While getting dressed this morning, I looked out the window to see my mailbox was busted. At one time, it stood squat and stout, seven feet from the curb, like a menacing linebacker zealously guarding his turf. Now toppled and helpless, it lay on its side, my insecurities leaking from its cracks for all to see. Luckily, insecurities speak only to those they own and to those wise enough to hear them in others.

Visions of drunken teenagers rampaging through the night toppling mailboxes in an alcohol induced prank spree looped endlessly through the rational part of my brain. The four foot tall letter box, as they are called here in Australia,  lay toppled and broken, unable to testify on its behalf, unable to soothe my growing anxiety and name its assailants.  The beige letter box silently lay there, its cracks shouting obscenities at me.

I put pants on and sauntered toward the crime scene, mindful to subtly spy distant trees in case the perpetrator lie all night in wait to collect the satisfaction of my disappointment. No such luck for them. I was tight lipped and somber like the professional detectives of my favorite crime show, First 48. I looked left and right, selfishly hoping to see toppled mailboxes to my left and to my right. That would mean, in the oddest of ways, that I somehow belonged. I would’ve settled for an empty toilet paper roll rolling aimlessly in the wind or simple chalk marks from an abandoned hopscotch game. Any semblance of dereliction elsewhere would do. There was nothing.

I stood, looking down at the broken concrete mailbox, the sun rising at my back exposing doubts hidden in the dark crevices of my mind. With my feet firmly planted on Australian soil, my transplanted American insecurities continued to grow. I wondered why my mailbox alone lay broken. With its wide concrete base and hefty disposition, this was no accident. As sure as a semi-trailer doesn’t fall over from a gentle breeze, my mailbox was on its side for a reason.

My mind raced, what other secrets could this place hold. As tempting as it is to play the race card, my foreigner card, my English speaking card, or my right handed card, I slide them all back into my mental card deck. I know this paradox all to well. You can never say with certainty that it is what you believe, but you can never rule it out.  So I bent over and picked up the pieces of my insecurity, piecing them together as best I could. There is always the thought, but seldom the proof.

My inner pundit was sidelined and soulfully sulking half a world away as the U.S. health care reform saga unfolded. The vitriol that was generated by the legislative push to pass this law was a pugilistic display of anger and disrespect. Legislative members were spit on, called ugly names and even received death threats. Not that America is the bastion of peace, but surely our legislative scuffles don’t appear on YouTube in the abundance of other countries (funny!!). The Australian, a daily newspaper in Sydney, Australia,  ran a headline characterizing the fight as “Obama’s battle for America’s soul.”  In reality, the fight is not his alone.

What is it about healthcare reform that has the country up in arms, violent with the tongue? Who is against healthcare reform? Who is for it? Not an easy answer, but in a country that is good at generalizing and slicing statistical data for group definitions, we probably can get there.

It would seem that a logical start for mitigating the madness would be  deciphering the unusual suspects responsible for the protests and the vehement opposition to healthcare reform. The primary groups are the Tea Party, Conservatives, libertarians and some independents.  They share a disdain for big government, big price tags and governmental intrusion in the lives of its citizens.

Exactly what would a Libertarian look like. Of course this is a generalization, but data says they have the following characteristics:

• 30% have a college degree
• 31% have an income greater than $75,000
• 59% are male
• 82% of  white

Pew Research,Politics and Candidates

Summary:  Well educated, male, wealthy and white – generally speaking.

Next up, the Republicans. What characteristics would they have?

• 37% are college educated
• 47% make more than 75,000 a year
• 22% are non-white
• 10% of the non-white segment is black
• 41% is older than 61 years of age
• 42% are  male

Gallup Poll

Summary: Educated, wealthy, white and older (starting to see a trend?)

It’s interesting to reflect that these numbers were from mid last year, and during that time period, the Republican party has been hemorrhaging members to the Tea Party movement which is a distinctly different group.

The Tea Party is the final group will take a look at. On paper, some of the characteristics of this group include:

• 75% of are college educated
• 60% of them are men
• 80% are white
• 10% are Latino
• 66% of them make more than $50,000
• 34% of them (including the 66% above) make more than $75,000 a year

CNN

Summary: Well educated, young, white and conservative (generally speaking)

The Tea Party is the youngest group on the scene, generally comprised of Republican,  Democratic, Libertarian and Independent defectors. This group has been at the heart of agitation against healthcare reform making themselves appear larger than the mere 16% of the population that identifies as belonging to the group. Rasmussen Reports.

So by and large, the group is characterized as being  predominately white, well educated, upper class, conservatives. This group, because of their wealth is typically insured and is more likely to run a small business in contrast to the rest of the population.

Juxtapose this with the opposing segment which would be lower income mixed race (including the majority segments of minority populations) and there is an automatic divide that can be seen along racial and class lines with smatterings of educational skirmishes thrown in for good measure. A proverbial clash of the titans.

The divide between the group is from the start far and wide.  Let’s be clear, this battle is about the cheddar, the dinero, the loot. Politics is a hungry beast fed by the battle for finite resources amongst willing and unwilling pawns. Obama’s strong-arm tactics are a forced redistribution of  resources in no uncertain terms. His healthcare reform is a Robin Hood fantasy with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid filling in as his merry men. Sorry, merry people.

The conservative coalition,  who has the most to lose in healthcare reform,  are the haves who’ll end up shouldering the additional taxation both personally and in the small business situations; it’s a fight for resources that belong to them in an economy that is already hostile to their growth. If Robin Hood were alive, he would be best suited to stay out of conservative neighborhoods after dark.

Despite their motive, this conservative coalition doesn’t see the conflict in terms of the haves and have nots; this boils down to an issue of principle – founding principles at that. They tapped into a spirit that is inborn into the American way of life. Rather than view the argument from the smelly side of concern for their country men’s welfare, they found a rallying cry that hearkens back to the founding of the U.S. and is enshrined in the formation of the country.

It’s amusing to know that other countries can see this as well. In an extremely interesting article written by Geoff Elliott in The Australian he contrasts the American view of national healthcare with the Australian view. You can read the article here. What emerges from the comments on the post, unfortunately, is that Americans are viewed as self centered, greedy capitalists unwilling to share their spoils with even their own country men.

In his article Elliott highlights the nature of the US split from Britain and Australia’s moderately peaceful split from the colonial power. The US split was brought about due to agitation against the existing governmental power. The indomitable I was bred in America. The I became more important than the we. There is no moral judgment here, just an understanding that individualism is part and parcel with being American.

Indeed, agitation was enshrined and encouraged to keep the government from tyranny and obstruction. For the conservative coalition, the additional taxes and modifications to their existing healthcare would indeed be obtrusive. In true American fashion, these segments of the population revolt. So although it is a practical issue, this segment rails against the principle of the matter giving rise to terms like Socialism and Marxism.

The opposing side of principle is practicality -  easily delivered with any number of dismal statistics about the state of healthcare in America. Take for instance a study completed last year by Harvard University which linked a lack of healthcare to the deaths of more than 45,000 Americans. Granted, this number wouldn’t even fill half the Rose Bowl, but these are human lives representing mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles etc. This number do not include those whose quality of life is hampered because of lack of access to healthcare.

With the economy still sputtering from a glut of greedy insurance practices and an over inflated housing market, the job numbers are still dismal and on the daily push the unemployed to the roles of the uninsured. If you’ve got the guts, you can check out state by state unemployment statistics here.

Even for those who are insured, there is no guarantee that it will be enough. It was estimated that last year over 60% of Americans who declared bankruptcy, did so because of medical bills. Many of these were insured during the time of their illness.

It should be difficult for the most loving liberal to look unflinchingly at the plight of the conservative coalition; their backs are against the wall. The healthcare reform bill of 2010 is a solution that violates the spirit of America’s promise to be unobtrusive to all of its citizens, despite its noble aim to prop up the most vulnerable among us.

Shifting the healthcare burden to a narrowly defined segment of America although convenient is ultimately problematic. We would hope that the conservative coalition would be active participants in solving the problem. Charity is a virtue, while theft is a crime.

There is a solution somewhere in the middle if the Democrats can address the principle within the problem; distributing the burden equitably. And we can only hope the conservative coalition can work through the practical issues realizing there is no way the country can allow 32 million people to gamble that they’ll be OK for another day.  My guess is that this will continue to be a political football for years to come. I just hope that we as Americans don’t lose our souls in the process.

Saw a recent Facebook post from Raj in regards to the Tea Party. Interesting conversation around the vitriol generated by this group and some of their recent 1st amendment selections.

Raj – The racist core of the Tea Party movement is obvious to everyone except the media. It’s pretty obvious what they mean when they say they want to “take their country back”.

John Lewis hit with the ‘n-word’ by tea party demonstrators | Political Insider

blogs.ajc.com

Demonstrators outside the U.S. Capitol , angry over the proposed health care bill, shouted Saturday at

I don’t exactly see the Tea Party singing ‘Kumbaya’ and running out to compassionately seek opinions of the local Native American Tribes, Latinos, Blacks or any other group that doesn’t look like them and think like them.

To them, these groups are stereotypes out to steal America’s riches through draconian measures like health care reform that is surely a precursor to enslavement, the forceful takeover of land or the silencing of their voice in the land they raise their children in. Maybe they have more in common with those other groups than they actually realize. …

See More They believe with the stroke of one pen, Obama and the Dems will undue the time space continuum, erasing Elvis from our collective memory while sending them to a Tule Lake-ish socialist internment camp in CA. It’s as if Obama and the Dems have mastered some brilliant Harry Houdini trick to disappear the Rule of Law and the checks and balances inherent in our government.

I don’t get why they don’t come out and say what’s really on their mind instead of hiding behind their weakly fabricated arguments. Let’s be real, someone in that crowd finally said what I’ve had a suspicion they were thinking all along.

I recently visited a good friend’s Facebook page and sat stunned as I watched a group of white high school kids sing “Shout” by Otis Redding in Black face and wigs. What’s worse is that it was my high school and I remember the performance. As I sat there watching, all the emotions which had been wrestled into submission since high school came rushing back. I remembered that my graduating class of 320 counted only 6 blacks in its graduating class. In the jumping and gyrating of disrespectful caucasian coons, I saw years of black jokes, and curly hair jokes, and burnt people jokes crawl back into my ears as my heart beat louder and louder. The denigration of generations for a cheap laugh, justified as nostalgia, history and good humored fun. The high school I remembered was the one I struggled to forget.

My breath quickened and my stomach dropped remembering deeply seated friendships growing into romance only to be butchered by obscene words like, “my parents won’t approve,” and “my father would kill me.” The isolation that some of those years brought about settled into my bones as though I had graduated only yesterday. That strange feeling of being in the midst of people but somehow keenly disconnected, reattached itself. Within me, the rage swelled. Growing up I learned to distrust people. Period. I distrusted blacks because when I spoke, I pronounced my words like “white people.” That made you square and ineligible for the in crowd. White had their own version of you are out. As I remember how cool I was with many, there always seemed to be that one black joke they had been dying to tell since they met you. There was a fundamental inability to recognize the destruction of trust their jokes engendered. Not that they cared, but their ability to highlight the difference eroded the commonality you had hoped would be there.

The desire to crush and obliterate trembled in my fingers which pulsated to the rhythm of the sledge hammer now driving the thump of my heart. As I searched for words, my mind flew past minority feelings of inferior expectations and landed in the open arms of Howard University. With fumbling fingers, my anger leaked onto my keyboard, painting underlined letters, supporting big exclamation points. Like a mother whispering to a child, ancestors spoke to me reminding me how such a negative experience had pushed me into a world filled with giants like, Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison and Ossie Davis to name a few. Without these high school slights I would never know people who looked like me birthed civilizations lasting 15 times longer than the age of the US. The pages of Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography Malcolm X” may have never graced my eyes had I not been set apart. As I began to fall in love with black people, I found myself and a whole universe that had been hidden from me in the suburbs. In loving this sense of self I received a wife who embodied all that I was and could be.

Without the experiences of high school I would have never found my voice. I wouldn’t have known that it was OK to speak up and set boundaries. Without those experiences, I might not understand how to deal within an industry that after 12 years has never graced me to work directly with someone who as actually shaded like myself. As I typed terse words, I weighed old friendships against a newer voice.

As luck would have it, there was no need to decide, it was all a mistake, but someone somewhere is fighting this Facebook battle when the new and old worlds collide.

Clearly NPR commentator Juan Williams feels like he has been viciously maligned by the left for his recent comments about Michele Obama. No need for me to dig all into the drama, that soap opera has aired. You can rehash it over at the Atlantic. While taking a quick peek at The Factor, tonight, host Bill O’Reilly questioned Juan’s move to the right. Juan gladly released some steam by tattling on the left and telling papa O’Reilly that he’d been viciously mauled by attack dogs from the left Attempting to stand his ground, Juan grumbled like a curmudgeonly old man, as he tattled on the left to O’Reilly. It’s pretty clear that Juan is going to be carrying psychological scars for quite some time.

I’ll post the video as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Personally, I believe he was way out of line and in his comments about First Lady Michele Obama. But knowing how the left gets down, I’ll keep my nose out of this one.

As a friend put it to me, we are all born into a conversation. That conversation sets the scene for the movie that is our life. Some people are born into abusive conversations, yet others bask in warm loving conversations. The ideas fueling these conversations form the heaven and earth of our individual landscapes.

To be black in America is a conversation that understands second guessing. Did that clerk not touch my hand because I’m black or was it not that deep. Did I not get the job because I’d be the only black or am I not the right fit? As you can imagine, you could substitute any number of adjectives into this conversation and it would still be proper. Female, Hispanic, gay, white, Asian, short, hefty, skinny etc.

One of the landmarks in the black conversation centers around degradation and abuse at the hands of others. Like an oral tradition, this conversation is centuries old, each new generation etching their leaf in the branch of the narrative and passing it down to the next. Some of the ideas in the conversation stick and grow broadly while others may wither and fall away.

The recent NY Post cartoon, which shows two officers shooting a chimpanzee, whispered into the ears of black Americans. Some, tired of the same old conversations, paid it no mind, but some, as though hypnotized by a pocket watch turning backwards on itself heeded the call and fell fully into the familiar trance. Their eyes spiraling backward like cartoon characters and their voices growing in zombified unison, “racist, racist, racist.”

Though the cartoon could be viewed as a little insensitive, racist it was not. At least not in my humble opinion. Being that the topic, the stimulus plan, was timely and the plot device, a crazy monkey, was relevant I’m not sure what other device could have communicated this message, the stimulus bill was bananas (I couldn’t resist).

Just to cover our basis, let’s review. The joke goes that a crazy monkey wrote the stimulus bill. Lest we forget, our headlines have been saturated with the killing of a crazy monkey, you can find it here, here and here. Moreover, the stimulus bill was not exactly a slam dunk, the unwieldy bill, massive in expenditures and unpopular among conservatives can be classified as crazy without a huge leap of faith. This makes the use of a monkey writing the stimulus extremely appropriate and clever, if not funny. Obama was not even in the cartoon.

There are some predictable folks preparing to rally. I’m not sure they get the implications of their protest. Imagine what happens if they get their way. There will be significant changes for the next four to eight years. In this time frame all monkeys, monkey business and possibly any references to bananas will be outlawed. An executive order will be issued banning the raising of any chickens for the purposes of frying or barbecuing. The USDA will quarantine and destroy any watermelon products. And it’s cultivation will result in prison terms but no whippings. Congress will begin impeachment proceedings for any comedian caught uttering the name Obama in the neighborhood of topics and punch lines associated with baby momma’s, yo mommas and any jokes involving a Priest, a blind man and a black man.

Sound ridiculous. It is.

Our country has progressed as a nation to entrust it’s highest office to a man of color. They’ve given up, collectively, the argument that blacks are inferior. If a white person throws a shoe at Obama, is that individual racist or is Obama just the president? When will blacks give up the conversation that anything that involves a monkey and Obama is racist? When will they silence the Sharptons because they recognize the mis-education in their ideas and their words?

“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.” – Carter G. Woodson The Mis-Education of the Negro

The post has issued an apology for the cartoon. You can read the apology in its entirety here. It ends as follows:

“Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.”

Al Sharpton, Spike Lee and Tom Joyner I think they are speaking to you. And while we’re at it, Chris Brown beat down Rhianna, why no protests against the physical violence perpetrated on the daily toward women of color. Why no protest about the hunger pervading he American streets? Why no protests and marches for better public schools which are proportionally related to the success or failure of black folk?

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote here:

So say we all. Can we get back to grown folk business now.

Now that headline seems like a pretty profane thing to say. Could you imagine the little loin clothed Indian man with the cute mustache uttering the words, “leave my elephant alone n!@#!$#@.” The crazy thing is, he’s on record saying something pretty close to this.

I’m watching the epic Gandhi on TV with my son and I realize I’ve never been up on his exploits in South Africa. According to the film and other records, Mohandas Gandhi’s expulsion from a railroad car launches him down a revolutionary path to fight the injustices of the pass laws upon the Indian population in South Africa by White Afrikaners. He eventually forces South African Prime Minister, Jan Christiaan Smuts to draft an acceptable compromise.

Oddly enough, in his quest to show his worthiness to Europeans, he joined the South African army in their war against the Africans. This is what piqued my interest. What side did Gandhi fight for, the oppressed majority Black population or the occupying colonial forces?

As it turns out, he fought on the side of the Europeans and continued to denigrate the personage of Black Africans, railing against Europeans for their categorization of Indians with the lowly Black Kaffir.

During a public meeting in Bombay on September 26, 1896, while discussing the struggle of Indians in South Africa, Gandhi is attributed to the following quote:

“Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”

I stumbled across this as I was pushing to introduce my son to the life and works of Gandhi. The irony is that this desire to expose my child to the good led me to the bad I had never known or wished to know. As he grew older it appears that Gandhi’s views softened, but it still leaves a sting. He does eventually move to a point where he begins to challenge the caste system and takes on classification of the untouchables, but this again is mostly framed in a nationalistic Indian perspective.

As odd as it would seem, there is quite a bit in the public domain in regards to Gandhi’s attitudes toward Blacks. In fact a book, Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity was written about the subject. Additionally, a simple search using the terms racist, Gandhi will snatch a quick “oh my” from most anyone’s lips.

How do we reconcile the noble ideas of such a mythic figure with some sinister beliefs lurking in heart? It would seem that such an historic issue [read: way in the past and irrelevant for today] wouldn’t even matter.

Sadly though, I don’t believe this is the case. My son and I saw the movie last week so we’ve been talking on and off about it all week long. How do I continue to instill in him the ideas of self respect when I find the very heroes dancing from my lips, have denigrated my existence through the slander of racism? How can I teach him to respect those that wouldn’t give him the courtesy of respecting him.