Tag Stop AAPI Hate

A Tale of One City

Michael 2 Comments

It was the best of times, it was the worst … no, wait, that’s taken. That’s two cities anyway. How about: it was the best of intentions, it was the worst of intentions. The one city is here, the time was Saturday.

20210321_200444Saturday afternoon might have been one of the better times for this fair city as a small group peacefully assembled with speakers in support of the “Stop Asian Hate” movement, supporting the local and national Asian communities. The diverse group was mostly college aged people with some families and one celebrity who was in town filming a movie. The rally started at a corner a little bit out of the downtown district and after the speakers spoke they move to a nearby park and held a moment of silence for the those slain in Atlanta. It was a good, positive time, Definitely one of the better times. But then again . . .

Earlier Saturday a group of a few hundred gathered at the baseball stadium and accompanied by motorcycle mounted police, they march across a bridge, through town, then to the large state  park that dominates the focal point of downtown. There celebrities, local and state politicians, and candidates for upcoming races assembled to make speeches opposing the ongoing state mask mandate and protesting the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Still. One of the participants spoke about the danger of the right to bear arms “being taken away.” One of the speakers referred to Donald Trump as “the real President of the United States” from the podium. One of the marchers said “freedom is tenuous” when asked about his opposition to the mask mandate.

There is a local TV reporter who each morning posts an inspirational message to her social media accounts. Sunday’s was “Don’t wait for things to get simpler, easier, better. Life will always be complicated. Learn to be happy right now. Otherwise you’ll run out of time.” it’s a great message. The people at the small “Stop Asian Hate” rally would get that. The people at the whatever it was supposed to be rally never could understand that and probably wouldn’t bother to try. Yet those are the people who if they did try and then stopped trying to make everything “better” by their own definition and just be happy that they have the opportunities so many other people around the world do not, there wouldn’t be a danger of not having enough time for happiness. There might be an overabundance of happiness because the rest of the world, the majority of the world I am certain, wouldn’t have to spend so much time protecting themselves from the ones who are never happy.

It’s sad that a small but so loud group of people so desperately clinging to a fantasy still garner so much attention and cause such an extreme amount of hate that a peaceful group of people, ones of all ages, colors and ethnicities, are held hostage by the fear that that desperate ones might any moment mutate into desperados.

I was right the first time I thought about it. Saturday afternoon indeed represented a better of times in my one fair city. Let’s just leave it at that.

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Spring into Action, Spring into Love

Michael 9 Comments

Spring is close to being around the corner you can smell it in the air. I cannot remember a Spring I have waited for more than this year, and that’s a lot of Springs. Talk about a winter of discontent. It should have been one of great hope. A vaccine was out and in use! Even though the first doses were administered in December, technically that was still Fall. And then it went downhill.

Right out of the gate, reports of cheating among West Point cadets hit the papers. Of course the Commander in Chief was busy trying to beg, steal, or cajole a few million nonexistent votes (oddly he never tried to buy) so why shouldn’t the youngest of the military try to game their way through the system especially when just the following day the first of over 40 pardons or sentence commutations were issued by Trump in his last month in office. December wrapped up with three people shot in a bowling alley in Illinois. January saw landslides in Norway, blizzards in Spain, and nutcases raining down on Washington DC. In February, if CoViD-19 wasn’t an infectious enough problem to deal with, avian flu broke out in Russia and an Ebola outbreak in Guinea had all of West Africa on alert. The month wrapped up with 5 dead from a shooting in Indianapolis. That lead to February opening with 4 dead in an Oklahoma shooting, and in a weird homage to December, three people were shot in a bowling alley in Central Pennsylvania. Uprisings and protests dominated the news in February and March with unrest in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Catalonia, and Somalia.

With just 3 days remaining in this winter, the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center released a report documenting 3,795 incidents of harassment, physical assault, and civil rights violations against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders since March 19, 2020 that include 503 in January of February of this year. (The Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center on March 19, 2020.) These are only the reported incidents. It is impossible to say what the actual incident frequency is although the Pew Research Center estimates 3 in 10 Asian Americans have been verbally abused since the start of the pandemic last year.

In front of a house on a road I use often there is a sign proclaiming, “Impeach China Joe.” I doubt the people responsible for posting that sign understand what the words mean. Like most bullies, they simply repeat what the head bully says. One of their favored means of attack is denigration. In the school yard fifty years that would be “Four Eyes,” or “Stinky Pants.” Now it’s China Joe, Crazy Nancy, Braindead Bernie. Now it’s every time that somebody wants to look tough without a pack of Marlboro’s rolled in the white t-shirt sleeve, they repeat a select epithet. Even if it was just name calling to make themselves feel superior it would be so wrong, but the modern societal bullies do not stop there. Actual violence, hospitalizing and killing people make up over 10% of the reports received by Stop AAPI Hate. That was before six Asian women were killed and one other wounded in the Atlanta shootings this week.

IMG_20200726_232745We have a new season starting Saturday. Spring is supposed to be a season of rebirth, hope, and beauty. This would be a good time to start acting like reborn, hopeful, beautiful people and stop the unrelenting slide into the ugliness this country and this world have become. It will take action of your part. Positive action, not just a heart and praying hands icon on your Tweets and emails. I have said this here before, you cannot stop the hate if you are doing the hating. You must love. Make no mistake, the opposite of love is not hate. It is however the cure for hate. The opposite of love is apathy. If you are not actively loving then you are not truly loving, and if you are not loving you cannot oppose hate.

RogersClemmonsI don’t suppose that it is coincidence that Saturday is not only the first day of Spring but also Fred Rogers birthday. If I had to pick only one hero to model my life on it would be Mr. Rogers. For over thirty years Mr. Rogers was a friend to millions of young Americans, and with a diverse group of performers shared time, stories, music, and make believe. Unfortunately at the same time, thousands of young American bullies were already gearing up to throw water and hatred on the devotees of Fred Rogers gentle manner and universal friendship.

Don’t let the bullies take over. Spring into action. Spring into love!