My Migrating Mind
We’re on to our second week with a new president, and while I’ve done my dubious best to tune out the fact, starting with the morning of November 9th when I stopped watching the news and haven’t looked back, it can’t be ignored forever. Especially since, contrary to my more optimistic friends’ suggestions, things are not as bad I thought they would be; they are worse. Donald Trump isn’t “rising to the occasion,” he’s failing spectacularly, if not in his own eyes, then our country before the eyes of the world. But, rather than pore over the president’s latest slapstick (if only it were funny), I retreat to my safe space for some reflections.
I’m a woman and an immigrant twice over, from the former Yugoslavia via Germany. I’m not Muslim, but I’m no stranger to travel restrictions. Making it in America as a law student studying for finals while watching NATO bomb by hometown of Belgrade on CNN, directed by Bill Clinton, was a bit stressful, but small beans, considering.
My graduation will forever be tainted by the humiliation my family was subject to before being granted entry to the USA to attend, with a valid visa whose procedure was designed to deter, not to obtain.
My parents and my sister, who are doctors and engineers, were escorted off the plane by border agents, questioned for a while and had their belongings and bodies searched; this peaked in having them remove their socks and spread their toes for inspection. Since they are very well-kept people, I suppose it all could have been worse. It always can. At least it eclipsed the digs I had collected over the years, which might pass for “microaggressions” today: INS guys staring at my German permanent resident status in my Yugoslavian passport and asking “What’d you have to do for that?”, or, “Got a boyfriend here you can marry?, or the very first one, which I’ll never forget because of his rotten teeth smirk: “You have money to come to America?”
I’m still here, I have friends, in the flesh, from all continents save Antarctica, from formerly warring factions, members of the military, people of all faiths, sexual and political orientations, from hemorrhaging hearts to right-wingers. If that’s a bubble, it must be a pretty big one. Let’s pop it!
What’s my privilege? I’m straight and white alright, but my life so far hasn’t rested on these facts alone. What has defined me, I think, was watching my parents juggle their professional jobs while making a new home and learn the language along with their two young children, in a country that welcomed immigration, believe it or not. It has characterized me that they, born in the rubble of World War II, pushed education and integrity above everything, put relatively little value on material things but a great one on responsibility. Traveling to my beloved multi-culti home country as it was violently falling apart, incited by a guy who vowed to make it Great again, certainly has left a mark.
I, too, had an opinion on Trump, though not what you’d think in light of my despondency and bitterness following the election that had me labeled a “liberal snowflake,” which is more lyrical than “sore loser.”
I found it laughable, in an “Only in America” kind of way, that the man would run for president, but I never took him as a joke and never dismissed the possibility altogether. This is not due to clairvoyance or a superior political mind (I possess neither, also I’m not all that liberal), but to hard-won experience: Never joke about horror scenarios that could, in theory, become true.
I thought of Trump what he has made easy to think of him: As a pompous, boorish buffoon, but one with undeniable smarts, some humor and even the occasional spark of geniality, though this surfaced in the company of evident brownnosers. Still. I didn’t loathe him per se. His personal life was gaudy, but what was it to me? Didn’t I disdain the pseudo-puritans getting off at Bill Clinton’s hanky-pankying? Two of Trump’s three wives hail from foreign places, his son-in-law is Jewish, his daughter now, too, plus she’s an exec in his company (as was his first wife), he used to stomp for Hillary, so how xenophobic/antisemitic/misogynistic/undemocratic could he be?
Things took an irreversible turn with the pussy tape. The icing on an already bad cake, the moment you have one bite too many and you’re sick of it forever. How could I not have been more disgusted with his slurs on Mexicans, Muslims, women reporters, the disabled, the dead? Because it hasn’t affected me directly, whereas lewd talk and unwanted groping has? I got down to the core of my problem:
It’s not really about him (Donald Trump would object, I’m fairly certain). It’s about what America has become.
It’s about the people who cheer him on. They outnumber him and his cabinet. The folks who like him because, yeah, he’s a little rude sometimes, but he tells it like it is.
What is “it?” What “is?”
It’s not just what he says, it’s what he doesn’t say. He may never have publicly said the reprehensible things the white supremacists have taken license to say. But he hasn’t disavowed them, either, thereby getting those elements of society, always there but on the fringes, drunk on their own, ugly importance. As for (too) many of those who voted for him without being “deplorables” (I’m taking Hillary Clinton’s accurate but fatal word choice at face value — she did qualify whom she meant, namely the xenophobes/homophobes/misogynists/racists, but that was conveniently forgotten every time she was pounded with the term): You may not be so, but you were okay aligning with those who are. To my mind, and keep in yours that I dislike the Clinton family, no amount of Hillary-hating could justify choosing the candidate inclusive of these values to Make America Great Again, or the third party candidate in states you knew to be swinging. On this, I don’t agree to disagree.
Ah, but what about the “the rural white,” the “poor and left behind” in “fly-over country”? Wasn’t it time they took “their” America back from the “elites” in their “bubbles”?
What makes someone elite? Being in the 1% wealth bracket, having an Ivy degree, being a New York intellectual (meaning what, having a densely loaded bookshelf in a high-ceilinged apartment) or a San Francisco health nut, or a Hollywood star, or listening to NPR and going to the Symphony? Say it ain’t so.
Yours truly, to her chagrin, doesn’t fit but the meager last two stereotypes, so does my aversion to our president (a native New Yorker billionaire reality show star with a Wharton MBA) and his fans still make me an elitist?
Let me tell you something. If picking a classical concert on PBS over trash TV, to read a library book over a tabloid, to prepare produce and reuse water bottles instead of opting for fast food and soda makes me an elitist, I’m fine with that. I’m saving money in the process. There is yuuuge social injustice in this country, and criticizing the incestuously rich and powerful — interestingly, those make up our new government — is legitimate. Vilifying those who owe their “elite” status to their scholastic achievements and hard work is not. Striving for better should not necessitate apologies. Maybe, if our celebrities consisted of those who said and did the most decent instead of the most outrageous thing, we’d be in a better place. A girl can dream.
At dinner before the inauguration, I said, not very originally: “Can I please go to sleep and wake up in four years?” To which my daughter replied: “But then you wouldn’t see me graduate, you’d miss half my college and almost all of [her brother’s] high school!”
Right she was. The event wasn’t about me. But my life is. I would have missed the next day, abnormally mild for January and a gift to the millions marching, the unseasonal squealing of children playing and bicycling, a milky coffee on the patio with my husband, no jacket required. Strangely, I, a chronically poor sleeper, had the best sleep in months. Yes, it’s worth keeping on going on.
