Bittersweet Symphony
2004-08-25 at 2:46 p.m.
Racism of Family Conversations Past and Watch Democracy Now! if you have ever cared about anything ever
Everytime one of the things that I'm going to write about now has happened to me, I have wanted to write about it, but I have forgotten for some reason.First off, my grandma, who you may remember from the Limbaugh story. I did just want to say, that I think she's basically a good person, sincere in her beliefs, she helps many people, including myself, financially, and I think maybe she's just going senile, and I can't hold that against her. But. I can still get mad about the craziness, all the mad, mad, craziness. So I was driving home with her after I borrowed her car. I think she thought that I was still a conservative, because I was when I was, maybe, 12, the last time I talked politics with her. OK, maybe 14. So anyway she was going on and on complaining about liberals and how horrible their attacks of Bush are, and bad they are to complain about the Swiftboat Vets because turnabout is fairplay (except we attack Bush because he's a closed-minded bigot whose actions have CAUSED PEOPLE TO DIE and they are attacking Kerry for lying when all the evidence supports Kerry's version of events and in fact they have themselves contradicted their former statements), but anyway, I basically just stay hushed through this stuff, I don't want to argue with people, it's not pretty. But she just went on and on, so I said something about something I thought was not a point to be argued about (I thought people have basically become enlightened enough to abhor racism), which was that I don't like the swiftboats anyway, because the co-author of the book has labeled my son a "raghead." She said, "When did he call your son a raghead?" I said, "He said Arabs were ragheads, and my son is Arab." She said, "Your son is not an Arab." I said, "Oh yes he is, he's half-Arab, and I will never let anyone make him ashamed of that." Then she went on to say that attacking him for making racist statements is just as bad as making racist statements, "He's attacking them, and you're attacking him. It's the same thing, isn't it?" When someone says something like that, that's when you know they're fucking certifiable and the conversation will get you nowhere. But, I don't see her very often, and will try to stick up for my plan for our conversations, which is that we not discuss politics and especially the Middle East and it's peoples.
But I do see my mom quite often, so there are naturally more occassions for the mad, mad craziness. She was looking at my son one day, and she said, "His skin is very fair. No one will even know he's an Arab." How lucky for him.
Once I was talking about this guy who I happened to mention was a Turkish immigrant. She gasped, "Oh my God, Turks are even worse than Arabs." What do I say to that? First off, about Arabs, do I say "No no you are wrong because you actually don't know any Arabs in real life and I do"? If she would be swayed by that, she would have already known that it was a disgusting thing to say to a person who actually loves some Arabs who have become a part of her family. And then, about Turks. Apparently they have a reputation of having some fierce fighting units, they invaded Crete not too many years ago, and they used to control the whole middle east, but my personal knowledge of them is that they're very nice and extremely forward-thinking in some circumstances. There were a bunch of young guys who worked at the airport who started playing with Aidan and taking them around on their cart while we were waiting there, which really helped me because it was very difficult for me to do what I was doing and watch him (although they didn't take him very far from me and not out of sight), and then on the plane, two young Turks were sitting in front of me, and I know they were going to the US for officer training because I spied on them (!), and they were, like, nicer than butter. Abnormally, abnormally, nice. And I remember this documentary about children in prisons all over the world, and the horrible things supposedly advanced countries do to their child offenders (if you can use the word "offender," we're talking all non-violent children were featured in the movie), and how locking them up makes them feel that they are worthless and they have very high recidivism rates and continue being cycled through prisons into adulthood, but that one country that has a really smart program was Turkey. They put children and teenagers like that in a facility that seems more like a school than a prison. The "guards" are not armed, and don't hold their authority over them like they would in say, the US, GB, and Russia. They go out for plays and stuff like that, and when they reach a certain age, they start helping them to get job-training and work, and they have very low recidivism rates. It was some monstrously different number.
And then today, I was showing her Democracy Now's broadcast (which I'll talk about later), and they had an interview with the father of Nicholas Berg who was beheaded in Iraq, and they showed pictures of him with some Arabs and war protesters, and my mom said, "He's taking pictures with the enemy!" And I blew up. "So if my husband goes to an anti-war protest, he's 'the enemy?'" And I don't remember what she said, but I informed her that some people I knew in Lebanon had expressed sympathy with Nick Berg and that my husband had been horrified and had said to me on the phone (I was in Lebanon when it happened) how sad he thought it was, "He didn't do anything." "Oh," she said.
Later in the day, she told me about how my husband doesn't want to take advice from her (oh, really, I wonder why?), and my step-dad told her it was because he didn't want to hear the opinion of a woman. I was like, Huh, it's interesting then that the young Arab men I met in Lebanon were so interested in my opinion about the Abu Ghraib thing. And, in fact, many men were interested in my political opinions. My 14-year old cousin said, "Are you for Bush or Kerry?" What else can I say except that my husband is in no way sexist? "So Gregg is wrong then?" (She thinks his opinion is somehow magical in my mind, but it is not, however I agree with him and have a similiar approach to things, usually, although we do not come out with the same opinions always). "Yes, Gregg is wrong." I mean, I will never say that women are not treated differently in many respects in Lebanon, which is the only country I can speak to. But it is just NOT as bad as some my mother has it in her mind. I mean, she's surprised to know female children are valued. I'm like, what are talking about? They're proably valued more. My husband wanted a girl, and his family can't wait for us to have a girl because they have all boys.
She just assumes she knows so very much. I just want to show her the reality, and I try to do that in an unbiased way. I want to show her the video I took when I was there, so she can see how very much they are JUST LIKE REAL PEOPLE. But I'm afraid she'll nitpick. Oh well, I'm going to try to set it up today.
Also, I want to make it known that I think the BEST channel on TV is Link TV. Not only do they do a really cool thing where they show a half-hour of newscasts from the Middle East translated into English, but they also broadcast Democracy Now!, which does an hour news broadcast everyday, of the most mindblowing news and interviews you will ever see. If you watch a whole hour of it, which you can from their website, and you care about anything in the entire world, you will never not want to watch it again. Yesterday they did the interview with Michael Berg I was talking about earlier. He basically said that he blames Bush, Rumsfield, and the US military officials who illegally detained his son for his son's death. He said Bush and Rumsfield have adopted the attitude that they can do whatever they want, and it has passed down through the ranks and caused Abu Ghraib (which I agree with because I saw it in the way we were treated at the INS), and that they detained his son from leaving Iraq and while he was being detained, Abu Ghraib came out, and the burnings and besiegement of Fallujah happened. Also, he says the people who killed his son weren't in Iraq before the US invaded it. It was really interesting, especially about his treatment by the mainstream media, who broke their promises to him so he stopped doing interviews. On the same show there was a lawyer talking about a civil rights suit in California where people arrested for all sorts of minor offenses, including protesting, where strip searched and videotaped for years, even though it is illegal for strip searches in county jails. There would be a group of men and women, and they would be separated and the women searched, (and video-taped), and in San Francisco they were forced to sign a consent, and if they didn't cooperate their clothes would be forcibly removed and those people would then have to sit naked in a small room for 12 to 24 hours as a sort of punishment for not agreeing to being illegally searched. So Abu Ghraib is just an extension of this sort of humiliation and nudity as punishment thing that happens here in the US. Then there were protest organizers talking about the methods of supressing protesting, including an audio weapon that shatters ear-drums, and that was really interesting too. Today they talked about atrocities during Vietnam.
I've never understood why some people don't care. I mean, I guess there's hopelessness. I understand that. But care, dammit! Anyway, Link is channel 275 on Directv where I am, and you can watch it on the internet too.
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