This Is The Twilight Zone

 

I have such a case of sensory overload.

President Biden somehow got into Ukraine, an active war zone, met with President Zelenskyy, and spoke on the anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion. His speech made it pretty clear that the United States stands with and will support Ukraine. Putin will not win this time. This is major because Presidents don’t just go into a war zone where they might be injured or killed. The Ukrainians are amazingly resilient and patriotic, and I’m sure President Biden’s visit gave them a big boost. But Repubs are whining and complaining about it. They’re criticizing President Biden and are openly supporting Putin.

There are traitors running the House of Representatives. On the same day President Biden visited Ukraine, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene began advocating a “divorce” between red and blue states. That’s funny that she uses a word like divorce, where couples either happily go their own way or they fight each other forever. What MJT is talking about is not divorce. It’s succession That is treasonous. But this isn’t the first of her traitorous behavior. She’s one of those who were involved with the January 6^th insurrection. Why else would she have asked tRump for a pardon in his last few days of office?

She is sworn to uphold the Constitution. She’s in violation of that oath. No one is doing anything about it except saying “bad” to say that. Kinzinger and Cheney are the only two Repubs that have openly condemned MJT. MJT isn’t the only traitor. There are over 140 treasonous Representatives and Senators.

Why? Hello? Fourteenth Amendment? You know, the part that says a person who is a traitor can’t serve in Congress?

We’re slowly becoming more lawless, at least among the rich, mighty, and powerful.

MJT and many of her colleagues also espouse that they are christian nationalists. I absolutely insist on calling them christian with a small c because they aren’t Christian. Jimmy Carter is a Christian. He follows New Testament Jesus, who was all about welcoming immigrants, sheltering and feeding the needy, protecting children, and all-inclusive. You know, everything the Repubs are not.

These christian nationalists are dangerous. They want to declare the US a Christian nation, which is something the authors of the Constitution NEVER intended. They want to force their morals and beliefs on us and using violence is just fine with them. They are like a snowball rolling down a hill and picking up more along the way, becoming bigger and crushing. They could destroy our democracy.

Lots of people don’t agree with their mad desire to indoctrinate everyone, penchant for violence, and involvement in crazy conspiracies. The problem is that not enough people are bitching about it or trying to do anything to stop it. I write and write about it and I feel like I’m talking to myself.

You know, if Jesus was here today he’d be called either a socialist or a communist. He was all about telling people to set aside their worldly possessions to follow him. The story about feeding hundreds of people with just a few fish? Isn’t that about socialism, sharing everything with everyone?

Try discussing that idea with a christian nationalist. They’d say you were a blaspheming demon. And, yet, repeatedly, Jesus showed us he was with the poor, the sick, the hungry, the disenfranchised and loving everyone. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” “Let the children come unto me.” “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”  Jesus was woke.

New Testament Jesus would not be welcome in Florida, where “woke comes to die.” He would not be welcome in Texas. Texas and Florida have both been involved in taking advantage of and mistreating immigrants by placing them on planes or buses and shipping them, without warning, to blue states. For various reasons, I don’t think he’d be welcome in any red state.

I don’t believe Jesus would approve of what some of these red states are doing to trans/LGBTQ kids and adults. I don’t believe he would approve of them forcing dishonest history on students.

Each day, I find it harder to look at even my unbiased newsletters because of the increasing stories about fascism and intolerance spreading across this country.

This is what Real Jesus was teaching: Loving God is the greatest commandment. Then, love your neighbor as you love yourself. Would you want to be treated the way Blacks, Asians, trans/LGBTQ and immigrants are being treated now in some of these states? Hell, no, you wouldn’t. You would want to be treated with respect, decency, and kindness. That’s what we’re supposed to do. Half the country isn’t doing that.

So, what is the solution? I will keep posting even if I’m just talking to myself. I will vote. I will volunteer to make calls. I will find organizations to join. I’m most interested in Rev. Barber’s.

But everyone needs to be doing these things. Too many of us are just complacent and so fascism continues to spread.

I was listening to songs from the Viet Nam era and this one really hit me today. It’s the same thing, 50+ years later.

Eve Of Destruction 

It doesn't feel like Black History Month

 

It’s day three of Black History Month but, to be honest, it feels more like Black Suppression Month to me.

Yet another Black man, Tyre Nichols, was on his way home and in his neighborhood when he was pulled over by Memphis policemen. Now why it was necessary to have 5 or 6 cops at a traffic stop is beyond me. Five of the cops were themselves Black and part of a special force called Scorpions, a rather deadly name for those who are supposed to be the “good guys.” And just like so many times before, Nichols ended up dead.

I was surprised that the killer cops were Black. I’m used to killer cops being white. Well, after I read a bit about systemic racism in our society and in the police force, I came to understand that Blacks can be racist against other Blacks too. That comes from a lifelong experience of being made to feel inferior, less human, than whites. Disgusting and sad, but I do understand.

Not more than a day later, Los Angeles police went after a double amputee in a wheelchair. A stabbing victim had accused the man, Anthony Lowe, of assaulting him. When Lowe saw the group of cops coming for him, he got down off his wheelchair and ran as quickly as he could on his two stumps. He was tased repeatedly and then shot in his upper body ten times. The police claim they feared for their lives because they thought he still had his knife. Riiiight, feared for their lives my ass!

Today I was ready about a Black state legislator, Rep. Travis Nelson, in Oregon who was stoppedby white policemen twice in the last couple of days. He says he’s been stopped by police over 40 times since he began driving. He thinks the Oregon police may be biased. I think he’s right.

Just as when George Floyd was murdered in 2020, there have been protests and calls for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to be passed. That act passed the House twice and died in the Senate twice. The reason why it’s not passing is because the Act it would allow families of the victims to sue the killer cops. God forbid, say the Rethuglicans. And so, cops continue to kill Black men at traffic stops or Black women sound asleep in their homes (Like Breonna Taylor) invaded by cops going to the wrong place.

White supremacy reigns supreme and the Rethuglicans in Congress are working overtime to see that it stays that way.

The way to heal this country is for white people to face some ugly truths. First, there was slavery. There was the cruel theft of land and decimation of the Native American population. There was the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans. These are horrendous things and white people don’t want to have to look at or learn about it. Americans refused to help Jewish refugees and many of them perished because we turned them away.

White people seem to think they’re the chosen ones; they’re the ones who must take charge of the inferior “others”. What they don’t recognize is that the Jesus of their faiths was Middle Eastern and not white. They don’t give credit where credit is due to the advanced civilizations of African and Asian countries.  An investigation just uncovered a couple’s agenda to spread Nazi teachings to white children, and they’ve attracted thousands of parents.

If only these small, close-minded people were willing to learn about “others” and accept them as equals.  We are never going to be united at this rate.  Here is what will happen: open-minded people are appalled and tweet and complain and post for a few days. Then they move on to the “next thing” and forget about social/racial injustices until another Black man is killed at a traffic stop. Rinse and repeat.

There was an effort to introduce Advanced Placement African American Studies in Florida high schools. The A/P classes give high school students college credits while they learn from a rigorous program they take when they’re juniors or seniors. What a great idea, I thought. This A/P course was going to cover true history, not the white-washed watered down non-version you get in high school history or social studies.

But wait! “Woke” comes to Florida and dies there. Gov. Death Santis loves to brag about his “Anti-Woke” legislation. Therefore, the A/P course was rejected because it would cover topics that might hurt the feelings of white students. In Florida, we mustn’t have that.  To appease Death Santis and the other Rethuglican legislators, the College Board watered down the A/P class, eliminating topics and the mention of people deemed offensive and too “woke”.

Crickets from the Floridians.

Are they OK with this then? Are they all racist, or are they too scared to speak up? And so, Fascism marches on. One article I read compares Death Santis to the Fascist Benito Mussolini from the WWII era.

Do people read? Do they think? Or is complacency the easy, comfortable way out of confronting the truths of our bad behavior toward “others”? In Germany, people were complacent and forgiving of Hitler’s awful policies because they felt comfortable—they had more money, more food, and more fun things to do. So, what if the Gestapo pushed a few Jews around and broke windows?

Here we go again, this time in the red states of America.

Red states have begun passing legislation to restrict voting rights of minorities. They haven’t come right out and claimed to be reviving Jim Crow laws. They hide behind redistricting and making it harder for people of color to vote.

The tRump leaning Supreme Court can totally turn our voting rights upside down. The Voting Acts Right that President Johnson signed into law almost 60 years ago has already been stripped down. SCOTUS tRumpers have shown that precedent doesn’t matter to them. If they can make it hard for people to vote and impossible for women to decide what to do with their bodies, why wouldn’t they go about dismantling other fundamental rights under the 14^th Amendment?

Justice and the police clamp down hard on “regular” people, including whites and people of color. If any of us had done what tRump and legislators like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, and others had done, we would all be languishing in jail. Not them. They not only continue to walk free, but they’re also still in office. Clearly, law and order doesn’t apply to them.

So, it doesn’t feel much like Black History Month this year. Books are banned. True history is forbidden to be taught. Black men and women are erased from history when their stories need to be told. It’s sickening.

But where is everyone?  I know there are others who feel this way. Where are they? I’d like to find them. I don’t like to feel this way, that I’m in the dark, just talking to myself.

There was a voice and it said something moving and meaninful. It was Dan Rather's Race Matters.

Racism and antisemitism

"Why does antisemitism appeal to me?" This seems like a strange question. I read a variation of it in a book I just finished called The Last Train: A Family History of the Final Solution by Peter Bradley. The author discovered by chance that his father, grandparents, and many other relatives had suffered under the Nazi regime because they were Jewish. Bradley’s father managed to escape the death camps; his grandparents and other relatives did not.

Toward the end of the book, Bradley reflected on antisemitism. It has been around forever. Racism has also been around forever. One of the topics he discusses is the idea of infection; that good people can be antisemitic and racist sometimes without even knowing about it. An example he gave was George Orwell, who recognized he was infected and set about trying to change his way of thinking. He asked himself, “Why does antisemitism appeal to me?” I think that was an excellent question. It allows one to dig deep without placing blame on society or politicians or parents or whomever.

I grew up in the turbulent 60s. I was 10 when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill into law. I didn’t know about it. I didn’t see it on TV nor did I hear it. I think I was insulated because my parents were Deaf. You might say it was a blessing in disguise. They didn’t watch the news because they couldn’t understand the newscasters. They read the newspaper every day but never discussed any of the stories with my brother or me. We didn’t understand sign language then and so we couldn’t follow any discussions they may have had.

I had my first inkling that my parents were, at the very least, prejudiced when I came downstairs on April 5, 1968, and turned on the TV to catch the morning news. In social studies, we’d just begun to be assigned to listen to some of the morning news. The anchors were reporting that Martin Luther King had been assassinated.

I wondered who that was. I went in and lip-read the news to my parents. Their first reaction startled me. They were delighted. They told me that he was a troublemaker. I wondered if this Martin Luther King was some kind of criminal. My parents’ mood changed, and they began to warn me there would be trouble from the Black people. But they didn’t say Black. They used a sign that I recognized would translate to the “n” word.

Of course, I later learned that Martin Luther King was no criminal. He was a civil rights activist and he’d been assassinated by a white man threatened by the idea that white supremacy was being threatened. Now I saw early clips of dogs being set on protesters by white cops. I saw young men being beaten with clubs. I was confused. My parents thought the people being beaten up were troublemakers. But they weren’t doing anything wrong when they were attacked.

When I started high school in 1970, I was going to have to take 2 city buses every day into downtown Baltimore. Mom told me that I should make friends with Black students so that I would be protected “in case” there was trouble. I felt disgusted. I’d had Black friends the last couple of years, and I didn’t feel threatened in the least.

We used to belong to a swim club. It was all white and there came a time when Black people began to picket. They wanted to be able to join the club too. My parents were up in arms about it. They didn’t want Black people to become members. I asked why and was given the stupidest reason I ever heard: they would pee in the pool.

As I got older, I began to understand more of the signs my parents used. I learned that they were not only prejudiced about Black people, but they were also bigoted about Jewish people, Puerto Ricans, and other Latin groups. When I asked why all they could offer were more stupid reasons to dislike non-whites.

My parents suffered discrimination. People made fun of them for their guttural speech. They were called “dummies” or “deaf and dumb”. They didn’t have equal job or educational opportunities. Sign language was denigrated as a lazy backward way of communication. I couldn’t understand how they could reject people of color and different religions when they, themselves, were rejected by most hearing people. When I asked, they didn’t seem to get the comparison and were highly insulted.

As a teenager, I only saw the fault in their prejudices and bigotry. I fought with them about the stereotypes they believed in so strongly. They were woefully ignorant, I thought, and unwilling to change. They never did change their views and would say, “We are what we are.” It doesn’t matter anyway. They are gone and the question isn’t why racism and antisemitism were appealing to them.

Is it appealing to me? No. I don’t get any benefit from believing I’m better than anyone else because I know it’s not true. We’re different colors depending on where in the world we are from. We have different religions, so many, that one can’t supersede others although Christians like to think theirs reigns supreme. We have different cultures. All are valuable and we can learn from each other.

I wish we could have respect for each other and get along. We’re all human, after all. But that’s wishful thinking as even now antisemitism is on the rise and African American males continue to be murdered by policemen for no good reasons. It seemed like we were moving in a better direction over the last sixty years but now we are taking too many steps backward, thanks to christian nationalism, white supremacy, and tRumpism.  We should be facing our history honestly instead of continuing to hide from it and cover it up.

It'll all come down to a choice. Who do we want to be?

This is what I wrote about the book on Goodreads:

Like most curious children who come upon closed trunks, Peter Bradley opened his father’s to look inside. It was a shock to learn that his father wasn’t born Fred Bradley; he’d been born Fritz Brandes. What other secrets were there? Bradley didn’t discover them until after his father died and the need to know grew. 

Fred Bradley didn’t speak much of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, his escape to England, and the disappearance of his parents. Peter Bradley was able to interview survivors who’d known his grandparents and father. In addition, there were documents that helped him trace the torturous journey of his grandparents from Germany to their final resting place. He tried to follow the route the train took which carried his grandparents and other relatives away.

I’ve read other books about the Holocaust, several by survivors like Elie Wiesel. The detailed brutality and inhumane treatment at the hands of Nazi oppressors made me sick. I thought this book was a little easier to read because Bradley was a generation removed and not a direct victim. He began the book with a history of antisemitism. He explained he might not have written the story but for the fact that he sees similarities to early 1930s Germany reappearing.

It's not an easy read but, for me, a necessary one.

How Jim Crow Inspired Hitler

 This morning I set out to write a journal or blog entry about Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day, in 1945, the Soviet Army liberated those starved and near-death Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp. I thought I knew what I was going to write: about the books I’ve read, the book I’m reading now, and all I’ve learned about the universal hatred people have for “other” people (other countries, races, religions, gender, sexual preference and on and on).

Then I read Katie Couric’s Morning Wake-Up Call article and followed her link to an interview she conducted with Lynn Novick, co-director of a PBS mini-series called The U.S. and the Holocaust.  I was gobsmacked by some of what I read. I learned some more shameful and outrageous actions taken by the white majority in our country. It’s awful. It shouldn’t continue to be covered up, although it would make people very uncomfortable and it should.

The first thing I learned had to do with immigration to this country and how it changed. Yes, I learned that there were waves of immigrants arriving in the United States from the beginning. Our history classes in high school (circa the early 1970s) took us almost to the Civil War but not quite. We got a passing nod at the Know Nothing Movement, which was explained as a group of legislators elected that sat around and did nothing. Ha. As an adult, I learned what that movement was about. It was a group of people similar to the MAGAs we have today: they were against people of color and people of different religions because they were afraid those groups would “take over.”

The United States used to have an open-door policy for immigrants. My maternal grandparents and paternal grandfather immigrated here before World War I. In 1924, a law was passed. It was called the Johnson-Reed Act. This wasn’t covered when I was in school, of course, and I don’t remember ever seeing it by its title. In books like Hawaii by James Michener, I did read about quotas on how many Asians were allowed to come to the US. 

What I did not know was that the law was intended to allow more white people to immigrate from northern Europe and the British Isles. It was intended to limit immigration from “undesirables”. That is, people from Eastern Europe, Greece, Italy, the other southern European countries, the Middle East, and Africa had difficulty coming to America. Jewish people were especially targeted as “undesirable”.

It's nauseating. Antisemitism and anti “other” have been baked into American policies for centuries. So this Johnson-Reed Act was meant to ensure America grew with a nearly all-white population. It’s disgusting enough to have citizens denigrating other citizens for their religion or color. It’s disheartening to realize the level of bigotry and racism in our leaders, especially today.

As an adult, I learned that by 1939, Jewish people realized what Adolf Hitler was about and desperately tried to get out of Germany. They wanted to come to America, where they could be free of persecution. But America said NO. In 1976, there was a movie called “Voyage of the Damned”. It was about a ship bringing refugees and being denied a port anywhere in the US. The ship traveled to Cuba and was also denied. The ship ended up having to go back to Europe. Some passengers were lucky and survived by escaping the Nazis. Most perished.

I was about 21 or 22 when the movie came out, and I was upset by it. How terrible! How could we have denied those people refuge when Hitler was instituting these horrible, regressive policies? Their citizenship was stripped so they couldn’t vote; they weren’t allowed to work at the jobs they used to have; they were forced to move to ghettos; they couldn’t shop in the places they used to. Where would it end? Well, I knew. So why didn’t we help them?

I see now that we didn’t help because of how deeply racism is ingrained in our country. It’s sickening.

Then came the real kicker. I’m not sure I can put it into my own words, so I’ll share this partial answer from Lynn Novick about Hitler:

“…in his career, developing his ideology, Hitler looked to America as an example. He most admired the way that we had either subjugated or exterminated our native populations as we had moved west across the continent. And he envisioned Germany moving east across Eastern Europe and doing the same thing to the people there. And he also thought that the model for how we had created a caste system, and basically put white people at the top and Black people at the bottom, was admirable.

When he came to power a few years later, he sent his lawyers to the United States to study our Jim Crow laws. What kind of laws do you need? How do you define, for example, who was a Jew or who was a Black person? What are the rules? How do you start to strip away what people can and can’t do, whether they can be married, whether they can have certain jobs. The infrastructure that we had created under the Jim Crow system, the Nazis were emulating. Isabel Wilkerson wrote about this in her extraordinary book, Caste, and there’s a professor at Yale Law School, James Whitman, who wrote a whole book about this. We’re not responsible for the Holocaust — we’re always very clear about that. Hitler took these ideas to a grotesque extreme. But the ideology behind a type of racial-purification project, we have some responsibility for that.”

That’s what did it for me.  My mind was blown, and I had to go away and sit down and think things through. My first thoughts were of the hatred that exists everywhere in the world, and there seems to be no end to it. Humans don’t seem to want to love and care for each other. See how many wars and killings and mass shootings there are. We are a pestilence, I thought. Right now, we are very much like the Germany of the 1930s.

So, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the US, we have many who deny there was a Holocaust. I suppose it’s because they don’t want to take responsibility for our part in it. They would like to erase it from history, sanitizing it as it goes. When I was young, there were survivors from Auschwitz and other concentration camps. They would speak and tell of their experiences. The survivors are very old now and soon there won’t be a living person to tell their stories. The only voices left will be in the books written by Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, and others who put their stories into words.

Learning about the Holocaust should be required in schools. Anne Frank: Diary of A Young Girl should be in classroom discussions. Another good book to read and discuss would be Exodus by Leon Uris. That’s what should happen. But just as discussing Black History and Native American history is prohibited in some states, I am sure these same states would also ban books about the Holocaust.

I must have hope. The next two years are going to be hell. My hope is that in 2024, we can begin to undo the evil actions being taken now and begin to face the damn truth. Yes, it hurts, yes, we suck, and yes, we need to face up to it…if we really want to heal. If. I hope.