Hekate
Hekate's JournalOur experience here at DU is a steady trickle of alleged Dems insisting we need all new faces...
...in the House, and that Nancy is old, tired, close to death (if you look at actuarial tables), out of new ideas, out of touch, needs to be primaried by a real progressive, not inspirational to young progressives, a millstone around our necks, and a lightning rod for GOP hatred. The latest one said we needed "a housecleaning from top to bottom" -- which at least had the virtue of targeting every Dem with experience and not just the women.
Friends, did I leave anything out?
Progressoid, these things have been posted often enough at DU that I have memorized them without even trying. "Who on the left?" you ask. Look around you.
As I've watched California tilt toward a minority-majority status...
...I've wondered how it will play out. Well, it is not where I grew up -- the history is all different, the composition of the population is different, it is geographically interconnected with the continent... It will be different.
My previous experience as a minority was as a kid and young adult trying to negotiate first school and later on full time work. There was an advantage in being in a ginormous high school, which guaranteed a level of diversity my friend in a deeply rural community did not have. There, one of her teachers would address her by her last name, kind of spitting it out when he called on her. She has friends-for-life from those days, tho, and fit in otherwise, as she was active in sports and had an olive complexion that tanned readily. She was not shy, was very outgoing and self confident.
I had friends but never completely fit in; I think I tried to blend into some kind of background. I sucked at sports, being hugely myopic. My heritage is Irish, and my people fry like bacon in the sun. There was always someone asking, "Haole girl, your father in the military?" (because clearly I had just arrived and would be going away soon). No, no he was not. He came in as a Lockheed Aircraft employee, and we were blue collar and fairly poor.
When the pineapple cannery recruiters came to my high school looking for summer workers, I signed up. Hard work. One day when I was working my shift a tiny elderly Japanese-American lady walked by and cackled, "You still here, haole girl?"
In college I worked in a major shopping center and my store drew a lot of young tourists. There was always someone who would ask enviously how I had scored this summer job (since I obviously had just gotten off an airplane myself). It was not a summer job -- it was my ramen and rent year round while I attended university.
Fast forward to my years as a young wife and mother: "Your husband in the military?" (because -- entirely without a tan -- clearly I came from somewhere else and would be going back there soon)
Well, you asked.
I ended up back in California after all, having married a Californian. My husband followed me out to the Islands with his new college degree, and ended up working as a bartender in a major hotel for over a decade. It was and is an extremely one-sided economy -- tourism.
I came back for a visit some years later with my second (and final) husband. We got together with one of my old friends I've known since elementary school, Chinese-American. (Yes, this is an important detail.) My husband was a systems analyst at the top of his game -- he was charmed by what he saw in Hawai'i and was sure he could do there what he could so readily do in California in those days: walk into a new job just like that. My old pal just laughed. He drew a verbal picture of what it took to get into various professions, and how many relationships and family connections you had to have, and which ethnicity, and so on and so forth. Being Jewish was no problem -- being haole and not from the Islands was definitely a problem.
Well, you asked.
Growing up, my mother was the arbiter of my reality. She grew up Roman Catholic in Colorado when the KKK was active and I think people forget how much they hated the Catholics. She had a store of memories and thoughts about the evils of racism, anti-Semitism, and the other bigotries. She had a lot to say about that. She thought multi-ethnic, much-intermarried Hawai'i of the 1950s-1960s was really some kind of paradise. She had dear friends in our diverse neighborhood. I was the oldest girl and became the babysitter in our diverse neighborhood. She did not have to ride the schoolbus and be called a fucking haole every day, though.
However, my mother's reality prevailed in those years. Based on her own experiences, she believed high school and junior high were a social minefield in any case, and all would be wonderful in college. That was one thing. The other thing was that she was a genuinely thoughtful, deep person, and taught me to think and to have empathy.
The people who were racist, the people who were full of resentment and could not see past the features of my face and the color of my skin -- they were not everything there was by a long shot. Returning for my 50th high school reunion with my husband, being with all those people who were young when I was young, and catching up a little on their individual sagas, was like returning to -- to home and family and a place I love on a deep deep level. (Whoa, just made myself cry)
It broke my heart to leave when I was 32, knowing there was no going back. It's the place that shaped me and my worldview, always. It's why I know racial/cultural identity is malleable -- and that if young Barack Obama had chosen to stay, he would have married a "local girl" and history would have been very different. It was a choice, in ways Mainlanders cannot grasp. It's why when I read about "code-switching" many years later I knew instantly what that was, and reflected yet again that if I had only done what my chameleon brother did and learned fluent pidgin for use out of our mother's hearing, I would have had a badge of belonging that would have belied my appearance as nothing else could have done. (And now I made myself laugh, remembering our mother's lifelong battle for Correct English At All Times.)
Well, you asked.
This is very very long, I realize. It remains to be seen whether I delete it tomorrow, or add it to my Journal.
Because someone has to start posting about it & that someone is you. These things...
...do not happen all by themselves.
I was once lectured by someone I'd never met before about how it was my "duty" to think up special-interest group activities for the club we both belonged to. At that time there were three women doing all the interesting stuff -- read: we were doing all the actual work to keep the local branch alive. One hosted the book discussion group (me), one the board games group, and one the once a month open-house social. The games group hostess was also the editor of the newsletter and local president. We were not hired by anyone or paid for our time. The editor and local prez were elected positions, also unpaid.
I tried to explain to this fellow that there was no such "duty," there were only people who up and decided they wanted a book group or a place to play Scrabble, and they put it in the bulletin and opened their home. He got really pissed off at me (I'm sure you won't, amirite?)
DU is very much like that. If you start posting on the topic of Asian-Pacific Islander Month, people will respond and a discussion will ensue. If I see it (if) I will probably join in, because I was raised in Hawai'i and my undergrad major was Asian and Pacific History, so I retain a strong interest in related topics to this day. For interest, when people were posting about the native Hawai'ian protests against adding more telescopes to their sacred mountain, I engaged in vigorous debate with certain DUers who had no respect for their point of view. I just don't initiate OPs.
I'll keep an eye out for whatever you decide to put out there. Mahalo for bringing it up.
We do not "give" them anything. The nature of propaganda is they take any word & twist it...
...until it breaks. You need to look up Newt Gingrich's seminal list of decent words and how to twist them into propaganda. In my own lifetime I watched the decline of the very word "Democrat" until by the year 2000 hearing a Republican political leader say "Democrat" was like an old film of hearing a German say the word "Jew." It only took them 10 years.
Read the scholar George Lakoff on "framing" an argument. Seriously.
They take and take and take. Everything we give up because they've tried to destroy it only means they will come back for something or someone else. They will gnaw Hillary's bones forever. They publish racist smears about the entire Obama family. They attack Pelosi without cause.
Every person and every cause we have ever had becomes filth in their mouths. Do you imagine they will stop because we run someone for office who has not yet been attacked by the RW propaganda machine? Why would they? It works for them.
Every name floated here as a possible presidential candidate is a person with an oppo file just waiting to be deployed, and what the GOP can't find they will invent.
If we do not learn to defend and stand by our own from GOP attacks, we will lose every time, and we will deserve to lose.
Screw GOP fundraisers. They are using Hillary as a fundraising punching bag in perpetuity. Got that?
Hillary Clinton is not in office. She is not running for office. But they are going to use her imaginary perfidy as a boogyman forever.
Do you not understand what this means?
It means WE DO NOT LET THEIR HATREDS AND LIES CHOOSE WHO WE RUN AND ELECT. IF WE DID SO, WE WOULD NEVER HAVE GOTTEN BARACK OBAMA. WHY DOES THIS ONLY APPLY TO WOMEN?
"Taking up impeachment" at this moment means throwing herself off a high building...
...screaming "look at me fly!" until she goes splat.
Nice gesture, if you like that sort of thing, but utterly pointless and someone else has to clean up the mess on the sidewalk.
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 90,641
