6 November 04
Gossamer
The spiders spin a strand, jump onto it, and drop into the breeze. They can travel for thousands of miles like this. We looked up into the sky today as we walked through the Arboretum and there were hundreds of them, floating softly like white wisps of dreams, waiting to make a good landfall. It’s a leap of random faith: unlike fledgling birds that make their first southward migration without really knowing where they’re going but that can at least rely on instinct, and the southward sun to aim for, and some kind of internal magnet, the spiders are completely at the mercy of the winds that carry them aloft.
Numenius and I looked up at the gossamer and we talked about hatred.
There’s a lot of it about. Liberals don’t like to use the word about themselves, it’s somehow dirty, it’s what THEY—the others—do and have and spread. Not us. But over the last few days many people I know—most of them in the blogosphere—have admitted to feeling hatred. (In addition to anger, rage, grief, perplexity, dumfoundedness, fear nay terror, numbness, isolation, like running away, like getting a long-lapsed antidepressant prescription refilled, and so on.)
Butuki over at Laughing~Knees is asking some pretty tough ones, questioning our assumptions about who we are—as Americans, as voters, as members of the world community. Chris Clarke is expressing in particularly searing form contempt for certain other liberal assumptions. Elck at The Vernacular Body suggests a most intriguing exercise: try to find five things you LIKE about Bush. Rana at Frogs and Ravens is being brutally honest about her emotional roller coaster this week. And over at Velveteen Rabbi, something extraordinary is going on: people are writing, respectfully, really wanting to understand, from somewhat opposite ends of the political spectrum. They are doing what I’ve come to understand as almost impossible: they are really trying to talk.
Here’s what I think we can learn, we liberals who are still reeling from these few days of heartache and disappointment. We have just had a full-on dose of what it feels like to be marginalized. We feel isolated. We see something the victorious don’t see, and they don’t care that we see it. Our truths are irrelevant to them. We feel like we don’t matter. We feel judged because of who we voted for, assumptions are made about us. We read about and hear people writing us off, and it hurts. (Some of the things said are, well, hateful.)
Well, guess what. A significant fraction of Americans feels like this ALL THE TIME. Whether marginalized by the color of their skin or the way they speak or the work they do or the trailer they live in. Welcome to their world. And, since this fraction is one we’d like to have on our side, maybe we can use the experience to LISTEN to them for once instead of assuming we know what’s good for them and telling them to vote for us or with us.
That, and explore this hatred thing a bit more. Look inside a bit. And leap out and jump into the sky on a strand of gossamer, trusting to the universe to provide…
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On what it feels to be a minority I thought you might find this transcript on the US Hispanic Community interesting. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s1228239.htm.
I’d say the Republican response to your blog entry is pretty representative. We’re still trying to work out how people can feel this way, but they clearly do. They think Bush is making America safer. When the world is so much less safe, I’m hard pressed to see how they can feel this way, but it’s all about perception. They’re frightened and they ant someone who talks tough and who will wield the might of the American military to keep them “safer.”
I once met an American black in the mountains here in Japan. Aside from being very surprised to see a black person hiking (a good surprise… I wish more of them would do it) it was our subsequent conversation that I remember most. After learning that he was married to a Japanese and had a child (something extremely unusual in Japan… it says a lot about the family that accepted him), I asked him what he felt about Japan, race-wise. He turned to me and deliberately said, “You know, Japan has got its racism, too, just like anywhere else. But at least here in Japan the Japanese are open and honest about it. They admit that it is their ignorance that compels them to express their fear of foreigners and they don’t differentiate much between black or white or brown. I just feel I know where I stand with people here when I meet them and it feels less threatening.” I still remember how powerfully the matter-of-factness about the constant existence of racism all around him came across. He had lived with it all his life and knew it as a fact of life.
I often wonder if it is possible to comprehend the plight of the Iraqis and the crimes that Bush has commited without having experienced this pain. It is why I was so shocked when I saw, numerous times, the faces of blacks in the crowds supporting Bush. They, of all people, should understand the consequences and destructiveness of people like Bush, and should see right through all the lies… and yet they didn’t. Even my uncle and aunt, a Greek and a Filipina respectively, two Republican Americans, voted for Bush, and yet have experienced the devastation of racism and exclusiveness of Bush-like policies all their lives (they live in the Bronx). I simply don’t understand them. All I can come up with is fear.
My very first reaction to the speech Bush gave right after the New York tragedy was that America would be heading straight into war and a great many atrocities and wrongs would be commited. When I voiced my concerns about this I got numerous e-mails from Americans (this was before my blog) condemning me for being anti-American. As the Afghan war escalated and I continued to voice strong opposition I once even got a death threat (I’m not sure if that should be an honor or not… at least I was getting through the thick skins). Numerous Bush-supporting Americans contacted me, both on my later blog comments and, more insidiously, through private e-mails, to throw abuse and attacks on me, telling me that as a non-American I had no right to pass judgement, or even voice an opinion (was I hearing echoes of Guantanamo?). That was right when every day, all day, American fighter jets from the air base just to the west were booming over my apartment, literally shaking the building.
Like Jenny I feel the whole world has a vested interest in what America is doing. If all the politics and their results were restricted to the States I wouldn’t waste so much time worrying about what Bush decides or does. But he has declared war on the whole world. He’s defying our laws. He’s running rough shod over our peace plans and global ecological protection efforts. He’s killing people and detaining them for no reason. He’s entangling and breaking decades of delicate diplomatic negotiations that may never be recovered. He’s oversimplified the image and complexity of the Muslim world and turned it into a caricature, rendering the lives of Muslims into statistics and valueless news bytes. Fullajah is being attacked even as we speak.
So damn anyone who tells me that I shouldn’t be angry or that I should have no opinions about what goes on in American internal politics. I am angry. Seething. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Democratic or Republican parties… all I want is for Americans to get their act together and start fixing the absolute mess they have created (and it certainly isn’t just Bush alone who created all this). My resentment is reflected worldwide. Worldwide! Do enough Americans truly understand what that means? If things continue the way they have been something awful is going to fall out from the center. And heaven help us if it does. The world is peaceful at the moment compared to that. (most of all I am deeply worried about the consequences of ecological meltdown, which no one seems to really be taking seriously, to all our tragic detriment…)
Phew… this turned into something much longer and bigger than I originally intended… let’s see, I was gazing at a daurian redstart, just down from a summer vacation in Siberia, right outside my window before I started writing this… the signal of winter on its way. Why is it that I can’t view and understand the world in that tail-flicking, clear-eyed acceptance that the redstart lives by? not even a hint of war in that gaze…
and everyone’s-hope.