Tag Archives: hate

To the Media: Do Your Damn Job

28 Nov

As you might have noticed, I am not usually someone who has a hard time coming up with things to say. Generally I am chock-full of opinions about all sorts of different things. But right now, I am simply at a loss. I really am. I feel like I went to sleep one night in a world that, though confusing, was something I was capable of working within and woke up the next morning here. In a place that makes absolutely no sense. It’s like, seriously, what the fuck is going on?!

I thought that perhaps by this point in time I would have backed away from my initial response to the election. The response that, if I had to sum it up for you, went as follows:

If you voted for Trump: fuck you.

But the thing is, the farther and farther I get from around 9:00pm on November 8th when I started crying because The Times had called  a Trump win, the more and more I double down on that sentiment. But now I would like to go ahead and actually extend that feeling of disdain beyond the confines I initially laid out for it. I would like to reach out to the media, not everyone, certainly not Charles M. Blow who is absolutely killing it, and say a big, hearty fuck you to them as well. Why? Well, I’ll tell you.

The media has a responsibility. It has a responsibility to report on the actual things that are happening out in this country and in the world. Do you know what it does not have the responsibility to do? It does not have the responsibility to normalize Donald Trump and his supports. And yet that is exactly what so much of the media has been doing since the day the sky fell down. Let me tell you a little story. Last week my friend Jessy and I were sitting in Chattanooga, Tennessee at a small restaurant downtown eating some dinner and drinking some wine. CNN was on the TV. CNN, the network that, by the way, Donald Trump called the Clinton News Network throughout his campaign. It was the night after Richard Spencer held that horrible conference in Washington, DC. So there we were, sitting, eating, trying to have a conversation about something other than the fear and disbelief that have been a mainstay in our lives since the election, when on the television screen came a video full of white nationalists giving the Hitler salute in the name of the President-elect of our country. And CNN called them the “alt-right,” a name coined by Richard Spencer himself to try and mask the true message of bigotry and racism promoted by the movement he now leads.  I was horrified but CNN, it seemed, was not so much. And it kind of led me to ask myself the following question:

Who the hell is the media trying to protect?

And then, quickly, I came to the answer:

Itself.

And I understand, we all have a job to do. My job is to serve people drinks and to write about what I see and understand of the world around me. I do the latter here, where I am not accountable to anyone but myself and my readers. It is also a relatively safe space because no one has found me yet in my small corner of the Internet. I have not been the recipient of death or rape threats, have not been sent hundreds of anti-semitic memes. I am my own editor. And the thing that’s crazy is that that sort of abuse, unfortunately, seems to come with being relevant. (I can’t imagine what Charles M. Blow and other brave journalists out there doing their jobs are enduring these days.) In ways, I won’t feel as though this blog is very successful until I have a few vile haters. And I hope that if that ever happens, I have the strength and courage to double down on my beliefs and communicate them with even more gusto. I guess I won’t know until that day comes. If it does. All that being said, it is my responsibility, it is all of our responsibility, to talk about what we see, what we experience, and what we understand. It is not our responsibility, and it is certainly not the media’s responsibility, to try and justify our current situation in order to not ruffle feathers.

In fact, ruffling feathers is sort of part of the point. It is what helps to keep tyrants out of The White House.

Anyway back to my story. I sat at the bar with Jessy and I totally and completely lost my shit as I told her that never, never in my lifetime did I expect to look up at a television screen and see the Nazi salute on any station other than the History Channel. But clearly we are at a horrible place. And then, about 15 repeats of the clip later, CNN changed to a new topic: Hamilton. And I watched as a white man took the screen and lectured a female reporter on just how rude the cast of Hamilton was to Mike Pence. And I watched as she chose not to take the path of most resistance and defend them, but instead she agreed that, yes, they were very rude and yes, they were out of line, but maybe Donald Trump and Mike Pence stand for some problematic policies? Maybe?

Maybe?!

We just watched the Nazi fucking salute like 15 seconds ago, lady! And you know what, the cast of Hamilton wasn’t rude: they were fucking afraid. They are afraid like so many of us are. And they, unlike so many, used the platform that they worked so hard to gain in order to communicate their fears in quite possibly the most straight-forward and polite way possible. They simply asked Mike Pence to look, to listen, to try and understand and maybe, just maybe, to humanize them a little bit. That is what free speech and artistic expression and the goddamn Constitution is all about.

So I guess I lied at the beginning: I do have a lot to say. But I guess what it all boils down to is this:

We are not somewhere new. We are somewhere old and horrible. We are somewhere that humanity has been before and it is about time we have the courage to call this what it is. We have the President-elect asking for the registration of Muslims. We have groups that used to be fringe but seem to be moving more and more into the mainstream calling for the release of phone numbers and addresses of teachers who they deem un-American. And we have a media who is so afraid of doing its goddamn job that it allows Donald Trump’s childish Twitter account to bury every news story of any value. Remember that Times article from Hitler’s rise where they said that Hitler wasn’t actually a threat? Where they said that he didn’t really mean all the things he was saying? Does that sound familiar? Because it should. Maybe the Times is calling a spade a spade this time, more or less, but a lot of other outlets are not. We have been here before. We have the power to impact the outcome.

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Swastikas at The New School

13 Nov

How much do you guys know about The New School University, formerly The New School for Social Research? I know a few of my readers (oh hey, GPIA!) know this little tidbit but for the rest of you, I just want to fill you in on a little history. It’ll tie in. I swear. The New School was founded in 1919 by a bunch of progressive educators unhappy with the direction academia was going in the United States. In 1933, it was set up as a University in Exile; a graduate division that was set up as an academic haven for scholars who had been fired from jobs in fascist Italy or were fleeing from Nazi Germany. The University in Exile had later incarnations and some of the notable scholars associated with it include Hanna Arendt, Erich Fromm and Max Wertheimer among others.

So let me just, real quick again, say something which is actually probably more for me than for any of my readers because this shit has been violently banging against my head all night. The New School for Social Research, my alma mater, with the motto “To the Living Spirit,” acted as a University in Exile during one of the darkest times in this world’s history for academics fleeing certain death. For academics fired by Stalin and fleeing Hitler. And last night someone drew a series of swastikas in one of the dorms. There were four large swastikas scrawled on four separate dorm room doors. Each of the rooms housed at least one Jewish student.

Open anti-semitism in New York fucking City at a school that has acted as a safe haven for scholars fleeing totalitarian and fascist governments at home.

And so I guess I have to say this because, I don’t know, I feel confused that some people maybe are missing the point.

This election is different.

This isn’t that someone won that we didn’t like. I mean, listen, I will be the first to say I would have been massively disappointed if Jeb Bush or John Kasich won. And I would have cried if it had been Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, but especially the latter. But this is not just about someone who isn’t “our gal” winning. This is that the forces of hatred have been awoken and they have been thrust into the middle of our cities and our towns. The hate is coming from the darkest depths of the internet and appearing on the dorm room doors of young, Jewish students at a progressive university in a progressive city. The hate is coming from our peers. It is everywhere, all around us, and it is fucking scary.

So for those people who keep telling everyone to stop protesting? I mean, sure, you are welcome to your own opinion and of course and I respect that. But I think you should read this article by Teju Cole. It was in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend and it is everything. It basically lays out, in words so beautiful I could never manage to formulate them on my own, let alone get them to flow from my brain and onto a piece of paper, how easy it is to normalize and excuse what is going on all around us. It says what so many of us have been trying to say. It says that this election is different. And so again, while I respect your beliefs that the protests are getting in the way and setting us back I have to disagree with you, and strongly. This is a democracy in action. And it has to happen this way, it has to continue. For most people it isn’t about contesting the election, it isn’t about being sore losers and not accepting a result or anything like that. It is about communicating that we simply cannot stand by and watch as our government, our country, our goddamn home is coopted by hate and fear. We simply cannot let this stand. We must refuse. Because the alternative is simply too hard to imagine. When we stop fighting, when we stop protesting, when we stop organizing and writing and talking that is the moment when we let the fear and the hatred take hold of us, that is the moment that we throw our hands up and say, “well, the people have spoken.”

No.

So I don’t know about you but I am not about to let that happen. I have spent a lifetime being active in my social circles and in my small space on the internet but more or less complacent the rest of the time. But enough is enough. If we needed this to awaken us all, then we needed it. But we sure as hell better take this as an opportunity to fight for change and for equality and for the end of hatred and abuse, otherwise we are no better than the rest of them. So, yeah, protest. Keep protesting. Protest for the next four years, no matter what form that protest takes. I am finding mine.

Swastikas at the fucking New School. This shit has got to stop.

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These are scary, scary times

10 Nov

Friends. As many of you already know, today I am embarking on a journey. Today I leave, my trunk full of clothing and books, my heart heavy, and head down to New Orleans for a short but important new chapter. A time when I can reflect on who I am and who I want to be in this world. I time when I can just sit back, far away from family and many of my friends, far away from where I have called home for my entire adult life, and start building. I want to start building a me that makes active choices and decisions for where I want my life to go and becomes a more vocal person within my community, where ever that community may be. This is more important now than ever.

I thought that I, along with one of my closest friends, would be driving South in a different America than the one we find ourselves in today. I thought we would be driving in the spirit of celebration and safety, not feeling as though we are in a high-speed train, breaks failing, hurtling into the darkness. Clearly we, along with millions of others, were out of touch with the degree to which people are hurting all over this country, to the degree that people feel ignored and left behind, to the degree so many disdain the cities and the people that live within them. And I get it. Shit is hard. And I am sure I am going to be seeing a lot of hard shit on this ride – a different kind of poverty and destitution than I see day after day in my beloved New York City. And that is unfair. I truly believe we all deserve opportunity, that we should all feel as though we matter. But more than anything else, I feel as though we should all feel safe and at home here in our America. In our beautiful, diverse, America. And so, in keeping with my post from yesterday, albeit with slightly less swearing, I have just a few things to say.

I am having so many feelings right now. I am angry, I am shocked, I am saddened, but more than anything I am afraid. I spoke on the phone with my father last night and he who lived through America during the Vietnam War, through the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, through the on-air killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, through the resignation of Richard Nixon, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the horrors of the Cold War and September 11th and everything that has come before, in between and after, he told me that he has never felt so unsure or afraid for and about the future of our country. These are scary, scary times. Scarier than ever before. And I remember speaking to my mother in the days and weeks following the 2001 attack on our country, myself in tears and her with a strength she always manages to find, and having her assure me that there are always these moments, always these times, that give us uncertainty but that we must have resolve and move forward and know there is more good than evil out in the world. That although things will never be the same, we will adjust and we will learn and we will get better. When I spoke with her at 10pm on election night, as we were understanding the reality of where we stood, her voice cracked. These are scary, scary times.

And in the past few days since Donald Trump’s election, things have become clear: we are living in a moment where people are angry and this outcome has, for some though certainly not for all, legitimized their feelings of closed-mindedness and has emboldened them to behave in ways that openly threaten those around them. My friend Ashlie shared this story:

Tonight we were at a bar, celebrating Leon’s fantastic film screening. A man came up to our table behind my seated friend and proceeded to, without greeting or warning or any words at all, put his arms around her, hug her, and kiss her cheek. We all assumed it was an old friend, and she squirmed around to see who it was, and it was a complete stranger! I said, “Do you know him?” and she said “no! Not at all!!!” We all started telling him in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t get to do that, just touch and kiss anyone whenever he feels like it, and he responded, “but Trump just won the Presidential Race.”
I am not kidding, lying, or being even the slightest bit hyperbolic. That is what happened, and that is how he defended his actions. So, know that.

Reading through the comments on her post revealed to me that there were many women who had the same exact experiences. Men walking up to them and touching them, grabbing them, kissing them and saying that because now that we have a President Elect Trump it is within their rights to do so. And then, of course, there was the one man, the one white man, who called all these women liars. These are scary, scary times.

And my younger sister, a graduate of Wellesley University, shared with me a story recounted by Sydney Robertson:

Today, Wellesley women, like a lot of America, were in mourning.

Edward Tomasso and Parker Rander-Riccardi, two students at Babson College, decided to drive around our beautiful campus with a Trump flag in a pick up truck. They laughed, screamed and sped around campus. Then, they parked in front of the house for students of African decent, and jeered at them, screaming Trump and Make America Great Again. When one student asked them to leave, they spit in her direction.

This is not my America, this is Trump’s America filled with hatred and bigotry. This is what he has provoked. Please help us get these faces out there, they cannot get away with this.

And this is just the tip of the ice burg. There are women afraid to leave the house in the hijab; women making appointments at Planned Parenthoods to get IUDs before our access to birth control, and our rights to choose, are further threatened; one member of the North Carolina LGBTQ community woke up to find a note on his car that read “Can’t wait until your ‘marriage’ is overturned by a real president. Gay families = burn in hell. Trump 2016.” And this is just the beginning. This is just 36-hours in. These are scary, scary times.

And so I head south. Away from a New York that no longer feels safe and into the unknown. I’m sure I will be fine but still, the nervous butterflies in my stomach are a little more active than the were just 2 days ago. Things seem less certain, more foreboding, and just, I don’t know, more treacherous. We all need to be more careful because a dragon has been awoken and that dragon has found his and her voice within mainstream media and our government, on the streets of our cities and our towns, and things will be a lot less safe for all of us. Every single one. Because if there is a Trump supporter who is reading this blog, and if that Trump supporter happens to be a white female (as so many maddeningly were) or a person of color, let me just tell you this:

Your vote will not save you. You cannot wear your vote as a badge of honor or protection as you move through your life. You might feel as though you are one of them but you are not. You are not part of their America. You are not equal. You are not free. And you are not safe. And so, though I might be angry and though I might not be ready to try to love you and embrace you in order to move forward, I hope that this horror blows over soon for all of us. Although honestly I doubt it will. We have a long uphill battle. And though on November 8th and the days immediately after you never thought you would be walking alongside us, you will be. Your pussies are just as grabable, your ethnicity and patriotism just as questionable, your skin color just as threatening.

I know that not all Trump supporters are awful or full of hate or voted for anyone else but who they believed would be the best person for the job. But the loudest ones, the ones in the corners of the internet, the ones touching women and threatening people of color, they are full of hate. Those are the bad ones. And so for those who voted not from a place of hate but from a place of fear and hurt, a fear and hurt that so many of us have been experiencing, you know what? We will be here. We will be here waiting for you because no one, no one deserves to be treated as lesser than. And we are, truly, stronger together.

So I’ll be seeing you, New York. Stay safe out there everyone. No matter where, or who, you are.

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That Time I Looked like Groucho Marx.

15 Jan

When I was in grade school I got this assignment to write an essay about a word.  Just one single word that each of us were able to pick.  I picked the word “hate.”  I picked the word hate because I used it all the time in all sorts of different occasions.  To describe my feelings about steak and asparagus, about this kid in my class who told me I had a mustache (thanks for years of insecurity, asshole), about the three weeks in school when we had to line dance in gym class.  My grandma, Bama to us, always said to me, “Bekahboo, hate is a very strong word.  Just say that you dislike line dancing in gym class very strongly.”  I tried it.  It lacked a certain, how you say, panache.*  So being a stubborn jerk sort of since birth, I decided I would write about hate and prove Bama wrong.

In the process of writing the paper, I realized that Bama was right.  Damnit.  In order to hate someone, like really actually hate them, you have to dehumanize them.  It’s what I always come back to whenever I read about the horrible things people do to other people.  In order to treat someone terribly and feel no remorse, you have to hate them.  You have to think of them as somehow less valuable, less human.  It is an emotion I never want to really, truly feel.  I never want to get to a point in my life where I dislike someone so intensely that I am able to cause them extreme pain, be it physical or emotional.  I don’t ever want my heart to go there.  But I think that for me, coming to an understanding about the word hate has been helpful, especially considering that I got both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in international affairs.  I spent a lot of my time, and still do actually, reading about how people are shitheads.  The only way for me to grapple with some of the truly awful things people are capable of was to put it in the context of that long ago written paper.  It doesn’t make my stomach not turn, or make me not want to throw my computer against the wall, but it offers up a starting point and I guess that is something.

So the whole point of this was not to give you a rundown of my fifth grade assignment (or whenever it was), although to be fair I would love to read that paper now.  (Hey, mom, do you think it is in one of those cardboard boxes of things from my yoot?)  Maybe if I find it I will even type it out on my blog somewhere for all of our amusement.  I will even leave in all spelling errors and grammar issues.  I think it could be fun.  I really hope that somewhere in the paper I talk about the kid who told me I had a mustache.  I am actually still mad at him about that despite the fact that I haven’t seen him since my high school graduation, lo these many years ago.  I hold a grudge.  Learned that from Bama, also.  Kids can be really mean, you know?  The mustache thing is actually a funny story.  So there I was, with a ridiculously thick head full of hair (as I still have today), and no idea that I looked like a young, female Groucho Marx.  And this jerk came up to me and was all

“Rebekah has a mustache, Rebekah has a mustache!”

And so I said,

“Whatever, idiot, only boys have mustaches!”

And I ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and *gasp!* there is was!  I spent the rest of the day walking around the school trying in vain to cover my face from my mouth to my nose.  Obviously, I looked foolish.  I didn’t want to talk to my mom about it because she had red hair and clearly knew nothing from mustaches so I went to the source:  the Frank side of the family.  We all have dark hair and, I would venture to guess, we all have a little ‘stache going on.  Except maybe for my sister.  I feel like my sister does not have a mustache.  Anyway, so I went and I talked to Bama and my Aunt Mindy about it and they told me to bleach it.  Of course, they didn’t realize how explicit they had to be, or how good I have always been at pretending like I know what someone is talking about, because I thought that I had to take Clorox to my face and that sounded like a terrible idea. I wasn’t a stupid kid.  There was no way in hell I was putting that shit anywhere near my mouth.  So instead I suffered through another few years of looking like Groucho until at the pharmacy I discovered Sally Hansen bleach.  So that’s what they meant. I bought some and for the next few years instead of having a dark mustache, I had one that was blondeish-orangeish that really showed up in the sun.  So, that was pretty fun.

Anyway, I wax it myself now.  Sometimes.  At this point in my life I don’t really give a shit about it.  It’s hair.  It isn’t going to like, jump off my face and gouge someone’s eye out or anything (although that would be an amazing super-hero power).  And actually, I don’t think it’s even all that bad.  There is this old lady on my street with a SERIOUS mustache and I gotta tell ya, I think she is sort of amazing for just not giving a shit.  I like to imagine that if I was as great as her when I was in grade school I’d look at that kid and be all,

“Yea, well you don’t have a mustache.  Prepubescent wuss.”

And then I would secretly have a complex but at least he would have one also.  Until he went through puberty and started growing facial hair and then found me in the hallway and rubbed his creepy little boy mustache in my face.  Not literally, of course.  I guess by that point I would have already discovered the bleach, AKA facial hair highlighter.  And I’m sure he would have found something else to pick on me about.  I feel like he used to pick on me a lot. Not often, but he would just kind of materialize out of nowhere and say something mean that would stick with me and then he would disappear again. Like the time it was hot in school and I was wearing a long-sleeved grey shirt and I had some sweat in my armpits and he came over and was like “you have sweaty arm pits!”   And I was like “so?” because that was all I could think of and then he laughed in my face and then for years I was afraid of wearing long-sleeved shirts.  Whatever, my body is very efficient at cooling itself.  Fuck you.

Well, this blog post went in a surprising direction.  I’m not actually sure how to tie this whole thing together because not only do I not hate the guy who used to poke fun at me growing up, I don’t really even dislike him very strongly.  I’m just a little mad at him.  He was just an asshole kid who, odds are, grew up to be a very nice adult.  I wonder if the internet knows.  Rabbit hole, here I come.

*Did you know that in Canada they use the word panache to describe antlers?  Or as a synonym for antlers?  Or something?  I love writing.  Always learn such interesting and largely useless things about words.  Oftentimes that you have been using them wrong.  Kind of like my use of panache.

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