Category: racism

Us vs. Them is Tearing Me Apart

Last weekend I finally told my husband what I’ve been afraid to tell anybody, but since it’s Suicide Prevention Month, I decided to be honest.

I don’t want to be here anymore.

I’m actually feeling much better now, that I put it out there to another human being and not just keeping it in my head and it was much worse back in July when I wrote the blog titled, “Broken Nation, Broken Me.” Back then it was so bad that I thought everyday what life would be like for those I left behind, now it’s maybe once every couple of weeks.

I don’t have a plan, I’m actually scared of the thought of going through with it, and I would never willingly leave my children without a mother, but somedays it is extremely difficult to get out of bed and do all the things required of living.

Now, with that out of the way, let me explain why.

I’m hypersensitive. Many people don’t know that about me because I learned at a young age that showing emotion caused me to be called weak. If I cried over something my dad would ask, “Do you want me to give you something to cry about?” usually reaching for the stick he used to beat us with. The “stick” was a piece of wooden baseboard about 3 feet long that he kept on top of the refrigerator. I learned rather quickly to not show when I was upset by something and just bury my emotions.

That was probably the beginning of my anxiety and depression issues, but that’s not what this post is about.

Every four years our nation goes through a presidential election cycle and of course people choose sides. I was raised by my mom in an uber-conservative Christian church, part of the “Moral Majority” led by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jim Baker. While my mom was a registered Democrat because of John F. Kennedy, she completely agreed with everything the Moral Majority preached and pretty much always voted Republican as far as I knew. She and my Grandma loved Ronald Reagan and everything he stood for and voted for George Bush when he ran because he would follow in Reagan’s footsteps.

I say all that to say that I was raised in a religion that attempted to teach me that if I was a true Christian I would always vote Republican because they were the party that supported life. The Democrats were the evil ones who supported killing babies. I was even taught that some Christians weren’t Christian enough if they were Democrats, because Democrats were so evil.

So every four years, I see our nation divided between those who vote Republican and those who vote Democrat, however this year seems to be the absolute worst!

If someone criticizes anything that the Republicans or Trump has said or done they are automatically labelled a “libtard,” a “sheep,” a “bleeding heart liberal” or many other not so nice names. If a person criticizes Biden or the Democrats they are “haters,” “Trumpkins, ” or “racists.”

In my lifetime, I have never seen our country so divided. I teach history, so I know that it has been this divided in the past, I mean we had a Civil War, talk about division! However, I wasn’t alive for that, so it didn’t affect my mental health.

The election isn’t the only thing people are divided on. People are divided on race issues, whether or not there is systemic racism in this country (there is).

Whether or not we should wear masks.

Whether or not hair and nail salons should be open as well as other businesses.

Whether or not COVID-19 is real.

Whether or not schools should open and if teachers are actually working when they do virtual school. (This one really hurts me mentally and emotionally because I am working my behind off to be there for my students and teach them and answer their questions any time of the night or day. I mean, I am getting emails from them at midnight and one o’clock in the morning sometimes.)

All this division is wreaking havoc on my mental health as well as on our nation.

On June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln quoted Matthew 12:25 in his “House Divided” speech when he said that, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Matthew 12:25 actually says that, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.” New King James Version.

This amazing, great nation that we call the United States of America is not very united right now. It is extraordinarily divided right now.

This division is breaking me. I speak about something and I’m attacked by one side or the other. Just seeing the division is disheartening and making me not want to be a part of this life.

When I have spoken how disheartening this is for me, I hear amazing platitudes like, “God is in control.” or “Give it to God.” or, “It’s just the devil trying to get you down, you need to rebuke him.”

I’m tired of Christian platitudes.

I want to see Christians begin to live by the example that Jesus taught. To love your neighbor as yourself. When they asked who was our neighbor, Jesus told the story of the good Samaritan where a priest saw a person who needed help and he walked by on the other side of the road, then a Levite saw the man and he also walked by on the other side of the road. When the Samaritan saw the man who needed help (Samaritans were looked down on by Jews in that time) he helped the man, took him to an inn and paid to have the innkeeper look after him. (Paraphrased from Luke 10:25-37)

Instead of Us vs. Them how about we begin to look at it as we. We need to get along. We need to survive this life. We need to help each other. We need to understand and support one another. We don’t always have to agree with everyone in order to love them.

Love is a choice and it seems the United States of America have become the Divided States of Hate and my mental health is deteriorating in this nation as well as the mental health of many of my fellow Americans.

Instead of demonizing “them,” maybe we can begin to work to understand where they are coming from.

Instead of demonizing “them,” maybe we can listen to what they have to say instead of what “Us” says “they” want, believe, are going to do etc.

I find myself retreating further and further into my shell to get away from the division in this country, in this state and in my city. There are still days I don’t want this life.

Let Me Say It Louder For The People In The Back

I LOVE this country! My favorite place to visit is Washington D.C., I have been there more times than I like to admit (about 18 times, 3 times last year alone.) Other people go to Disneyland over and over, I prefer to walk among the buildings and monuments that tell the story of our nations’s 200+ year history. I especially love to take other people and share it with them. (Hit me up if you ever want to go when this pandemic is over, I can’t wait to get back there.

I love DC so much that one of my retirement goals is to be a tour guide at the Nation’s Capitol for at least one season before finding a beach to relax on for the rest of my life.

I LOVE the United States so much that I became a U.S. history teacher to instill just a tiny bit of the knowledge of our past into our future generations and maybe a few of them will begin to truly LOVE our country too and want to pass on the knowledge of our past.

I say all that because many people believe that it’s impossible to LOVE this country while at the same time acknowledge that we aren’t as perfect or exceptional as we’d like to believe we are. It’s one of the divisions I wrote about in my last post in July. It’s part of why I haven’t written since then. The division seems to have grown and I’m still struggling with that.

Instead of working to make this a better place for everyone, it seems like a very loud group of people are trying to say that everybody is already treated equally and we should all just be happy with it. That same group of people are also “helping” police keep cities safe from Black Lives Matter protests by showing up with guns when according to a report by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project released on September 3, 2020 has said that 93% of the protests that have taken place this summer have been peaceful and non-violent.

In fact, as I write this, there is a planned Black Lives Matter protest happening in my lovable, livable town and a possibly armed group there to “defend” our town against them, even though the chief of police has been letting people know all week that the police don’t need civilian “help.” They don’t want what happened in Kenosha to happen here.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston wrote the Declaration of Independence, the most famous break up letter ever. In it, they wrote that “…all men are created equal…,” but they didn’t all believe that when they wrote it and many Americans still don’t believe it today.

If they truly believed that ALL men were created equal, then why at first did they not want to include enslaved people in population counts? Then when they settled that question, why did they decide to only count them as 3/5 of a person?

Once slavery ceased to exist at the end of the Civil War, yes we had to fight a deadly, costly war to finally end the peculiar institution in this nation, many states passed laws that became known as Jim Crow laws to keep African Americans in a second class status. People in power in those states, cities and counties, still didn’t believe that ALL men were created equal.

In other places around the country banks instituted redlining, where they wouldn’t approve loans for houses in certain areas, usually areas of town where people of color lived.

There is a whole lot, I won’t bore you with about how all of that led to institutionalized or systemic racism, which is defined by McGraw Hill in Sociology and You as the type of discrimination that results from unfair practices that are part of the structure of society and that have grown out of traditional, accepted behaviors. That leads to discrimination in education, employment, the criminal justice system and many other public arenas.

The United States government continued to prove that they did not believe that ALL men were created equal when they passed the Chinese Immigration Act in 1882 and continued to renew it until 1945, and again when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that resulted in the Internment of 122,000 Americans of Japanese descent, with about 70,000 of them being Nisei, a person born in America of Japanese parents (ourdocuments.gov). It wasn’t until 1988 that the Senate voted on a bill to apologize to the internees and offer them reparations for their time in the internment camps. The last camp closed in 1946 (New York Times).

Many cities had laws that restricted Blacks and Hispanics from buying homes as late as the 1970s and 1980s (https://www.kqed.org/news/11727455/black-farmworkers-in-the-central-valley-escaping-jim-crow-for-a-subtler-kind-of-racism). Many police departments still pull over people of color far more often than whites. (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/the-stop-race-police-traffic/)

I’ve been in teacher mode for this blog far too long and it’s time to end. If you’ve read this far, THANK YOU!!!!!!

I LOVE this country, but we have a problem with treating ALL men AND women equally. We can do better, we have to do better because Black lives matter as do Hispanic lives and Asian lives and the lives of every marginalized person in this country.

If you’d like to learn more, here are a few videos. There is also an incredible documentary on Netflix called 13th.