Sins of the Parents

My therapist says that we spend the first 20 years of our lives being screwed up by our parents, who didn't really know any better, and the second 20-30 years screwing up our own kids, because we don't either. The vast majority of us get so busy starting marriages and families and careers and such, that we haven't the time or inclination to engage in introspection. Somewhere around mid-life, most people reach a transition point, which often manifests itself as a "mid-life crisis" or some such. I think that's where I am right now - not in crisis, but certainly in a bizarre and confusing transition mode. Its decidedly exciting, often painful, but occasionally filled with wondrous moments of enlightenment and understanding...

So, having started this post last night before I began surfing the net and finding out that the chickenshit Governor of AZ actually signed that state's anti-Hispanic race-war bill, I'm supposed to be thankful? Actually, in a perverse way I am, because I was going nowhere fast trying to write about some pretty deep internal stuff that I've barely begun to process. But, as luck would have it, and as often happens these days, I woke up with a bit of an epiphany regarding the correlation between my personal tale and what is taking place in this country. And while its going to take me a while to sort through and understand my personal psychological and familial history and how that affects my present state of being, we have loads of research an analysis on U.S. and AZ history, the history of migration and immigration that has led to the current state of affairs in that state and the nation. And certainly, it is easy to say that unresolved issues on the personal and familial front are only a microcosm of those which have our nation teetering on the brink of violent revolution...

Gangs of New York? No shit? That's what I woke up to playing in my mind this morning. Now you need to understand, I am not a big movie watcher or fan. I really am frightfully immune to POP culture, don't know the names or roles of actors or actresses, designers or entertainers, etc. I am totally unaffected by advertising, be it radio, TV, print, billboards. That world just slides past me like background noise. Gangs of New York? Really? Yep, really...

What is going on in AZ right now is a localized reaction to a national phenomenon, notwithstanding the stark reality that the U.S. has a very real problem with illegal immigration, border security, etc. I believe it is safe to say that our porous borders are in fact an integral part of our free market system, as is the flow of illegal labor and illegal goods. If there is no demand, the supply dries up. This is Adam Smith and John Locke stuff, friends. Americans demand cheap labor, and Arizona is trying to stem the flow of this resource. How un-American is that?

Yet, in a very real way, what Arizona is doing is as American as the annihilation and subjugation of our indigenous people from the earliest settlers, the fierce and violent resistance to the Micks and the Wops and the Chinks and the Krauts. the Spics, of course, and every other group of "them" which has striven to reach our borders and shores. We have a fine and well chronicled history of nativists who appoint themselves the true Americans and fight tooth and nail against newcomers, intruders, interlopers. Immigrants. As though God created the world, partitioned off America, peopled it with Aryans, and said, "This is good." So sorry, and not sure what you learned in school, if anything, but it didn't happen that way. Not even sort of...

This is about economics, true. But its also about race, notwithstanding the vehement denials of Tea Party activists and other xenophobes. And for anything in America to be about race at the outset of the 21st century should be major cause for pause. Have we not learned anything from our past errors, our history, our nature? Can we not, finally, grow up and see this country for what it really is, and for what it might be?

America today is a boiling cauldron of racial tension. If we are a melting pot, as is often suggested, why are we not melting? Is it that the heat hasn't been high enough? If that's been the case, I assure you we're rapidly reaching the boiling point...

The election of Barack Obama, while uplifting to many of us, was like the thunderclap of Armageddon to far too many whites. And the current economic hard times are generating the same violent anti-immigrant reaction that has manifested itself during every steep economic downturn in our and other nation's histories. The difference here, however, is that a subset of the progressively dwindling white majority is feeling more and more threatened, as the superiority which it has enjoyed since it first stepped foot on these shores carrying its thundersticks and its insatiable lust for land and wealth diminishes year by year. A lust, I should add, which isn't limited to pale skinned Europeans but which was and is totally alien to indigenous peoples throughout the world. Whites like to think that we worked a great deal in bartering for Manhattan with the natives, but in their minds, the goods they got were invaluable, as they had no access to such luxuries in their own local economy, while the whole concept of "owning" land was as alien to them as designer handbags are to me.

My closing point on the upcoming race wars in America, in which I dearly hope my darker-skinned brethren will let me play on their team, is that America is never going to be all that it can and should be, unless and until we overcome, once and for all, the archaic, outmoded and destructive concept of race and racial purity. And this necessity to abandon our native cultures and allow ourselves to truly blend fully and completely into something uniquely and admirably American is not limited to Anglos, but to all who aspire for our nation to be healthy and whole, once again and for better reason a beacon to the rest of the world. Only when we are forced to go to scholars and historians to understand the roots of this music or that dish or this bizarre custom or holiday, and where the whole concept of race takes on a curious, quirky, and altogether archaic hue, will we know that we've arrived...

...and so I came to realize that, much more than I ever could possibly have imagined, my subconscious worldview was significantly shaped by, of all things, being raised Roman Catholic in the Protestant Bible-belt south. Really! When yours is the only family on the block whose children attend parochial school, who eat fish on Fridays, who go to mass every single day, who don't go to Vacation Bible school and church camp (where I'm pretty sure they all lost their virginity), you can't help but think of yourself as different. And my mother regaled us with tales of the abuse the Catholic kids suffered in her Depression-era Midwest farm-belt childhood. I never in a million years would have imagined that that upbringing would have created in my subconscious a sense of "otherness," a sort of siege mentality that played a role in my erection of very stout defensive walls in my psyche. Certainly, there are other and probably more meaningful influences that have made me the screwed up individual that I am, but this one was more major than I ever realized...

I know just how those frightened Anglos feel, feeling their birthright slipping away. The Catholics are fighting the same battle and ironically for much the same reasons. In my case, they wound up with one less member, and now I'm getting over those useless and destructive feelings. There is a path for all who seek it...

Life is interesting, no?