I generally avoid talking about politics as much as possible. I have my own views, as we all do, and just like our outlooks on life, is based off of our own experiences. Our views of our world will only change when our personal daily experiences change: no amount of yelling, screaming, fights during Thanksgiving, videos from World Star, Facebook live vids will change that, because, despite the multiple evidence, if it’s not affecting people directly, not in their daily experiences, it doesn’t exist in their life, nor does it matter in their life. It’s sad, but it’s the truth.
What we, in the US, are now seeing in our politics is a new phenomenon to us, concentrated by decades of built-up resentment overflowing to where we are right now, yet this is not new to other countries, nor in our history. Less than ten years ago the debate was about the level of police brutality over African Americans, now it’s the inhumane treatment of Mexicans at ICE detention centers. After this weekend’s two mass shootings in Ohio and Texas, it breaks my heart to see how all of us, and I do mean ALL OF US have become the unwilling pawns to other people’s hate, which many have been given the authority to feel by our present administration; I’m pointing the finger at both sides of the aisle.
Right now the flavor of the moment is Mexicans, Trump, and the Republicans, with no quarter given to each. You have one side pointing fingers at Mexicans needing to be deported back to Mexico, needlessly being labeled as criminals, with their only crime being their expired visas, and the others where local level young politicians riding the wave of media popularity are blasting the conservatives for their biases. Both sides have successfully, with the help of social and mass media, made people forget that none of these folks are actually doing what they are being paid for.
It is a politician’s job to represent their district. It’s to be an advocate for the direct needs of the people they represent to larger government, for all manners of support. It’s to fight for their causes, know their concerns, and help manage the needs of your constituents, no matter your personal feelings about who or what they are. If I’m in Florida, I should not know the name of the local representative of a town in Montana nor should I know if they are a Trump supporter or not nor should I care. If they are doing their job right, the only news they should be in is the local one where they’re supporting a school district supply drive, or helping raise the state income tax for their constituents, or finding a way to lower the homelessness rate by creating more well paying jobs for those living in their district. If I hear anything about their “opinions” of one party versus another, one group’s race/gender/religion, then you are taking too much time focusing on your own opinions rather than servicing the citizens that voted you into office. Nobody should know if you have any bias for one group or another. The only thing anybody should know is that you represent all you have been charged to oversee and you do so with respect, dignity, humility and grace.
I don’t like how personal opinions/biases of politicians, reporters, athletes, and entertainers have become the approving nod to allow followers to transfer their frustration on others. I can liter the internet with the names of all those who’ve tragically lost their lives over some misdirected anger that was posed over them for reasons that they had nothing to do with, but it’s already all over the internet, being drowned out by all the other noise out there so we can all conveniently forget. None of us who are in power, have the right to impose our feelings for one group over another, because if those actions lead to someone’s death: intentional, unintentional, or accidental, then those lost lives are on our head. We have no one to point the finger because we lit the fuse. You have the right to your opinion, and you have the right to assist those causes you personally believe in, but I ask this for the sake of us all: none of us should know which groups you hate.
By directing any form of attention to that which you hate, you give it power and a voice. You do not weaken it, you make it stronger. You don’t speak of it’s name, like Voldemort, because you’re afraid of it, you don’t speak of it because they don’t have sway over your life and there are more important people and things to think about. If you don’t like Trump, why in God’s name are you posting about him every damn day? You might as well be part of his cheering section because you’re not openingly supporting who you feel is the best candidate to take him down. You’re not telling the world why your chosen candidate is someone they should considering voting for during the next election because you’re too busy giving free press to the one thing you hate. If you weren’t aware, internet search results populate based on how frequently something is the topic of discussion, so based on your public aggravation, you are unintentionally promoting that which you hate. STOP IT! If you don’t like something, discuss it privately among your friends, but stop putting it out there for every Tom, Dick, or Harry to read.
…and the news. I’ve completely stopped watching it because I know that their intentions have been driven away from what they were charged to do: be an impartial information source. Now they’ve become the attention magnets, looking to gravitate more eyeballs to their sites. News outlets get paid based on advertising dollars, which are measured by how many people view their content. The more frequently someone goes to read/watch/listen to their pieces, the more ad revenue they generate. News outlet will now curate what is in their news cycle based on what they believe more viewers will want to read and share. Humans will gravitate toward information that reaffirm their internal belief, whether true or false. If it mirrors their own internal diatribe, they will read it, bask in it, and share it among more like-minded folks. The same is true with articles that read the opposite. We know that people, if against everything it stands for, will share it with their like-minded peers and criticize it into pieces. Why do you believe Tomi Lahren was hired to Fox News? It wasn’t because of her even keeled temperament or her insightful in-depth political commentary. Her comments either vehemently offended people or spoke out loud what those she related to feel internally, but would not voice outwardly. People either love her or hate her, but regardless of which, shared her content, making her go viral. That’s how she got her job.
Each news outlet will slant their opinion based on what they believe will garner them a larger audience, with some groups intentionally looking to provide a counterpoint to what’s popular, looking to incite anger. There’s not really an unbiased news outlet anymore, as more and more reporters are no longer taught the difference between fact and opinion, only where you should look for work: Fox News or The Atlantic.
Humans relate to their world based on their own experiences. Too often, folks fail to learn from history the lessons that had been hard fought by their predecessors, choosing to act more like the hormonal teen screaming to the world “You don’t understand what I’m going through…” like they would their parents, as those wiser prepare to drop some truth bombs, so I say “Hold my beer..”
Although the plight of African Americans and women (of all ethnicities) are still well publicized, particularly in present day media, the targeting of other cultures in history have all been forgotten. Here’s a reminder that unlearned lessons from history do repeat themselves.
1830– Indian Removal Act that authorized the negotiation with southern Native American tribes for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi, making them leave their fertile lands, to be distributed to the “American” settlers, while the Indians were sent regulated to untamed western territory. The continued integration of many native american tribes, whether be through language or religion, to blend in better with the new American settlers have all but erased many tribes language and religious history, with few people currently racing against to clock to learn and document whatever they can before they lose the last vestiges of history forever.
1844 – The Bible Riots targeted the Irish Catholics immigrants in Philadelphia, destroying homes and churches in the region. Targeted for not only their heritage, but of their religion, the country’s established Protestant population (which originally left England due to the papacy) wanted to ensure their religious freedoms by stamping out the newly immigrant population’s own right to religious freedom. Earlier in that century, Anti-Irish/Catholic sentiment swept the country, with newspapers, signs, and ads saying “No Irish need apply” shunning the new settlers coming to escape poverty, pestilence, and famine, this while attempting to politically shut out the Irish Catholics from political power in major cities across the country.
1882 – The Chinese Exclusion Act signed into US Federal law, prohibited the immigration of all Chinese laborers. This was following the Chinese Massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles when a mob burned and pillaged the Chinatown, killing more than 28 Chinese people. The Act eventually expanded it’s list of “undesirables” to include Middle Easterners, Hindus, East Indians, and the Japanese until the repeal 61 years later in 1943.
1891 – Mass lynching of Italian Americans spurred by a March 14th, 1891 article from the NY Times and other local papers, incited crowds in New Orleans to commit “mob justice” in the hanging and mutilation of innocent Italian men. The violence ensued throughout the country as innocent Italian American immigrants became victims of angry mobs looking to dispense their form of vigilante justice. The marginalization and harassment of Italian Americans heightened again during WWII. Italian immigrants would later be again targeted, this time by the government during the Emergency Quota Act of 1921.
1921 – The Emergency Quota Act, which later became the “National Origins Act” in 1924 restricting the influx of Jews, Italians, and other groups listed as “undesirable” from entering into the US. This heightened antisemitism after WWI, as Jews in the US were socially ostracized from joining local clubs, refused the purchase of homes, and refused college admissions. Nazism grew in the US, with local hate groups forming all over the country, with one rally in particular, held at Madison Square Garden in NY, drawing a crowd of 20,000 supporters, however the majority of the reported hate crimes against Jews in the US wouldn’t be largely publicized until 1958.
1929 – Mexican repatriation deported 1.8 million people to Mexico in unconstitutional raids. The act was a desperate attempt of the Hoover administration to mitigate the oncoming economic crash of The Great Depression. The administration believed that the only way they were going to create new jobs was to forcibly remove Mexicans from their positions, opening the opportunity to other Americans. The criteria that they used was based on their name: if their names sounded remotely Mexican, the people were immediately arrested, then deported. 60% of those who were unjustly deported were United States citizens, born in America, but were of Mexican heritage, and had never been south of the border. Even hospitalized Mexicans were put onto stretchers, driven to Mexico, and left at the border. This continued for seven years and officially stopped during WWII, when laborers were necessary to fulfill the increasing demand left by those who went off to war.
1942 – Executive Order 9066 lead to the mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during WWII. Although already incarcerating Japanese Americans 48 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor (12/7/1941), the order wasn’t officially signed until February 19th, 1942. Once the orders came, military were given orders to root out Japanese American residents living in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, with their US born children. These immigrants, who were refused citizenship due to the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907, an offshoot of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, were legal aliens, but due to public sentiment after the attack on Pearl Harbor, were forced to leave their homes, farms, shops, and fishing boats, transported to “assembly centers” for several months before being shipped over to one of ten “relocation centers” in the South. The places resembled concentration camps with armed guards and barbed wire fencing. After the incarceration ended 2-3 years later, many found their properties seized for non-payment of taxes, or appropriated, and were forced to start over from scratch.
1953 – Executive Order 10450 was signed by Eisenhower, using the excuse of re-enforcing security standards within those employed by the government, barred homosexuals from working for the Fed. An offshoot of the Red Scare, order 10450 titled the Lavender Scare, saw five thousand gays fired from their government jobs, including private contractors and military personnel. US Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), would falsely label gays as treasonous subversive communists during the height of the McCarthy era, where aggressive public investigations and hearings were conducted before government, committees, and agencies of those who were under suspicion of being communists or communist sympathizers. Outside of government workers, those under suspicion included entertainers, academics, public figures, and labor union activists, and the mere suspicion was enough to end careers, get victims blacklisted, or culminated in false imprisonment. Although the actions of these witch hunts were deemed unconstitutional, public sentiment would ruin the lives of any accused, even those found innocent.
Many of those who survived past these travesties are no longer with us and although we can potentially blame the passage of time for this Groundhog Day effect, here are some more recent reminders that political/media public sentiment that had wrongfully caused the ostracizing and/or death of innocent people.
June 1982 – Vincent Chin was murdered by two Chrysler plant workers who were recently laid-off, blamed Chin thinking he was Japanese for their unemployment. Chin, who was Chinese, was having his bachelor party with his friends when both men attacked him, allegedly spouting out racial slurs, while repeatedly hitting him with a baseball bat. Chin was brought to the hospital brain dead and died four days later. The two men were convicted of manslaughter, but only sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay a $3,000 fine. Neither spent a day in jail.
After 9/11 – Sikh men (who also don turbans and keep long beards, as do Muslims as part of their religious practices) have continued to be victims of hate crimes by groups who confuse their looks as Muslim. Anti-Muslim hate crimes as of 2016 rose to 67%, which hadn’t been seen since post 9/11, says CNN. Back in 2017, a video went viral after a Canadian Sikh politician was seen publicly harassed by a woman who thought he was Muslim. This is not uncommon as many Sikhs are still mistaken as Muslim and are still being harassed.
Summer 2017 – Two members of a militia bombed a Minneapolis mosque and attempted to bomb a women’s health clinic in Illinois. They said their intention to pipe bomb the mosque was to stop them from imposing their beliefs on others.
2018 – Vietnamese war refugees that were officially given asylum and were here before the 1995 cut off date are now being targeted for deportation by the Trump administration. This flies against the 2008 US/Vietnam agreement that allowed those Vietnamese citizen to stay. Those that are included on this list are those who are persecuted in Vietnam for their Christian religion.
In the examples above, groups were either irrationally targeted by the administration or by mass media. The bigotry and biases of either groups spiraled on to the masses and either culminated in death or extrication of the large groups, all in the favor of either preserving citizen’s current way of life or the outright theft of someone else’s property.
When you see one group of people get targeted by an administration or by the press, be willing to scratch the surface, rather than take everything at face value. As with 9/11 when Saddam Hussein was initially blamed by the Bush Jr. administration for the terrorist attacks, rather than the true culprit: Osama Bin Laden and ISIS, very few people in both government and the press seemed to want to ask “why” at the time. Was it to establish the US again as a major military power? Was Hussein used as the scapegoat to divert attention from Osama Bin Laden’s family, since they had extensive financial ties to the Bush family? Was it to finish what Bush Sr. administration had started? Who knows. All we do know is that millions were spent needlessly, many fine military personnel lost their lives during the conflict, and there were no weapons of mass destruction found (when the public was given this excuse as their red herring): none of the responses truly involve the protection of our country or our way of life.
If you’re in politics or a reporter in mass media, I ask this with all sincerity – don’t show your personal biases in your work or in public. Please do your job to either fairly inform the population with both sides of the argument or support your constituents that have placed enough of their trust in you to vote you into office. For every life that is lost because of your misplaced displays of anger or mistrust, is now, and forever will be, on your head.