When my Muslim friend first told me what happened, I knew that this offense broke something inside of her. My heart ached and I wept. With her fearless articulation, she forged a link between the casual assault upon her and the murder of 26 year old security guard, Jemel Roberson, who was holding a shooter when police arrived and shot him dead as onlookers screamed don’t shoot, he’s security. I wept again.
To be spat upon, this universal symbol of disgust and hatred, the vile nature of its expression, the horror of what is emboldened by the language of this greedy, xenophobic, morally rudderless con artist of an American President, my friend brought crashing into view with the shooting Jemel Roberson.
Fascism is fueled by hatred. For us, now, it doesn’t come with jack booted thugs or brown shirts. It’s all the more terrifying because average looking citizens in tee shirts and flannels are carrying out acts of vicious violence made more frightening by the capricious nature of onset.
Men with Ivy League educations, church going elders with 20 or 30 or more years experience in law-making and governance have actively courted and welcomed the most base and ignorant elements of society into their ranks. Why? Because their fears and prejudices could be harnessed for their own greedy ends.
A selfish minority has ginned up enough fear and hatred to catapult themselves into power. Power to shift the priorities of the nation and render the rule of law impotent. Allow themselves to rape, plunder, and pillage government coffers, to use and abuse national resources for self enrichment while the country and the fabric of the nation goes down in flames.
As George Conway termed it a “shit show in a dumpster fire.” But this confines the blaze to the Administration. We are on the verge of becoming the Hindenburg folks. All that is required for evil to flourish is that good people do nothing, remember that line.
Now we know who they are, this evil, rapacious, greedy, Republican leadership and their feckless co-conspirators. We know there is no depth of ugliness they will not plumb for their own short sighted gains.
The handmaids of the 1%, the McConnells, the Nunes’ and Ryans in their employ will violate anyone or anything, and they don’t even have to dirty their hands. Collateral damage? They could care less.
They just whisper nightmares into the ears of every white man who’s lost the best working years of his life to companies that these same powerful men and their cronies broke up and sold off.
In the rust belt and all across the flyover cornfields, and festering in the Deep South are angry, forgotten, and dispossessed men who feel dismissed and disrespected. They are hearing something akin to the rhetoric of Germany in the 1930’s. It goes something like this: “You’re not a loser (because we robbed you of meaningful work).” “Ignore that last fact and let us redirect your sense of loss to women, blacks and other minorities. They are to blame for what (we’ve) done to you). (Now for the drum roll...). “Your gender and skin color entitles you to respect. You’re a member of the master race, and your ability to compete and thrive is threatened by women and people of color. Not only are “they” taking your jobs, but they want to breed you out of existence.”
To the targets of this propaganda I want to say this... There aren’t enough guns, bullets, or viagra pills for you to feel good about yourselves again. The hateful 1% who work, day and night, to hold down minimum wage and rob you of benefits are saying “look away. Look over there.” Then the hate-mongers point to me and you. They point to women wanting equal pay and human rights as somehow taking something away from you my tightly wound and furious white brothers. They point to Blacks wanting to be safe in their own skin, who don’t want to be casually executed at traffic stops, or die in custody under suspicious circumstances, dying time after time after time, they point to our desire for civil rights as robbing you of what exactly?
Refugees from poverty, from gang violence, from the drug lords that the NRA arms to the teeth, Syrians leaving behind there homes and worldly goods to flee the carnage your own government created, you need to see them as hoards of criminals and terrorists who want something you have, your jobs, your women. Is that it?
These ragged souls mean you harm, they want to impose Sharia law on you because out of 22% of the world’s population, 1.5 billion Muslims, you’ve heard of a half dozen that preach that goal. From this evidence you conclude Christian, white male leadership is threatened. “You’re number one, you’re number one, you’re number one!!!”
Thus among the fearful and confused, among throngs of perhaps otherwise decent people who have abandoned critical thinking, are mentally deranged and violent persons.
The Alt-Right/Trump confederacy has empowered people who existed on the fringes of society only, now enlarging their number, a soup of gun toting ammo-sexuals and criminally insane persons suddenly convinced that they are deposed kings, masters of the universe. Somehow robbed of what their race and gender entitled them to. The means of their faltering self esteem is magically the fault of the most economically and socially disempowered among us.
What feat, a trick of mind numbing improbability, even more daring than the Nazi dehumanization of the Jews. In Trump’s America white men feel put upon by everyone who doesn’t bow down or cower in the shadow of their magnificent presence. Something of an unremarkable birthright. Pale skin and a penis, that’s it. Well, rocketed to the fore by the jet fuel of hocus pocus, religion. A warped version of Biblical interpretations that others among my acquaintance are better at debunking. But all of it requires no hard won advantages.
People who want a level playing field and equal rights and protections under the law are a problem for the Patriarchy. Subject to magical thinking or cultural mass delusion, being a white male is the only class distinction that can’t be taken away from them. How sad.
A man might be dying from a preexisting condition, when he finds his only pension plan, social security, under attack by men who want to privatize and gamble it away on the stock market. Then some rich kid buys a patent and sends the cost of a life-saving drug he takes up over 100 times more expensive. Some black kid pulls alongside him and his music is too loud, or he see’s a woman hurrying to prayer, her hijab flapping in the breeze. A Muslim woman, he hates Muslims. Seething with rage and misery, suddenly the weight in his pocket, the great equalizer, makes his trigger finger itch. Ascendancy is only 6lbs of pull away, or, with a mere switch, an effortless hail of lead and till the magazine is empty.
Among nervous suburbanites and deluded evangelicals Trump has harnessed the rage of an ocean of beer-bellied suckers. The kind of people who, as construction workers, he often refused to pay (claiming shoddy work or something was a quarter inch off). People the Donald makes fun of in private, and within their ranks, dangerous and unbalance people he has licensed to action.
I am grateful that my lovely friend, a strong and deeply principled Muslim woman, spoke up. In these dark days it is an epic act of courage. A part of me is terrified for her. She took a public stand and spoke directly to this ignorance specifically because it is a threat to all that we have held dear since 1776. She loves this country.
Fear consumes me because these random idiots are everywhere and my sweet friend cannot hide. Her hijab, a symbol of her faith, freely practiced (in the city of Brotherly Love no less) could be a lightening rod for cowardly men and women.
Cowards want to blame the victims. Victims of our endless aggression and interference with nations of the Middle East. People who are being blamed for the wars we started, or armed, or funded. Wars whose singular purpose was to transfer the wealth of America to the greedy 1%, owners and profiteers of the machinery of war. — To say nothing of their desire to destabilize Third World governments and maintaining control of outdated and polluting forms of energy.
What dangerous and terrifying lengths these men will go to.? What’s a small genocide when you’re holding a profit and laws sheet in the tens of billions? Dead natives never troubled the sons and daughters of colonial empires.
In Chapel Hill a couple years ago a man gunned down and killed 3 Muslim college students, two boys and their sister, over a “parking space.” The shooter decried Muslims ever being allowed in this country. There were two girls in hijab attacked on a Seattle train last year. We all remember the 2012 shooting at the Wisconsin Gurdwara, the Sikh temple massacre, because the murderer simply “thought” they were Muslims. The most recent mass shooting, a hate crime, only a couple weeks ago, in a Pittsburg Synagogue in Squirrel Hill.
The anti-Muslim temperature is rising to meet the neo-Nazi’s already lethal rage towards Jews and African Americans.
The only thing I can think of, the only gesture of solidarity we might make is, I believe, an idea of sister Rebecca Kirkman’s. I think it was the reason my dear friend, mistook her for Muslim. She was wearing a hijab.
What if we start a project calling upon folks from the women’s march, trading our Pussy Hats for Hijabs.
I’d like to take part in organizing that. Where we take one, two, or better, 3 days in protest. Maybe we can organize a service, a kind of protest culmination, where we speak out, offer up our experiences and hopes.
Perhaps, collectively we could take a knee in solidarity with the Jemel Roberson family, with Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James. Wearing or carrying signage with the rainbow Star of David and BLM posters. People need to know we have their backs.
Can we set up a separate page or do it through our FB page: Truth & Reconciliation America? We could start with a YouTube video. Can we give a Muslim sister some cover? Who’s in?