  And it worked really well.  Yeah, in my day, the kids who smoked—and they were the cool kids even with subtle coughs and throat clearing and that awful smell on their clothes—would come to class, lay their pack of smokes on top of their desks, and pay attention to whatever subject was being taught.  I’m not kidding.

Of course, along with the leniency toward smoking cigarettes, which were somehow legal for kids to get in those days, (I forget this point; seems like only age 18 and older could buy them, so how were we allowing kids to smoke cigarettes anyway?) came a pushing of the envelope.  On occasion the sweet aroma of marijuana wafted from the teen smoke lounge and intermingled with the Camels and Virginia Slims.  Society forgot that kids push boundaries.  That’s what they do.  That’s what childhood is for.  Society also had forgotten that teen-agers are kids, albeit really big and immature kids.

I guess adults in those days were not going to see past the smoke and mirrors.  Cocaine and heroin were the big drugs that worried parents.  As the kids themselves would say, marijuana is like an aspirin compared to hard drugs.  Then some kids did get hooked, searching for that elusive high and rush from harder drugs.  But overall few who tried marijuana became drug addicts for any lengthy period.

The dance continued until the mid 1980s when the student smoking lounges—did I mention there were two, one for the new freshmen campus—were closed down.  The times had changed dramatically with a full-fledged, alleged war on drugs in America.  Youth were being programmed to just say no to drugs.  But teen life and modern childhood come with a lot of baggage, more so if the kids come from parents who themselves do drugs.  And that scenario was played out in a major anti-drug TV commercial: the one where the father walks into his adolescent boy’s bedroom and confronts him about a shoe box of pot, demanding to know where he learned to do this sort of thing.  “You!” the kid retorts, “I learned it from watching you!”  The father hangs his head and turns sadly in defeat.

Half baked idea

From Woodstock when Jerry Garcia held up a joint and proclaimed “Exhibit A,” police departments cutting out marijuana questions on recruit applications, to all the free-wheeling, pot-smoking, drug-toking movies and rock lyrics and concerts of the past half century, finally the figurative smoke has cleared.  The debate is OVER.  Pot won.  My generation of former high school cigarette and pot smokers must be dancing in the streets.  That is, if we can get off our hind ends without a walking cane.

Medical marijuana is becoming legalized throughout the nation and is recreational in Colorado.  For the past few years, the Texas Legislature has some young elected official who tries to open the marijuana laws only to be shut down by the Old Gray Guard.  But it’s just a matter of time before Texas sees the light, like Dallas.  The majority of the voting public—democrat and republican—do not care about marijuana remaining illegal and especially with a prison sentence.  And our prisons are mostly full of people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes.

The reason for Dallas City Council’s change of heart to permit a small amount of marijuana without a trip to jail came from listening to minority communities.  A black ministerial alliance had asked for a cite-and-release solution for up to four ounces of weed, explaining how rare it is for black youth—but really many, many people of all ethnicities and ages—to get a break if caught by police for low-level offenses related to, say, driving, no license, no insurance, no registration, and then a bag of weed, too.  If someone’s in jail, that person often loses a job, and many other financial problems follow.  It’s a hole the individual can never escape financially.

The flip side, the law-and-order side, is Don’t Do Drugs.  It’s that simple.  But a society is not at all simple.  There has never been in the course of human history a simple place, a simple time, a simple era.  And societies evolve and change slowly yet radically … especially in the span of fifty to sixty years.

Marijuana may be nothing to go to jail over.  It obviously does not create a violent streak.  The effects of marijuana are not the same as legal alcohol consumption or manufactured illegal narcotics, even prescription drugs.  Some pot smokers may feel the need to try harder drugs and will even spiral into addiction and criminal activity.  But like the old hippies have been trying to tell us since the ’60s: Marijuana grows on God’s green earth for some reason.  What could it be?

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The O’Reilly factor. Figures.

When I was a newspaper reporter, I used to watch Bill O’Reilly every night.  I figured I needed to stay in the know, and his show did present several sides of an issue, at least two sides.  My liberal friends cringed at the thought and asked how I could stand him.  “I don’t like watching him,” I replied. “I like to watch the sparring.”

In the late 1990s, O’Reilly did seem to cover important topics, inviting many liberals to come on his show to debate.  He also had many show biz types like Suzanne Somers who was writing books about nontraditional and holistic cancer treatment.  Being a man, he fawned over her, smiling while discussing her monumental stardom after just one year on “Three’s Company.”  Keeping her hair white blonde didn’t hurt.  Besides, her eyes sparkled, too.

O’Reilly kept his show cool bringing in Republicans from heavy metal bands to Hollywood actors and actresses.  The question always came up about people of their stature turning conservative, usually a quality their fans did not realize or assume.  The answer was the same:  They had traveled the world and seen dire poverty and social injustice.  Their minds were opened to the benefits of capitalism especially in nondemocratic and socialist nations.  O’Reilly smiled, his eyes sparkled in agreement.

Then something happened that turned me off “The O’Reilly Factor.”  George W. Bush was running for president, and O’Reilly appeared to be his number one fan.  Bush would come on the show and unpretentiously say things like, “Why do I need to go talk to Al Sharpton?”  O’Reilly gushed: finally a political candidate unconcerned about political correctness.  O’Reilly had lost his objectivity.

I stopped watching “O’Reilly” every night, catching it occasionally while flipping the channels to see a topic of interest.  What I started noticing especially on Thursday nights was the ‘babes’ he had on to ‘spar’ with him.  These professional women usually were educated attorneys well respected in their fields with specific details on topical and controversial court cases or arrests and could provide insight and maybe a counter to O’Reilly’s societal cynicism.

But I couldn’t get past the visual: the lips, the makeup, the hair, the tight dress, the full bosom, the cleavage.  What’s up with that?  The FOX network came along with shows like “Married with Children” and “The Simpsons” to cater to America’s love of the bawdy and OK maybe the body, the female body.  Somehow this in-your-face sex appeal crossed over into the FOX News division, too.  No other female network newscasters and reporters look or dress like the FOX girls.  There’s a reason.

Oh and somehow FOX News becomes the leader in conservative news.  How can this be?  Just put two and two together.  Or just two.  For all the sizzling hot female correspondents sparring on “the no spin zone,” O’Reilly remained aged and aging, turkey neck in check.  Never a face lift or jowl tightening.  Good thing for him there’s a double standard.

So what I’m saying is a professional woman cannot be taken seriously by men, white or blue collar, when she’s showing her cleavage.  It just isn’t possible.  My God, men are only human!  As much as I would like to blame O’Reilly for sexist jerk comments and boorish behavior—to the tune of millions of dollars in she-said-he-said pay offs—the women have to accept some part.  Sexy is a game we can never win in the real work world.  To my younger sisters who think they can portray themselves as overtly sexy and still be respected for brains and beauty … you can’t fool Mother Nature.

 

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Thirty years in the workforce: well deserved ‘tiredment’

Updating the ol’ resume recently, I just realized something.  I spent practically 16 years in one career and 14 in another.  That’s 30 years combined of full-time, real-deal working—and boy, am I tired!  No wonder.  I haven’t been a workaholic really, even was laid off a few times.  And those 30 years do not include part-time jobs in high school and throughout college.  I think my worker’s fatigue comes not only with advanced years of life but also from spending so much time and energy trying to scratch out a living, what has turned out to be two careers.

After college once I returned to the big city, I eagerly anticipated quick employment.  I’d fill out a bunch of applications and just sit by the phone and wait for the offers to roll in.  I was a college graduate.  At the time 30 years ago, not only were we in a recession of sorts, I had no real work experience.  All those part-time jobs—from slicing meat at a sandwich shop to waitressing at an Italian restaurant, writing freelance articles and tutoring college kids—didn’t matter much.  What mattered was real on-the-job work experience, 8 to 5 weekdays, for at least two to five years.  It didn’t matter the education in my pretty little head.  The lack of ink on my resume revealed an inexperienced applicant, a kid just starting out in life.

No Work Blues

Back in the late ’80s, I was one of those college grads living with the parents while searching for employment, any job to get on my feet.  I applied for teaching and newspaper jobs as those were areas for which I was qualified.  I even applied for a job I kept seeing in the Want Ads, something called an Underwriter.  Man, that insurance company must have thought, “This is what colleges are putting out these days?” because I had no idea what the job title meant.  I just saw ‘writer’ and went for it.  I had spunk.  And so dumb.  In those days, we didn’t have the internet to quickly search job titles.  So I humiliated myself, in the insurance world anyway.

I went on several teaching interviews.  No job offer.  “What is wrong with me?” I wondered way back then.  I still ponder why I never started teaching right out of college.  I think I may have come across as insecure, not too bright (well …), uncertain of my abilities and knowledge in my field, and intimidated by a confident older prospective employer who was a school principal.  I know I went into the interviews subconsciously thinking, “Why would you want to hire me?  Anyone else would be better than me.”  I had low self esteem because college had not been easy.  I may have sabotaged myself from getting hired quickly.

Then I was interviewed to be a clerk at The Dallas Times Herald.  My new boss and I had a lot in common as far as love of the arts and news.  I was in awe of her.  She was high-profile, looked like Mary Tyler Moore, and had tons of success in the mass media.  I know because part of my job was to send out her bio prior to her speaking engagements.  I learned a lot at that big-city newspaper—to this day the friendliest place I’ve ever worked.  It was in downtown, and sometimes on pay day a group of us clerks-slash-wannabe reporters would walk over to eat lunch at the West End.  I figured my future was in the newspaper biz as a reporter someday.  I even got a couple of freelance pieces published.  I had spunk.

A clerk job paid only $6 an hour.  At the encouragement of some older colleagues, I asked for a raise.  I did what they said to do: set up a meeting with a supervisor, list my job duties and additional work I’ve taken on, discuss the current salary and explain what I need to live on my own.  I asked for $9 an hour.  The company gave me $8.  So that’s how the game’s played?  Next time, I’ll know to ask for $10 an hour.  A colleague pointed out my great success in getting such a significant raise, that probably someone else lost a job or some budget was reshuffled.  I moved out on my own, living in an apartment.  Life as an older 20-something was looking good.

A year later I was suddenly unemployed along with all 900 workers of that century-old Dallas institution.  We got two months’ severance with insurance plus any pay for sick days and vacation time we didn’t take.  Next I found myself standing in line at the state ‘employment office’ as a laid-off worker.  That was humiliating, but I met a lot of interesting people in that long line.  I pieced together any kind of work, including working at a homeless shelter where I used to volunteer.  Plus I did a lot of substitute teaching, willing to rise predawn whenever the phone rang and a computer listed a job to work that day.  After several months, I finally got a steady job at a major used book store, earning about what I used to make plus health insurance.

What color is my career?

At this time in my life, I could have gone in any direction.  I applied at all the schools as well as colleges and universities and any media outlet, even drove to Austin and other parts of the state doing the same, sometimes getting an interview.  During this time of possibility combined with depression, confusion and insecurity, I was advised to read career books.  I took lots of personality tests to figure out a career direction.  The psychological tests would guide me into an area that would make me happy and fulfilled while also being a productive citizen in society as a whole.  Whatever.  I was bored senseless and certainly had the time to take a bunch of pop psychology tests.

What I found out about myself at the time was I really wanted to be of service to mankind, to help humanity.  That was enlightening.  I used to want to join the Peace Corps.  After the career tests, I considered going into social work.  But that did not appeal to my creative side. Maybe I answered some of the questions wrong.  A few years later when I took all those career personality tests again, I found the one thing I must have as a worker is respect.  That was my top priority, a job or position whereby people would respect me or what I do for a living.  So why would I want to be a teacher?  Or a newspaper reporter?

By the end of 1992, I got a big career break.  I was hired as city editor at a small-town newspaper.  I moved away with my dog and got to work building a career, one week shy of turning 30.  In many ways, I knew what to do as a reporter.  If I needed advice, I asked for it and was willing to listen, and usually would do as suggested.  I’d say that ability or characteristic has been my saving grace.  I would befriend seasoned reporters and learn how to go about covering a story or issue.

However, I’m not sure how I came across as a co-worker in general, because I was all work and no play.  In the workplace I imagine anyone who ever worked with me or near me may have thought I shoot off my mouth, talk too much, try too hard to be funny.  Really, I think long and hard before speaking, precisely phrasing opinions or comments sometimes within a clever turn of phrase, and still I can come up with some very funny quips.  I know I kept myself in stitches all the time.  So another aspect about surviving the work world, to me anyway, has been levity: a much needed release from the seriousness of our workday lives.

I moved on to another small-town paper, taking on another title of entertainment editor along with government reporting, and flourished with a very supportive editor.  A few awards later I moved back to the big city and tried my hand at cub reporter.  It wasn’t for me, not anymore.  I had so much experience and had been virtually free to cover issues and subjects that were important to me (granted, I did grunt work, too), I was unfulfilled.  Maybe I was reaching a mid-life crisis, but at age 40, I wanted to be a teacher.  All along that had been my initial career goal.  When a teaching job was offered, I changed careers like that.  Snap.

So, as the song goes: That’s life.  That’s what they say.  Mine has been that of a career woman with all the connotations that go with it.  The past decade and a half, I’ve worked in the public schools and taught thousands of kids from pre-kindergarten to 8th grade.  And I’ve been laid off as a teacher, too.  I even got additional certification to teach journalism.  I figured my newspaper experience could teach any kid to be a reporter, and I do mean honest reporting.  No fake news.

After three decades in the work world, spanning two careers, I’ve learned: Diplomacy is a must along with self assurance, think before speaking, do a job well, and aspire to be a consummate professional.  Every now and then I see on social media old high school classmates retiring as they reach the 30-year milestone, gladly saying goodbye to their dutiful yet required time spent in the workforce and set careers.  I have never thought of myself as retiring or even retired—though I am indeed tired.  I’ve always seen myself in the future still working, here or there, in this field or that … till the very end.

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“Roseanne” bar none

I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but I’ve seen every episode of “Roseanne” so often that I could teach a college course.  I mean a brief Continuing Education fun course.  So here goes.  “Roseanne” was a situation comedy created by the star and namesake, comedienne Roseanne Barr.  The premise revolved around her working-class family life with a husband, three kids, and a close sister.  The show ran from 1988 to 1997 on ABC.

When this show first aired, it was a phenomenal success along with the comedy musings of Roseanne Barr herself who sardonically titled her comedy club act “The Domestic Goddess.”  She made fun of her daily life as a wife and mother with lines like ‘We’re starting a natural food kick at our house, so we switched to brown sugar.’  Her comedy was down-home, family-centered though not always G-rated, with lots of die-hard feminism and blue-collar pride.  Her show followed suit.

Because she was a wife and mother and also obese, probably in the 20+ size range, the network suits did not know what to think.  These were the years of other hit comedian shows like “Seinfeld,” “Drew Carey” and Tim Allen’s “Home Improvement.”  Roseanne did not fit the mold.  Not only was she a woman, a loud-mouthed, wise-crackin’ mother, she was not thin and attractive.  And Roseanne cast as her TV husband Dan Conner an actor equally large, John Goodman.  She can laugh about it now, but in those early years, the tabloids, media and late-night comics were unfairly rough on her because of her weight.  The truth was the higher-ups in show biz could not believe a loud funny woman who was as large as her opinions—spewing left-of-center politics and controversial views—would draw tens of millions of viewers and fans.  They lost a bet.

Americans are big and fat

People saw in Dan and Roseanne Conner couples who look like them, like everyone else, or like most people if we’re being honest.  A precious few Americans can keep the weight off for a lifetime, not without some kind of little helper or great self control and maybe metabolism.  So the fans cheered on Roseanne for years.  She even tells of a time when the network execs bought fancy sport cars for two of the male comedians whose shows were in the top ratings, along with Roseanne’s show which was probably number one at the time and beat “The Cosby Show.”  And what did they get fat Roseanne?  A chocolate rose.  Probably a big chocolate rose.  The sexism and body shaming speaks volumes.  No doubt Roseanne would have enjoyed a new sports car, too, as sincere appreciation from the TV execs whose pockets her talent helped line.

What the suits didn’t understand is “Roseanne” episodes dealt with real-life everyday situations with poignancy and heavy doses of humor.  It was blue-collar comedy.  There was nothing like it coming out of L.A.  Throughout the years, the Conners worked fairly hard: Dan, a dry waller who later chased his dream of revamping classic motorcycles until the shop went belly up; Roseanne faithfully working a variety of menial jobs until starting her own diner which stabilized the family income.  Still in the lean times, the Conners played some games about paying bills (like not signing the check) or misusing coupons (erasing the expiration date).  There was the time during an extreme financial low, their electricity was shut off.  Critics didn’t like watching a sit-com about a low middle-class family laughing their way through a mountain of problems.  I guess they figured it was unbelievable.  Let me tell you, it wasn’t—as many of us who’ve had to rough it can attest.

Watching the episodes in reruns, we see Roseanne’s weight shifts but a little.  She is a TV character, from the health-conscious ’90s, who will remain forever overweight, morbidly obese at times as was her husband.  But have you seen Roseanne today?   She did it!  She lost the weight and at no small price.  A rags-to-riches story does not mean instant weight loss and body perfection.  She has been candid about cosmetic surgeries and a weight-loss procedure that seemed to not take effect until years after her famous show ended.  Still, she lost the weight.  ‘Quite a load off, huh,’ the Roseanne character might say enviously.

Shut up!

Critics also objected to the yelling, what seemed to be constant loud and heated arguing back and forth between parents and kids and husband and wife.  Roseanne held her ground and refused to cut the yelling from her TV family, maintaining this was realistic family life whether people acknowledge it or not.  She was perceptive as most comedians are.  In the family unit, members do not perceive how loud or angry they come across to neighbors, friends and onlookers.  Roseanne believed most families yell on occasion if not often.  Prudish folks wouldn’t understand and felt as parents they were in charge and their power never challenged by their children even during adolescence.  Get real, Roseanne would reply.

What made the show tick was the family unit, the three kids growing up with obese parents.  The wealthy and upper-middle class do not relate to a show like “Roseanne.”  That’s because when it comes to families, the poor and low class care about their children because they have nothing else while the middle class and the wealthy care about their children’s education.  Roseanne’s oldest daughter found this out the hard way, again during the Conner family’s lowest economic crisis.  Becky Conner assumed her parents had a college fund for her, but they didn’t.  Through the years, they needed money for housing, utilities, food, clothes, bills, other priorities and emergencies.  So Becky, without graduating high school, simply ran off to marry her boyfriend who had taken a job out of state.  It was a shocking moment in TV history.

Writer’s block

As a fellow writer, I noticed through studying the series how Roseanne’s character occasionally lamented how she had not done anything special with her life or had become someone special, specifically a writer.  She spoke of her high school dream of moving to New York City and writing for Mother Jones, of being a children’s book author someday.  Possessing a creative imagination, she could spin an original bed-time story for her son every night.  As a birthday gift one year, her family turned the basement into an office just for her to write, a quiet place away from the chores of wife and mother.  The next scene, Roseanne is dusting and vacuuming her new office.  She does not have a writer’s drive, the ability to collect and organize thoughts then sit down and punch it out on a typewriter or computer—both devices she never learned to use.

This is where I cannot relate with Roseanne the character.  My middle-class background led me to take every advantage of writing, from tall tales in elementary school to junior high poetry and newspaper staff, continuing on in high school.  A couple of weeks before starting my senior year, I walked into the hometown newspaper office and talked to the editor about a part-time job.  I could type and was on the newspaper staff, I told him.  I would have swept the floor and laid out the paper old school with glue and light boards.  But he needed a high school correspondent and so hired me on the spot, paying me $10 a story.  That experience helped me in college when of my own volition I wrote freelance features for the town newspaper, which led to becoming a news correspondent for the university news service, and later a writing tutor at the college.

But Roseanne Conner never pursued real writing, any writing, writing just to write, like this blog here.  [The real Roseanne of course has a blog.]  All those years, especially when her children were in school, she never thought to drop by the local newspaper (the town had one) and start writing a column or go to a community college (there was one nearby) and take a writing course.  Other TV characters do just that.  But those other TV shows were written and created by middle- and upper-class folks, people with built-in drive and a lot of self confidence.  That is what Roseanne—very overweight, economically and emotionally depressed at some level yet always quick-witted with razor-sharp hilarious perceptions of men and, well, every kind of person—never had: self confidence.  That counters the real Roseanne.  Her TV character never figured out that through pursuing a passion, doors open that lead to opportunities like a fulfilling job, career and success.  The comedian clearly brought success on herself but did not instill her own drive and ambition into her TV show character.  Wonder why?

Now Roseanne Barr has become a Trump supporter, strange given the American TV audience still believing her to be a big ol’ feminist.  But she’s proven once again, like her working-class sit-com—entertaining through deep characterization and blunt bawdy humor for loads of laughs—she has her finger on the pulse of real America.

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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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A suburban Gibson’s girl

Long before Wal-Mart, there was Gibson’s Discount Center.  That was THE low-cost department store in the small-town Dallas suburb where I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s.  Gibson’s had much more to offer than the nearby Mott’s Five & Dime or Ben Franklin.   Gibson’s was small compared to the sprawling and overstuffed big box chains of today and did not carry groceries.  But when I was a kid, it had all the essentials my working-class family of four could afford: polyester shorts, pants, skirts and dresses; swimsuits; night gowns and children’s sleepwear; gloves and coats; baby stuff; bras, slips, undies, girdles and pantyhose; shoes slightly out of style; cologne and cosmetics; cameras and stereos; jewelry; school supplies, posters, and lunch boxes.  It was like an indoor bazaar.

Since my mother took me and my brother there every week, I got to know the place well.  By age 5, I started exploring the place on my own, simply breaking away from my mother usually shopping the clothing aisles.  It was easy for a little kid to sneak under the racks of hanging clothes.  In our family box of photos, there is a picture of me looking up at the Gibson’s camera clerk, who shot me as I was snooping behind his counter.  I remember the man, dressed in a clerk smock, resembling a dentist.  He was holding a new Polaroid color film camera and aimed down at me, saying enthusiastically “Smile!”  Surprised, I looked up at him, and his snapshot caught me biting my lower lip.  I figured I was in big trouble.  He waited until my mother passed by to give her the photo of me caught committing a crime.  Really he was just trying to sell a camera.  The Gibson folks were professional and friendly and knew my family as weekly regulars.

Parting the bamboo curtain

During the early 1970s, Gibson’s was getting hip to the times and way in the back of the store installed a shopping section called the Tiki Hut.  As I recall it, the section had a thatched roof that reminded me of Gilligan’s Island, a show I watched in reruns every day of my childhood.  I was an older child then and loved exploring the weird items found only inside the Tiki Hut.  First you had to walk through a beaded curtain made of bamboo.  That was really fun to a city kid.  I’d walk back and forth through the bamboo strands.  I thought it was so cool and that someday when I was a teenager I’d want strands of beads to replace my bedroom door.

The steel-and-metal shelves contained an array of knickknacks from Far Away places like Taiwan, the exotic destination stamped on the bottom of most of the items.  There were remnants from a sea-faring life like shells, knotted rope, treasure chests, and lots of brass items like statues of Hindu and Buddha gods and goddesses with strange poses and multiple arms.  There were lots of wood carvings made from coconuts, like a smiling monkey with a pipe and sailor’s hat.  There were incense burners of brass and wood.  And of course this is where you’d find incense like patchouli, a fragrance I’d never in my young life encountered but instantly loved it.  I’m sure I bought my first incense burners there, one long wooden and one tiny cone-shaped brass, though I never knew what to do with them for years.  I didn’t want to start a fire in the house.

One item I got from the Tiki Hut was an imitation shrunken skull with long white hair.  It was made of hard plastic … and glowed in the dark!  I had it hanging in my bedroom when a squeamish young cousin of mine dropped by one night looking for me and ran out screaming after seeing that green skull smiling at her.  That was funny.  But I never knew the small skull would scare anyone.  Guess I was a strange kid, a bit of tomboy.

In retrospect, my venturing into Tiki Hut lit a wanderlust which has remained to this day and age.  I always wanted to travel the world and explore other cultures.  And I was interested in the religions of the world, what people believe when it comes to God and the afterlife and why they believe it.  As peculiar as I found those brass Eastern religion gods with multiple arms and awkward poses, some standing on one foot, I was curious.  But mostly I was afraid to buy one, my mind echoing Bible school teachings about all the other religions and their false gods and evil spirits that abide in places like the Tiki Hut.

Rumours

By the mid ’70s at Gibson’s , Tiki Hut was a place I considered kid stuff.  I had outgrown it and turned my evolving adolescent mind to the record albums in the music department.  I spent hours studying rock album covers: David Bowie, Heart, The Eagles, Alice Cooper, Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull.  One album Tull put out, Aqualung, featured ‘scripture’ on it: In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him.  The blasphemy was so terribly shocking, and yet I kept reading.  Dangerous stuff for a suburban teen-age girl to be caught in hand.  I felt a little naughty seeing some of the sexual album covers that were the norm in those days.   I’d frequently look over my shoulders.  When I had a few dollars, I bought one of my first albums at Gibson’s, Toulouse Street by the Doobie Brothers, only to open it up at home and find an interior photo of the dudes, well, at a whorehouse.

Yeah in Gibson’s music section I could feel the rebel vibes: young guys with long hair, beards, jeans and denim jackets, often with their girlfriends, thumbing through the albums for purchase.  FM radio or album rock was heard from the latest stereo system for sale.  It was clearly where the cool hung out.  As I recall, I ventured over there many a time from age 10, splitting my trips to Gibson’s between Tiki Hut and the music department.  I fell in love with a clear yellow 45 disc by Grand Funk with the rock hit We’re an American Band and wanted it for my 10th birthday.  I got Billy Preston’s The Kids and Me with his hit Nothing from Nothing on another birthday, and mom worked out a deal with me to do a few weeks of household chores for a Glenn Miller memorial tribute double album set.  I was in junior high band then and discovered a love for Big Band music and jazz.

I don’t recall seeing anyone I knew from school or my neighborhood all those years I roamed around Gibson’s.  Yet I know they shopped there, too.  It was the only place in town to explore and discover who you wanted to be someday when you were your own person.  By the end of the ’70s, a big mall was built way over on another side of town, actually into Dallas.  It was so huge and new that places like Gibson’s couldn’t compete to maintain fickle youth.  Besides, the mall had several huge records shops … and Pier One—where I clearly saw my future in home décor, furniture tastes and clothing from the mystical and alluring Eastern world.  But for me, Gibson’s Tiki Hut and music department opened the door to a new world of ideas, free expression and ancient knowledge.

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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.