It’s OK to Admit We’re Flawed
Reflections on what the Fourth of July means in a turbulent time, as well as what it means to me personally
Welcome to Moronitude! This time around we’re going to be talking about the nation’s birthday.
Editor: You know that the Fourth of July was yesterday, making this post late, as always.
Listen, I’ve never once sent my parents a birthday card that arrived in time, and I love them a hell of a lot more than I do America, so the nation should be lucky that I’m even mentioning their special day. Plus, America is old as hell, they’re not going to even remember that I said anything at all. Moving on…
The Fourth of July is a really loaded day for me personally. While America may have turned 247, the day also marked the fifth anniversary of my mom’s death. Let me tell you, it’s really fun to be going through inner grief during a week when strangers repeatedly say “Happy Fourth!” at every minor interaction. It takes everything in me to not sneer a “Fuck you” at them, but of course I hold it in because the man selling me lotion and TP has no goddamn idea what’s going on inside my heart. But it adds a little twist of the knife to a difficult time of year for me, and that says nothing of the turmoil in my heart concerning the actual holiday, which is what we’re going to dive into first.
One of the running themes I explore at Moronitude is the selective historical amnesia a certain segment of the country endorses. These folks want to remove all of the conflict from our national history for two reasons: so there is no residual guilt about atrocities committed by the United States and to keep oppressed peoples in line whenever they “act up” while fighting for their rights.
We got into this a bunch last time around while discussing Ron DeSantis’ idiocy, but the past month has brought another avalanche of ignorance, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent actions. As the court struck effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, the right immediately started quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a way to justify the actions of those six unelected wingnuts hellbent on destroying this nation.
There’s something incredibly trolling about bringing up this quote out of context constantly—those who do it definitely know that—and it is a complete disservice to what Dr. King actually believed. Yes, he did have a dream that one day his children will no longer be judged by the color of their skin, but he also was very aware that we were a long way from getting there. Proclaiming that this is what Dr. King would have wanted is beyond disingenuous, it’s an attempt to use the words of an exalted leader as a weapon to convince people to believe the Civil Rights movement is over. But earlier in the speech he says the following:
“There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.
We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.
We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.
No, no we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
You don’t need a history degree to know that we haven’t come close to meeting the standard that Dr. King is calling for before his dream can be realized. Much like when people proclaimed Obama’s election as proof that racism was over, now is not the time to pull back on affirmative action programs. We can’t have a colorblind approach to education until we eradicate all of the imbalances that exist throughout the educational system. It’s not an oversight that many Black and Hispanic children have fewer opportunities from the moment they step into school—it’s intentionally baked into an educational system that receives most of its funding from property taxes. Affirmative action within college admissions is an attempt to right this wrong by admitting brilliant students who haven’t had the opportunity to pad their resumes with copious extracurriculars or AP classes, not because they didn’t want to do participate, but because they had to work to get by and their schools simply didn’t have the resources for those classes.
More importantly, the Supreme Court ruling didn’t eliminate affirmative action, it eliminated it based on race. Which means that certain prospective students including veterans on the GI Bill and legacy admissions would still be allowed preferential treatment when it comes to admissions. In other words, the George W Bushes of the world will still be able to get into Yale despite being staggeringly stupid. Put even more bluntly, the elite will still be able to keep their foot on the throat of those who hope to claw out a better life for themselves. A study performed in 2019 showed that not only are the majority of “legacies” admitted to Harvard white, but that 75% of those white students would have gotten rejected if they hadn’t been born lucky. But sure, go on and tell me more about the Supreme Court righted a major wrong….
The historian Kevin Kruse was as appalled as I was by right wingers trying to justify this ruling using Dr. King’s words, so he went and pulled up some quotes about how the civil rights leader actually felt about affirmative action. In his 1964 book “Why We Can’t Wait” he had this to say:
“Whenever the issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.”
And in his final book released in 1968, Dr. King summed his thoughts up in soundbite just as quotable as his famous dream, but I’m guessing you’ll immediately recognize why we don’t hear this one quoted by the Dinesh D’Souzas of the world:
“A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”
Musical Interlude
It’s a lot of words today, so here’s a song by Dillinger Four. I saw them this weekend in Chicago and it was the frickin’ best. Enjoy.
You’re Protesting Wrong
Continuing on the same theme, I want to present the following tweet by Ana Kasparian, a political commentator at The Young Turks who is supposedly on the left.
For starters, don’t believe for a second that she actually believes this. The civil rights movement was filled with violence—whether that be by the police state acting upon non-violent protestors or by organizations like the Black Panthers and Malcolm X calling for using “any means necessary” to obtain equal rights. Every struggle for rights and equality in the United States has involved some form of violence.
On our nation’s birthday, how can we forget that we were founded by a citizenry who couldn’t stomach paying taxes, so they lashed out with violence destroying property (The Tea Party)? Slavery was finally ended by horrific bloodletting over the course of five years. We have 40 hour work weeks and weekends thanks to a labor movement that was consistently put down with brutal violence by the richest families in America but persevered anyway. The women’s suffrage movement gained momentum after The Night of Terror—the brutal beating of 33 women who had been arrested for picketing outside the White House. The gay rights movement started with the Stonewall Uprising, a riot against the New York Police Department after years of discrimination and brutalizing. Calling these movements a fight isn’t a metaphor, it’s the reality.
When someone like Ana Kasparian tweets nonsense about there not being any violence in the civil rights movement, she’s not trying to tell the truth. She’s trying to whitewash our history into one with no flaws or ugly moments when people were oppressed for so long that lashing out with violence becomes the only way to be heard. And in doing so she’s saying to the trans community that all of the actions they take to fight for their rights are moot because they aren’t doing it correctly. They aren’t following the rules of decorum put in place by the oppressors, so their actions are immediately invalid.
To pretend that every single oppressed group waited in line until their benevolent masters in power granted those rights to them is a complete disservice to the history of this nation. Uprising is our history, not a flaw we need to paper over. How am I supposed to be proud of George Washington’s fight against oppression if I can’t also be proud of those who gave their lives in the civil rights movement? How can I justify a bunch of people dressing up and throwing millions of dollars worth of tea into Boston Harbor while casting shame on those who screamed “enough” at the NYPD at Stonewall?
In my eyes, there’s no difference between all these actions. It’s just brave people who have been pushed too far fighting against an oppressor. It’s flipping the finger to the tyrants in power, and to me, the most American thing imaginable. If there’s a sliver of patriotism left in my soul, its roots are found in this inherent desire to fight for our rights against a powerful foe, no matter the odds.
My Fourth of July with My Mom
Grieving is weird.
Anybody who has lost someone understands what I’m saying here. Grief is both universal and entirely personal. None of us go through the same process, none of us have the same experience, and yet, we can all relate.
Mine always hits me in waves. Some days I feel like my mom died yesterday, other times it feels like it’s been decades. Often thinking of her brings me joy and makes me giggle, other times it makes me want to scream. Most often I just quietly tear up and spend a minute in reflection and move on. That’s the system that works best for me, but it’s harder to do certain times of the year, like on the anniversary of her death.
This year I was able to do something that let me really bask in her energy by visiting the Lincoln Park Zoo. My wife, Kim, and I were in Chicago to see the Hold Steady and Dillinger Four (two of our very favorite bands), so we started brainstorming some ideas as to how we could spend the hours before our flight honoring my mom. And while still trying to figure it out a lightning bolt struck—let’s just go to her favorite place in the city.
When my parents lived in Chicago back in the 1970s, my mom worked as a docent at the zoo. The bulk of her duties lay within the reptile house and she absolutely adored it. I think there was something about changing people’s minds and dispelling their fears of snakes that appealed to her. Thinking of her standing outside with a boa constrictor around her neck, introducing it to children, fills me with so much joy.
As we wandered the zoo I couldn’t think about all of the stories she’d tell of her time there. The time the penguins froze to the rocks because Chicago is colder than Antarctica, the gorillas who loved smoking cigarettes (it was a different time!) and her grievances against those she felt misallocated the zoo’s resources.
I was a little worried that I’d be overcome with grief as my mind filled with so many memories, but it was the opposite. It felt right. It felt like the only place I should be on the anniversary of her passing. And, perhaps most importantly, it was fun! My mom brought me to zoos not just to share her love of animals with me, but also to have fun. It’s a simple little thing, but it’s an incredibly important thing.
After my mom passed the fun got zapped out of so many things I previously loved. For example, I couldn’t read for fun because the hobby was so intertwined with our entire relationship. I’d go into a bookstore and have a panic attack because of what bookstores represented to me. But going to the zoo is different. We went to the Jacksonville Zoo days after she died as a way to distract ourselves from all the funeral arrangements and grief, and for a couple of hours everything dropped away while I watched lemurs chase each other around and giraffes stick out their black tongues. The same was true yesterday as Kim and I wandered the zoo—it was fun.
There was only one moment where I thought I would lose it completely. We were in the reptile house—a part of the zoo I unconsciously saved for the last place we’d visit—when a docent came up to me while I was straining my eyes trying to find the gecko hiding in the darkness of its enclosure. After a moment of searching alongside me, she gently pointed to a branch towards the top of the cage.
“There he is,” she said with a hint of an Australian accent. “He’s a beautiful gecko, isn’t he?”
“Yes he is,” I said as my eyes began to become shrink-wrapped in tears.
The Fourth of July is never going to be an easy day for me, but moments like this heal me in ways I could never even hope to explain. For the briefest of seconds it felt like she was right there next to me…
Despite all the psychic weight the day carries, yesterday was likely the best Fourth of July I’ve ever had. Grief sucks, that’s indisputable, but I can’t let it keep me down. I can mold it into something of my own, and turn the moments of wallowing in sadness into moments where I’m lost in the joy of previous experiences. It’s all a process and I’m pretty sure I haven’t always done things right, but five years in, I’m starting to figure things out, and that’s a win in my book.
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