What Have We Done?

I am old enough to have lived through the civil rights movement, the demonstrations over the Vietnam War in Berkeley (I attended a few), the flower child movement and consequently, the rejection of the status quo.  That makes me old, I know.

I am old enough to have welcomed the first black students to attend our very white, rich and affluent school.

I am also old enough to have lived through the Watts Riot, the Rodney King Riots and so many, many more.

Today my heart breaks, not just for the injustice of a black man losing his life through bad policing (more will be known as time goes on, hopefully), but for our country, for our youth, for the generations after me.  For the innocent babies that will be forevermore taught hate.
Today, we have had several days of rioting that have decimated thriving communities; our symbols of freedom and hard work have been destroyed.  Our souls are being ripped out.  Rioters will tell you this is all well and good.  I have heard them say, who cares about property or possessions when lives are lost.  I wonder what they are talking about when the riots themselves have caused lost lives. And how do we measure this pain?  They say we are not to measure in buildings or possessions or the ability to put food on the table through one’s business.  Or to have a store nearby where they can shop. We must think about black people and the pain they have when they are discriminated against.  And yet the pain I see on the faces of these very people they are so virtuously ramming that 2x4 through shop windows for - breaks my heart.  For the life of me, I cannot understand this line of reasoning.

Of course, I’m told, I’m just a dying breed and I just don’t get it.  I must be like the gentleman in Portland who tried to carry an American flag through the streets to support his country and was brutally attacked and heckled.  I’m that person, some old boomer with ancient ideals that just don’t fly in this new age of so-called progressive thinking. 

I never thought that my welcoming Johnnie as my friend in 1968 would today be called racist because having a black friend doesn’t qualify a white person as not having some inherent racism and if you look hard enough, you will find it, they say.  If you don’t, “they” will show you what and where it is.  These new preachers of progressiveness will show you chapter and verse of just what sins you are guilty and they are more than ready to tell you what you need to do to correct it.  And if you don’t – well, Hell, fire and brimstone are just a stone throw away. 

They hate religion, evil as it is, but little do they realize just how much of a religion they are also practicing.  They have a god (progressiveness), they have a bible (found in the annals of academia), and they have their preachers (just about every college professor – oh and movie stars, don’t forget).  If you go against any of these things, you will be lucky if you are not ostracized (how we worked so hard to stop religions from doing this yet here it rears its ugly head again), silenced (see how protesters routinely shout down people they don’t agree with), and shamed (apparently ok to do as long they are doing it because they are so virtuous).

Not one of these things is my ideal of liberalism.  This is not why I marched in Berkeley.  This is not why I welcomed Johnnie as my friend at a time when black people literally lived on the other side of the tracks.  It was such a different world then, these new ministers of progressiveness have no idea what happened and what we went through.

It’s true that I am not black and have not walked in their shoes.  But I have had a peak and I have been discriminated against because of my race.  Not just me, but my whole family.  We are Armenian and we could not purchase a home in a certain part of town because of our race.  Armenians could not hold a job at the university.  I was called names in school because of my race. Yes, it’s peanuts compared to what black people have and do go through. I do understand this.

  Recently I realized I have generational PTSD from listening to my grandparents and mother talk about their exodus from their homeland due to discrimination.  How my grandmother suffered.  How my grandfather was nearly executed for being Armenian. How my grandmother’s sisters were stolen and put in harems or given to Turkish families, how brothers and fathers were killed leaving families to fend for themselves. How my mother had to translate for my grandparents as a child of 9 years old when they first arrived.  She was the one who had to learn English and she was the one who steered that family. I saw and heard my grandmother cry too many times while remembering the children she lost and her trek through the desert.  It left an indelible mark on my psyche.

Our family always understood the plight of those who suffer oppression.  A glaring memory I have as a little girl was when we were moving to that better part of town once courts ruled against discrimination in housing.  We put the house up for sale and were ready to sell it to a black lady who had been given money for her home due to some development going in.  She loved our home and was so happy to be able to purchase it.

All of a sudden, my little nice neighborhood that I grew up in became a hot bed of activity.  People came out of the woodwork and meetings were being held in our living room.  They were not happy.  Their property values were going to go down they exclaimed and so the meeting went.  I sat there bug eyed.  I had never seen such a display from my neighbors.  The display was fear.  One particular exclamation has never left my memory even though I was only about 11 yrs old at the time.  One neighbor complained that her husband had just planted flowers.  “What about Sam’s flowers?” she said.  I can still remember thinking – “who cares about Sam’s flowers.”

The next day, my father had the unenviable task of telling the prospective buyer that he couldn’t sell her his property.  Again, I was there, watching.  I could see on my father’s face how hard it was for him to tell her this.  The lady’s face once happy suddenly fell, like the life got sucked out of the room.  In my young life, I had never felt so sorry for someone else.

I understand, I have an idea and I want to make it better, always have and always will.
After high school I went overseas and returned 10 years later.  I was so happy to see that the black population was now able to live and work more freely than they were able to before; they were no longer regulated to the other side of the tracks.  There was progress and I was relived. 
It’s true, the scars of 250 years of slavery do not go away overnight and I know how they must suffer the generational PTSD like I do.  And I know it’s harder because of skin color and there will always be bigots and racists no matter how hard we try and eradicate these sins because we live in an imperfect world.  I know I can never understand completely.  No one needs to tell me that.
Fast forward to the Rodney King riots in 1992.  We were a young family with a bunch of kids.  I was recently divorced and had remarried.  We were on welfare and doing our best to make solid citizens out of the kids, but it was rough.  We didn’t even have a car, I had to borrow my mother’s and my new husband was trying to find a job to support us all.

I was following the riots and hoping for the best, but then it erupted and literally all hell broke loose.  One day while all this was going on, my neighbor, who was black and our daughters were good friends, stopped in for some reason.  I remember we were outside in the driveway talking.  What did we talk about?  The riots?  How the police hate black people?  How awful life is for her?  No, not one word.  Instead we talked about our lives, the struggles we go through, how she was working hard to become a nurse so she could have health care for her kids.  I remember admiring her and her resolve.  I felt like she was a better person than me because she didn’t let her race define her and here I was drowning in kids and troubles.

Later I was to find out about Reginald Denny - The truck driver pulled from his truck and nearly beaten to death in those riots.  But he was saved just inches from his life by kind-hearted black people.

The thought came to me that this was how we make the world a better place for our children; this was how we resolve issues.  We lead by example.  We do our best to turn the bigots and haters through love and forgiveness.  Is it going to be easy?  Of course not, whoever said it would be.  I doubt it would ever be completely resolved, not even in 100 years.  But burning down neighborhoods and defacing and destroying national monuments and landmarks (they even defaced an Armenian genocide memorial) will only cause people to be angrier and will only foster more hate.  The fact that people can’t see this is alarming.

I write this only because I must share my heart.  I want things to be better so bad and yet I feel we have today taken a huge step backwards and that we may never recover from this.  We can only blame ourselves.  Sure politicians are for the most part deceptive and useless, but who is throwing the rocks?  Who are spray painting stores and landmarks?  Who is smashing windows and setting buildings on fire? 

In the words of Thomas Sowell:

“Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.”