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| Hello America by Vincent Valdez |
Our long weekend travels took us through our usual Western/Central Massachusetts stops: North Adams, Northampton and Worcester. Our adventures helped me focus some of my thoughts about the state of the world, a subject I've been reluctant to address here - not because I'm not upset. Indeed, I'm furious. But I've been struggling to find the right words. For months. So, here goes...
"Why were we taught to fear the witches and not the people who burned them alive?"
That quote popped up on my Facebook feed a while back and it has stayed with me. The Salem Witch Trials weren't really about religion. That was just the excuse. They were about power and social control. That social control lives on in our mythology. Mythology is social control on a trans-generational scale.
Enter Professor James B. Haile III, Ph.D...
In North Adams, we went to a reading by Dr. Haile at Research & Development, one of the retail stores at MASS MoCA (The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art). He presented his new book, The Dark Delight of Being Strange, a genre-bending work combining both fiction and nonfiction elements. Haile's philosophical charge for himself and for the reader is to challenge and reform our mythology, especially regarding people of color.
If you control the mythology, you control everything.
The political rhetoric coming out of Washington right now reinforces a mythology we've all been fed our whole lives. For the MAGA crowd, the history of the United States - of "America" - is a story of white triumph. People of color were to be conquered, subjugated and exploited. The fact that any of them would with to be treated as human - never mind as equals - is intolerable.
The current immigration policies aren't about the law or economics as the policies are disastrous regarding both. They're about race.
You don't think so? Fuck you.
I'm not joking. I'm tired of being nice about any of this. If you're offended by what I'm saying, fuck off. If you can't draw a line on this unacceptable shit, fuck off.
If it were about the law, there would be due process. People would not be snatched off the streets and out of their homes on suspicion alone. Those arrested would not be hidden away in remote prisons in Florida or abroad in countries with appalling human rights records, even worse than Florida's.
If it were about economics, there would be acknowledgement of how much even illegal immigrants contribute to our economy, never mind our society. There would be acknowledgement of the fact that mass incarceration costs more than just leaving people the fuck alone. But there isn't.
It's about getting rid of brown people.
What is it MAGA fuckheads say to people they don't like? "Go back where you came from!" or "Learn English!" They just want people of color and their cultures to disappear. Because if they have to see them, hear them, interact with them, share the community with them, then they have to accommodate them. And I don't mean in the bullshit "Nanny State" sense. The United States is only a nanny state for billionaires. I mean they have to incorporate them into their reality, their normal. They have to acknowledge their right to exist and that is intolerable.
They have to incorporate them into the mythology. As equal contributors.
There is a culture war, folks, and the good guys are taking a beating these days. Why are people fighting so hard over what is visible in schools, libraries, sports, public spaces? Because if you control the mythology, you control everything. If LGBTQIA+ is presented as normal, they lose. If the Ten Commandments are displayed in reverence, they win. Because the mythology matters.
There's more but I need time to think it all through. For now, I'll grant the last words to SNACKTIME, a funk/hip-hop/punk/thrash metal band we thoroughly enjoyed on Saturday night.
They closed their show with the following message:
Fuck ICE!
Fuck Trump!
Free Palestine!
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