Alas I'm intimately familiar with a Birther. He's my father. He's also the reason that I know for a fact that there's an element of racism to the Birthers.
He's also the reason it hurts so much to listen to these people. After all, I love my father. Consider his experience...
He's born in the South, son of a World War II veteran who served in the Navy. As a child he plays with the other children, regardless of color. He doesn't care that the 2nd baseman is black, just as long as he can catch his throw from home. He's subject to strict discipline, in part due to a military father, in part due to social norms, in part due to a frankly psychopathic step-mother.
He matures, he goes to school, he's a good student who graduates from high school. He does everything he's told, right down to cooking and cleaning and ironing the clothes in his house, the sole exception being his father's uniforms. He isn't from a wealthy family. He doesn't starve, but also doesn't have much more than anyone else, including the black children who are also the sons of sailors.
It's 1966 and he's graduated from high school. The Vietnam war is starting to escalate and he joins the Marines. At Camp Lejeune he goes through boot camp, making it through because or in spite of the abuses and curses heaped on him by an all-too-real R. Lee Ermey clone. He is taught to hate the Vietnamese enough so that he can de-humanize them, so that he can shoot them. He does everything he's told by his superiors and his government, including taking the lives of people that he's never met, and have never done him harm. People who didn't exist until he was shipped to southeast Asia by Uncle Sam. After all, the colors of the South were binary: black and white. Asians, Latinos, Pacific Islanders? These people only existed as caricatures in the movies and cartoons.
He goes to Vietnam and starts shooting at people, same as the black people in his beloved Corps. He gets yelled at by his superiors, eats poor chow, gets shot at and hit, same as the black people.
In 1970 he's served two tours in Vietnam by now, and he's ready to come back to the States. Now that he's done shooting people in the name of God and Country he's supposed to come home and get a job. Go to Vietnam, be a good Marine, get shot at and hit, kill people, come home, and get a job. Just like a good citizen. Just like his father did in World War II. But for him there's no hero's welcome for him. He's spit on, called a baby-killer, hated by misguided people for doing what his government had ordered him to do.
And now there's a recession starting. Much like today the war drained the economy, redistributed the wealth to other places, started destroying the working class, killed a lot of people, and created a generation of people who were just broken. But a good soldier doesn't give up, and my father was a damn good soldier so he got the job he could get: he became a truck driver. He worked, he paid his taxes, he kept on being a productive citizen, same as all the black truck drivers that were trucking down the road right along with him.
But Uncle Sam had done some despicable things when he was young. They had sanctioned water-hosing, and worse, of black people who were asking for nothing more than the right to live their lives in peace without having to worry about offending white people by being black. They had done their level best to make sure that black students weren't allowed to attend this school or that school.
My father had not a fucking thing to do with any of that. He wasn't there, he wasn't a cop, he wasn't a politician, he wasn't so much as the dogcatcher. He was a student, and then he was busy trying to survive in Vietnam, making the same wage as the black people there with him.
But now it's the 70's, and black people are understandably pissed. The Black Panthers and others were echoing anger, righteous anger, and the people that they were mad at were white. The cops, politicians and dogcatchers who WERE there, putting the dogs on them, water-hosing them, beating them, were all white. The face of lynchings, of injustice, were white.
And my father heard about it. But it's hard to accept responsibility or guilt for things he had no part of. After all, he'd only ever done what he'd been told to do by his parents, teachers, superiors, and government since he was old enough to understand directions. All this in spite of being betrayed by authority in the form of capricious social norms and a psychopathic step-mother.
But he was white, and thus guilty by association.
Now it's the 80's, and the recession has deepened, and he's moved away from his family to go to California to search for work. Now he lives in an apartment building in Hayward, in a working-class neighborhood that, on this side of the tracks, is a mix of whites, blacks, Latinos, and people of two particularly notable countries of origin.
Our next door neighbors were from Vietnam and Cambodia. I swear to you I'm not making this up. This really happened.
Yes, my family lived next door to people that Uncle Sam had ordered my father to shoot at a scant 10 years ago. They lived in the same apartment building we did. We had nothing more than they did. No better lives. Right down to the crappy plumbing and substandard electric lines that would cause the TV to fuzz whenever someone used the microwave. And the fucking roaches that had followed us from Florida, the nasty little bastards.
But my father lived with them in peace. He didn't mess with them and they didn't mess with him. That's the way he wanted it and that's the way he liked it. My father didn't care that me and my brother made friends with them. After all, we were just children. We had no knowledge of the Vietnam war. My father never spoke of it to us, we didn't watch the news (and, even so, the media had long such dropped the subject), and our history books didn't reflect it.
Flash forward 2 decades of living a quiet and none-too-prosperous life, the life of a broken Vietnam veteran. The life of someone who had abuse heaped on him but did as he was told and was none the better for it. He has a roof over his head, clothes on his back, and food in his stomach, and not much more. The one thing that he's got that he values the most is peace and quiet.
But now there's a president, a president that isn't the same color as all the ones that have come before him. This time he's black. And he doesn't talk with a southern accent like pretty much every other black person he's ever met. Or played baseball with. Or went to boot camp with. Or gotten shot at with in a foreign country.
No, this man rose to the highest office in the land in spite of his color. In spite of all the disadvantages of being black that my father had heard about from the Black Panthers, and Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., and a lot of other people.
And after hearing all that for so many years it made it that much harder for him to believe that those people weren't full of shit. After all, my father was a white man who had done everything that he'd ever been told to do by authority. The only thing he asked for in return was enough money to live, to keep his family fed, clothed, and sheltered. And there were times that he wasn't given those things no matter how hard he worked for it. He wasn't in a position of power or wealth, in spite of the advantages of being white that he'd heard about from so many places.
And it burns. Right, wrong or indifferent it burns.
And so to insulate himself from the burning, the guilt by association, the betrayal of promises of advantages of being white and doing as he was told and being a good soldier he's bought into the denial. He denies the legitimacy of reality that a black man lives in the White House.
And it kills me. This man who taught me all the ideals that bring me to this website is a Birther.
He is anti-war. He told me that war never solved anything, that VIOLENCE never solved anything. He NEVER qualified that statement, either, with the justifications of World War II or the Revolutionary War as so many do.
He is pro gun control, believing that though you may have the right to own a weapon that you also have a solemn responsibility to use, or not use, that weapon in accordance with the law and with common sense.
He is pro-choice, believing that he has no right to tell another person what to do with her body no matter how he may feel about it.
He is for the working people, believing that in exchange for a fair day's work one should receive a fair day's pay, regardless of gender or color, and that pay should be able to buy food, clothing and shelter with enough left over to buy a little extra and save for a rainy day.
He is pro peace, believing in diplomacy and tact over bluster and threats.
And it seems that all that is out the window. But I'm trying to understand. I'm trying.
Because I love you Pop. Because you deserve my understanding, in spite of the fact that all the things that happened to you had nothing to do with me.
Because I want something better for you.