An Election About Grievance

 

This is an essay about the United Sates election. The topic of this essay is the grip of grievance, and what it is doing to our country and what it can do in our lives. So I want to present my essay interspersed with some art (some written, some visual) to maybe give you a bit of energy to keep going and striving, or to maybe unlock the death grip grievance has on your heart.

So here are a few wonderful poems, and some of the USA's more beautiful monuments, and my thoughts on the election of grievance.

The United States has just had an almost 50-50 split on the concept of what our country is, of what our country should be, but, more than that, of who our country should be. America, before the Europeans got here and began the great experiment of a country of the people by the people and for the people, probably was primarily native Americans and people from what is today Mexico, and parts south. Europeans (including Spain in that) forcibly brought more people here from other parts of the world, and there is some archeological evidence to indicate there may have been more variations of people here before that. So, I don't know that we can conclusively say who the country belongs to, right? I mean the whole point of The United States is that some of the people who came the the continent of North America were looking for a place to experiment being in charge of themselves. And I think there has always been that push and pull of, "We created this thing, and we get to decide who stays and who goes." But, we cannot set up a system for inclusion, for people to be free, and then use it to exclude. Can we?

Freedom of expression has long been something people have fought over in The United States (and, of course, other places). On the one hand, as it were, the USA has always had a cadre of people who hate freedom of speech and expression, while also having a lot more of it than many other places in the world, and that may well be why a good portion of us take it for granted.  

Many of us don't know how to feel about our country after the election. It seems clear as the ringing and pure sound of a bell to me that the person who leads our country ought to have education that he or she has done well in, and an even temperament, and an ability to look beyond his or her own wants and desires to what is better for the group of us stuck with that person at the top. For example, when Covid was running rampant and there was no vaccine, and we did not know that steroids could help a person survive, it seemed clear to me that we all should be wearing masks. I admit I was a slow adopter. It didn't get to the rural area where I was at the time right away, sort of, in bulk, and we didn't know how contagious it was. And I remember my first time grocery shopping while wearing a mask: I could barely think of my list and what to buy because I was so distracted by the mask, and the fact that I had felt I really needed to wear it had made me so anxious about catching it. It felt like to acknowledge the need for a mask was to acknowledge that something deadly was in the air, and I could not think straight. Most grocery carts (buggies?) in the USA have a top section, for kids to sit in mostly, and I always stick my more fragile vegetables, fruits, and my carton of eggs up there. When I got to the belt to put my groceries up for scanning, as I was unloading everything I noticed that, rolling around in the bottom of the cart were the eighteen eggs (I'd selected a large carton, because who wanted to go back to the store?) I wanted to buy. They were loose and rolling around in the (potentially) contaminated cart because I had put them not in the safe space at the top, but at the bottom, and I'd put the carton in upside down, and then jostled the little suckers out. Thankfully none had broken, but in that moment I felt broken. I thought, Clearly I am not succeeding at this! But, and this is the important thing, I adjusted, and soon I was back to doing everything as well as I ever had, while masked. When the kids went back into the schools I noticed every single day when I dropped my daughter off, that the school staff stood at the entrance to give masks to kids who arrived without one, and the kids put them on and went in, and their parents (most of them in my very red, very rural area) stood in the parking lot, unmasked, losing their ever-loving minds. Their kids were fine. They adapted. Aside from my mishap with the eggs I was fine. I adapted. Those parking-lot parents did not adapt, because they worked, so hard, to not adapt.

Luke and the Frog: An American Fairytale OR What It Feels Like to Be a Parent in America

 

Jasminne Mendez

On the Monday after Mother’s Day, 

after another mass shooting, 

I pick up my daughter from school 

and on the ride home while she munches 

on veggie chips and looks out the window, 

she tells me a modern day fairytale:

 

“Luke killed a frog today 

at the playground

during recess

the frog was small

not a baby frog

a teenage frog

because he had a medium-sized body 

not a small body

a green & blue medium-sized spotted body 

Luke stepped on it & stepped on it

until there was blood

& the teacher had to call the frog ambulance

& Luke was put on the naughty list

& I was the only one who yelled stop! 

Stop! Don’t kill it! 

but Luke wouldn’t listen

& the others joined in on the stomping

& I yelled stop! 

but no one would listen

& they stomped & stomped

& killed the frog 

& and it bled red

out of its eyes

out of its head

& it made me sad

& can we buy the frog flowers

because when someone dies they should get flowers

& Mami, what if that frog was supposed to be a prince 

but now he’s dead

& now we’ll never know”

In the USA we have a section of people, roughly half of us, who are working so hard not to adapt. I remember once hearing a story on NPR (National Public Radio, one of our national treasures) about the SCOTUS (US Supreme Court) decision to integrate schools, which happened before I was born. The program said that it was the job of SCOTUS to see ahead in time, and to make decisions based on where the world is heading, where the course is pointing, and to, often, get there first, and drag the country with it, and that is what happened when they desegregated schools. And, low and behold, most of us, and certainly the children, adapted. But a faction purposely did not adapt. They stuck it in their shoes like a boulder, not a pebble, and they reminded themselves of the rub and discomfort everyday as they invented harm it was doing to them because it wasn't actually doing any harm. They manufactured harm to feed their own grievance and discontent. And grievance is the most intractable of diseases.

I have a life-long friend whose father died fairly soon after my own. Hers died suddenly, went from being seemingly hale and hearty to dead, as did mine a year or two before. And this was at least ten years ago, but I could go for coffee with her today, and a main topic of conversation would be that her father had died, and that it wasn't fair, and that all the people, from her sister to the doctors and nurses, who were in some way a part of her father's last days, are to blame and must be made to pay (currently, note the present-tense verbs!). Of course they are not to blame. Of course her father's lifestyle and the limits of the human body are to blame, exactly the same as with my own father. But she will not adapt to that fact of life and the human condition, and she is still weighed down by her anger and depression. She will not let it go because it has become who she is. It has radically changed her life, and she nurtures the grudges and grievances like others of us would nurture a baby kitten. And her life has lost joy, movement, purpose, except for hate. And not one little minute of her efforts have re-animated her dead father. Her father adored her, and if he is in some afterlife looking down, I would expect him to feel terrible. He would have wanted her to be enjoying her life. He was the father who got them ice cream as dinner, and he would not want her to be so full of rotting pustulant hate.

But deeply held grievance cannot be cured with medicine, therapy, education, surgery. None of that will work. Then only cure is for the grievance-filled organism to die. Otherwise the host will keep it alive interminably.

In the USA those who have been on top since the beginning of the democracy experiment, white men, are having a moment. Many of them are lovely, like my husband, and Jimmy Kimmel, who cried on his show over the result of the election. Some of them are not lovely, like a recent immigrant, Elon Muskmelonhead, who immediately joined Fox News in denigrating Kimmel for his show of empathy and emotion. After a long history of always being the ones who were elected, who got the good jobs, who made the decisions unopposed in their houses, they are finding sharing, impossible. They want back what they had. They want to be excused for everything from rape to racism, and they want to talk about themselves, and they want to be told what we're doing for them. And their spouses and parents want this too. There's a whole trad-wife trend here of women who social media themselves being runway-model fabulous servants to their husbands and families.  I mean, if that's how you want to live in your house, go for it. But I want to choose something different, and in public we all have to be tolerant of our differences. But no, tolerance is now too much to ask. That grievance they have been feeding daily is not up for that. It is now aggrieved that I would dare to choose something different, just like my friend keeps trying to get me upset about my own father's death, to get me hopping mad, because my not being angry, my moving on from grief, somehow makes her feel just a teeny bit shamed, and as if she could be wrong. We're not allowed to be vegetarian if other people love meat, because that insults their meat-eating culture. They are looking for agreement on their grievance, and they are looking for praise over how they do things, and they are so fragile about it that anyone who is enjoying a different style of life is deeply distressing to them.

To The People Who Have Resisted the Urge to Push an Asian Person Into the Path of a Moving Train

 

Bao Phi

 

(We are the lines we won’t cross)

 

Who hasn’t given up their seat to a man who says

he can’t stand to sit with his back to the door.

Who hasn’t waited, preoccupied with the thoughts of escaping

this or that war, or sweatshop, or relationship,

 

(To be Asian American is to be told what you deserve)

 

by now learning that almost all stories in life end in some type of heartbreak—

exhausted, turning your back:

and in so doing, making you vulnerable

to the combustion that is human interaction.

 

(Every human being alive and dead is a cautionary tale)

 

Before this there never was a before this, 

but if you don’t know:

many years I’ve taught myself to walk between my child,

any railing they could be tossed over,

put myself between them and, say, train tracks,

knowing others see us as moving targets in a steamed jungle 

the way my parents did for me.

 

(Already so many ghosts)

 

To be an Asian body in America is to belong nowhere.

And what people cannot hold, they push.

 

What if

instead of being the opposite of a trust exercise

we were made sails

our purpose: to turn our backs 

to a wind we can’t see.

So why did their side win? Because my side had hope, and education, and empathy, and their side had blind rage. Blind rage is not going to be sustainable in the long run; it won't last on and on, which is probably why they lost last time, but it will get you through the clinch, and Harris' campaign was just about one quarter of the year, so they could hold their breath in spite that long. But anyone with any idea of what is, maybe normal is not the right word, but let's say: average, for reasonable humans has only to look for more than a few minutes at the two at the top of the ticket, and their bros, Little Tommy Tucker, Muskmelonhead, Jigglesguliani, Muckpillow, and you can see that the way they act is off. It's like they don't know how to act in public; they don't know how to be appropriate. They laugh too loud, too hard, and too forced, like they've never had a genuine laugh in their lives. They remind me of malevolent spirits occupying the bodies of the dead, because there is nothing natural or "usual" about them.

"So what? Go on, you poor American, no one wants to hear about your problems!"

I feel that. Even I don't want to hear it.

But I bring it up because possibly the one thing that can pierce the armor of grievance is art. Art catches us in our more emotional brain, and by surprise, and sometimes it helps us see the error of our ways in a way that nothing else can. And for those of us who already see the flaws, and are trying to repair them, move past them, let go of grievance, art is sometimes the energy bar we need to keep going.

Let America Be America Again

 

Langston Hughes

1901 –1967

 

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

 

(America never was America to me.)

 

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

 

(It never was America to me.)

 

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

 

(There’s never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

 

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

 

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

And finding only the same old stupid plan

Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

 

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,

Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!

Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men! Of take the pay!

Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

 

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.

I am the worker sold to the machine.

I am the Negro, servant to you all.

I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—

Hungry yet today despite the dream.

Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!

I am the man who never got ahead,

The poorest worker bartered through the years.

 

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream

In the Old World while still a serf of kings,

Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,

That even yet its mighty daring sings

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

That’s made America the land it has become.

O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas

In search of what I meant to be my home—

For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,

And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,

And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came

To build a “homeland of the free.”

 

The free?

 

Who said the free? Not me?

Surely not me? The millions on relief today?

The millions shot down when we strike?

The millions who have nothing for our pay?

For all the dreams we’ve dreamed

And all the songs we’ve sung

And all the hopes we’ve held

And all the flags we’ve hung,

The millions who have nothing for our pay—

Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

 

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

 

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—

The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,

We must take back our land again,

America!

 

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!

 

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!