Raising Children In A War Zone
Someone recently asked, what was my most profound struggle. The potential awardees flashed within my heart as if each were readying for a curtain call. Childhood sexual abuse victim! Being told I was not worthy! Being ugly! Cancer! The gauntlet Black men who want a life different run in the U.S.
Drum roll please! And the winner is: raising our children in a war zone. Not even close.
The latest iteration of the U.S.’s so-called culture war, dominated by white supremist ideologies and threats, has me not wanting to bring our twins back into the country. Ten dead in Buffalo at the hands of an eighteen year old avowed white supremist who legally purchased military grade weapons, an assault rifle, bullet proof vest and military clothing. A rampage with roots in manifestos and threats, written when he was seventeen, carried out with sufficient presence of mind that staking out his prey and live streaming the event was important to the mass murder.
His legacy to be added to the many race based horrific atrocities already well documented. It’s impossible for me to shut out the roll call, the long list of victims, known and not. Not just because their innocence haunts me. Not just because I know, “There go I but by the grace of God.” No! More because I am a reluctant sentinel, needing to keep constant vigilance over my babies. Wary of white strangers in gray suits, short skirts, army fatigues and yes, blue uniforms!
What a horrific state from which to parent. Sadness overflowing into tears when I heard Sandra Bullock talk about Black women not being allowed to experience the same joy of mothering as other women for over four hundred years. The image of children, Black and Native, torn away from their parents breasts, their clutching arms, to be sold, raped, murdered and abused. I cried! Not just because of the truth she was telling! I cried for my own babies! For now!
And most of us know our nation’s children are in despair. The data is there for us all to see. Their faces also! Hopelessness, depression, drugs, suicide are all on the rise. Indicators of how profoundly young people are seeking to relieve the pain created by the disharmonies brought to their consciousness by a society constantly in conflict with itself. A culture that fails to see that people can’t worry about abortion rights when they are forced to worry about their own right to live. Or their children’s. A culture that expects children to learn while adults fight over wearing masks to prevent a global pandemic from stealing any more lives.
To expect that children will on their own overcome worry about a planet getting increasingly warmer is a blind spot begging for catastrophe. For, how can anyone focus on saving the planet when we can’t save ourselves, or our families. Is there anyone asking victims in an other war torn lands to recycle?
This is the culture war’s legacy. Not being able to focus on what might lie ahead when you and those around you are in the throws of the oppressive tumult of war: military, mental or cultural. A tumult seemingly accepted. Normalized, even. If not mythicized! The scattering of isolated incidents the news cycle promotes for what has been deemed to be our short attention spans is in truth a well documented ode to a culture of violence.
A wonderful piece by Charles Beuck, published in Traveling Through History, entitled “Only 15 Years of Peace In The History of the United States of America” (Medium.com, January 9, 2020, https://medium.com/traveling-through-history/only-15-years-of-peace-in-the-history-of-the-united-states-of-america-c479193df79f) chronicles, very well, the U.S.’s love of conflict and war, foreign or domestic. For 95% of the country’s existence, excluding all of the race based atrocities committed against people of African descent, from the Spanish slaughter of the Hugenots (Fort Caroline, 1565) until now, armed violence against “others” is as much a way of life as apple pie and the Star Spangled Banner.
Yet, though many were dismayed when Judge Regina Chu pounded her gavel pronouncing Kim Potter guilty but not culpable in the murder of Dante Wright others, had reaffirmed that the corner many thought had been turned remains. And those who tried to dismiss Trump as an aberration were they not made to know, by policy, illness and death, just how profoundly victimization along pigmentation or ideological lines flourishes.
We have five year old twins. Descendants of a West African lineage that was enslaved within a chattel slave system bringing oppression, rape and murder to the innocent. Born in the Philippines, their Mandaya tribal genetics is undeniable, physically and spiritually. They are brown skinned, precocious and self directed. And right after they were born I wondered aloud if we had birthed them into a burning planet? Or made them citizens of a country in which they would never live their fullest life.
For if it’s not a white supremist, with hate in their hearts, policies in their arsenal and guns on their hips, it’s those damn video’s of elementary school children who go to school strapped and parents who walk around the same. Both willing to shoot anything that moves! History blends with the present becoming an interwoven mosaic for me. The “Get out!” heeding of ancestors like signposts in darkness. The starkness of our collective present reflected in shallow eyes and battle weary souls.
It’s like the country is stuck in adolescence. Adults fighting over their right to not be their brother’s/sister’s keeper. Protestors molested by frat boy breast grabbing cops. The elderly trampled by the same. Mouthy sixteen year old girls punched in the face by grown men. Skittle carrying teenage boys shot for winning a fight they did not start. Rifle toting boys roaming the country side looking to deface of murder victims or make victims into victims. All, while color line enforcers bring rational thinking to the insane (and vice versa) while waving bibles upside down and quoting scripture inside out to show who’s rights are being protected. And whose are not!
Like many parents, we want our children to be liberated from the sins that have laid waste to the promises etched in a Constitution that did not conceive of them being in this country. When our twins smile at me as if all is right with the world, deep inside I cry. Because I know it’s not. That’s the weight of child raising in a culture war: planning for a future we do not know they will have.
“I’ve come upon something that disturbs me deeply. We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know we will win, but I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house. I’m afraid that America has lost the moral vision”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
