politics

Thoughts August 12, 2017

American Politics, Reflection, Uncategorized, , , , , , , Leave a comment

I just returned from a three-day MBA retreat in Warrenton, VA–about an hour outside of Charlottesville, a town that’s been in the news for all the wrong reasons this year. Since Friday morning, I have been in back-to-back classes, barely sleeping, and totally disconnected from the news. Yesterday, I saw an update pop up on my phone as I was walking back to class: “Car plows through anti-white nationalist protesters, injures 19 people.”

I brought it up to the people I was walking with as we moved from one class to the next, “guys, I just got an update….have you heard about this?” Their responses, with tones expressing a matter-of-fact-ness mixed with apathy and disappointment: “Yeah? you haven’t heard about it yet?” “Yeah, yeah…we heard.” 

I didn’t bother to look up the story, read the facts, discuss or reflect about how I or they felt, find out more of the same violence as led by the white alt-right attempting to assert themselves on people of color (again)…I knew the ending to this story and I knew how it would make me feel. And I knew I was too busy and too tired to follow up.

You all know me, you know what I believe, you know my political leanings, undoubtedly you know how I feel about what happened, but let me explain to you the mental fatigue–and anguish now that I’ve finally looked up all the facts–I feel, and I’m sure many people of color feel as well.

This summer, I made the conscious decision to focus my time on self care, school, work, and CAPAL–with special emphasis on self-care. When I read the news, I deliberately focus on foreign policy. I deleted all my news apps, deleted most news podcasts, and turned off all my news notifications save for one news source: Quartz. The only reason for keeping Quartz was that it has a Trump filter and posts from reliable sources.

Why the effort to stay out of the loop? The amount of evident, SHAMELESS, unpunished physical and emotional violence committed by Americans against Americans–overwhelmingly white against POC– is too much, too distracting, and too demoralizing. The America we’re living in, or as I like to call it “The Timeline Where Trump is President” or “2017A,” can be insufferable. Where every day you expect to read news headlines that sound like chapter titles of history books. Nazism, the KKK, white supremacy, fascism, alt-right–whatever you want to call it, it is here with us the Internet and 24-hour news cycles have breathed new life (and legitimacy) to their causes

As a young person, I am still trying to build myself and find a role in society. I want to lead a fulfilling life and career after my MBA, so that I can affect positive change in my community while making a decent living for myself. But in order to get to the point where I could be an agent of change, I need to believe that there is something worth working towards.

Self-care and self-improvement require optimism, and optimism is hard work. It is much harder to be an optimist today than a pessimist. If I read the news, if I follow the tragedy, if I Google “the meaning of blood and soil” every. damn. time. white supremacy rears its ugly head, I will not make it through the day. International trade policy, economics, accounting, etc. will take a back seat in my brain to fear, distrust, and constant anger at the fact that the country I live in tolerates and sometimes encourages white supremacy. A person can only take so much.

Many of you follow the news all the time, I see your posts and your passion and I support your effort to speak up and show that acceptance, love, fairness, and equality are values of the majority even if they’re not the values of those in power and the bigots they rile up. For me, though, I have been trying “to fight the good fight” for a long time, and I need a break. At this moment, if I devote more of my emotion and my time to anger and pain, my brain might melt.

—

What happened in Charlottesville, VA this weekend was horrific, unconscionable, and depraved. I cannot imagine what those protesters went through and how they are coping right now. I cannot imagine the intensity of the driver’s hate for these people. Heather Heyer didn’t deserve to be murdered for being present at a rally.

I am twisted up inside and even as I type this I feel my throat tightening and my heartbeat quicken because on top of everything else, I felt close to Charlottesville and Albemarle County in some way. I spent two summer vacations there around Charlottesville because of how peaceful the place felt and the kindness of the locals. I even just visited UVA’s campus (coincidentally the weekend after the Robert E. Lee Statue was taken down). So for something so violent to happen in a place that seemed so safe also feels like a betrayal of trust.

So. The question that is on a lot of my friends minds right now is “How can we overcome this?” or “How can we fight bigotry and hate?” What I am starting to find out is that there’s only so much you can do until you begin to internalize a piece of the trauma yourself. We need to make allies of each other by showing compassion and understanding to each other and take turns opposing acts of hate and white supremacy. No matter how much I might want to be in in full activist mode all the time I just can’t anymore. It will, ultimately, consume my emotions and affect my work, school, and personal relationships. Right now, it’s not a price I’m able to pay.

*photo credit ABC News*

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Brexit’s Warning to America

American Culture, American Politics, Long Reads, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Originally posted to Fay’s Medium.

Brexit’s Warning to America: Don’t Validate Your Racists

In the wee hours of Thursday night, just before falling asleep, I checked the news one last time before bed to see if there were any interesting headlines from around the world. As Washington, D.C. snoozed, those of us tuned into the waking world felt sleep suddenly leave us as we found out the United Kingdom had voted, by a slim margin, to leave the European Union. The Brexit was now a reality, and its implications were sending the media and markets into a tailspin.

Though I read world news for at least an hour every morning for work, I tended to skimp on reading about the Leave campaign or UKIP (U.K. Independence Party) simply because the notion of a Brexit sounded farfetched. The idea of the U.K. shooting itself in the foot both economically and politically by leaving the E.U. sounded even more outrageous and unimaginable than last year’s infamous referendum vote in Greece that inspired a similarly punny term: “Grexit”. In July 2015, the Greek people, beaten down by years 0f austerity and pushed by populism voted overwhelmingly to renege on their debt and leave the E.U. as well. In the end, however, their leadership ignored its people and listened to E.U. leaders. The Greek government opted to avert an even worse financial crisis at the expense of its democratic integrity. Needless to say, as bad as Greece is today, it would have been worse had it left the E.U. and attempted to resuscitate the long-dead drachma.

But I digress. The Grexit and the Brexit are only similar in the fact that from the outset they sounded so unbelievable to the average person. Indeed, a viable Donald Trump candidacy for President of the United States began equally as unbelievable — laughable, even. How could the average, decent human being be caught so off-guard by the burgeoning hate within their own country? Many European countries as well as the United States have supremely underestimated the power of this extremist, xenophobic contagion that has spread across the Western world since the 2008 recession, amplified by the refugee crisis, and stoked by demagogues looking for an easy path to power. This contagion goes by many names and slogans — “Make America Great Again,” “Freedom for Britain,” National Front, Golden Dawn, etc.— , but they all share the same features: the scapegoating of immigrants and ethnic minorities, a propensity toward violence, and a touch of religious extremism.

All this to say, that on June 23rd, 2016, the United Kingdom did not just vote to leave the European Union, they decided to leave the modern world and decent society and legitimize their bigots instead. On Saturday, a compilation of more than 100 tweets from the U.K. went viral on Facebook (they have since been removed for unknown reasons). The tweets came from British citizens who woke up to a “new Britain” they no longer recognized or felt safe in anymore. Decent British citizens suddenly found themselves in a country where people publicly harassed and berated men, women, and children because they had an accent, spoke another language, wore traditional clothing, or had darker skin.

 

Trending on Twitter: #PostBritishRacism #PostRefRacism

What UKIP and the Leave campaign has done to British society, a Donald Trump White House will do for the United States.

A Plea to the America’s Maybe Trump Voters

It’s not impossible for this kind of blatant hate speech to become more normalized in the United States and manifest in actual violence. Indeed, we have already seen several examples of how Trump’s rabble-rousing is doing just that. But we have a chance to stop it. Let us take the Brexit as a warning and recognize that the United States does not accept blind prejudice, racism, and an unjustifiable fear of immigrants.

There is an unsettling number of maybe-Trump supporters in my life. Many of these folks are not hateful people. They are people who want some kind of genuine change to take place in the American government, and they want to feel like they have a voice in the behemoth of the American political machine. Many are not people who you would call racist/sexist/homophobic/etc., but are people who believe that someone new in the Oval Office who will either frighten or inspire our stagnant Congress into action. Given the option of Clinton or Trump, these people think “at least Trump will shake up the system because he’s an outsider and brash.” Many Americans can sympathize with this sentiment, but the belief that Trump is the outsider we need to shake up the American political system is specious and naive. It is also a bit lazy to believe that all the work you need to do to change your country for the better can be done in a single, specific election.

The true impact of a Trump presidency will not be a 50-foot border wall along the Mexican border nor will it be a Nazi-esque database of Muslims that will track every American Muslim’s information. President Trump’s true impact would be in the public acknowledgement that the majority of Americans are justified in their fear of one another, and that the only way to deal with that fear is to sequester ourselves away from diversity, human decency, and the modern world. To vote for Donald Trump would be to disavow the values and achievements of the United States.

Britain did not just shoot itself in the foot this week economically, but it has further emboldened racism in its country and the ramifications are striking. We have come too far, America, to regress socially as Britain has sadly decided to do. Make no mistake, the general election in November is not about “PC culture” and it’s not about “making America great again.” This election is about preserving the achievements we have made as a nation over the last 240 years in order to make our citizens and soon-to-be citizens safer, more prosperous, and a part of the American community. Because, personally, I don’t remember the past as that great and worth “going back” to, do you?

What utopia from the past would we try to return to? The past where an African American person would essential risk their life simply to exercise their right to vote? The past where women weren’t considered capable or intelligent enough to vote, file for divorce, or acquire contraception? The past where child labor was considered normal? The past where social security didn’t exist and we were perfectly okay to let our seniors die impoverished and alone? The past where people could openly and without retribution deny opportunities in education, housing, and financing just because of someone’s race, sexuality, or gender? I cannot imagine anyone wants this country to go back to any of those versions of America. No matter how bad we think things are today, “going back” is not an option.

The “real America” is not supposed to be a society with a tribal mentality where our freedoms and rights are viewed as a limited resource of privileges that only certain groups can hold at one time. No, the “real America” believes we can move beyond that petty tribal squabbling of “whites v. everyone else,” “immigrants v. native born” “Muslims v. Christians,” etc. and that we are able to engender trust in the presence of diversity and change. There are still severe injustices in our country for people of all groups and classes, but we cannot fix these problems by being suspicious and hateful of one another. Believe it or not, America can become better and better if we work together.

Though the United Kingdom is an ocean away, I urge all Americans, to take the social implications of the Brexit very seriously. The United States must not vote for or encourage the bigotry upon which Donald Trump has built his entire campaign. Hillary can be a great president even if you distrust her last name as a legacy of “the establishment.” At least, she has avoided the use of platitudes, hate speech, and fear mongering to get this far. The same cannot be said for Donald Trump. You, our families, our friends and I will be safer living in a Hillary America than a Trump America.