21 Jul
Posted by: Rukhsana Khan in: cultures, political correctness, racism
I’ve been thinking and thinking about why Trump, despite all his lies, and all the detritus that is spewing from his blowhole is so popular among a certain demographic of American population, and I think I may have come up with the reason.
When I was looking at the faces of the Trump supporters, most of them are around my age. In their fifties. That means they’re of the same generation that made my life such hell when I was growing up. They’re the ones who sniggered when David Archer called me ‘licemobile’, and even if they didn’t always join in, they didn’t stop the harassment because on some level they might have agreed or thought, ‘better her than me’.
I can picture them, back when they were still slim (like me), kings of the world, wandering the halls of their small town high school and hanging the little Jewish kid by his ankles from the third floor window as a ‘prank’ during frosh week.
But life for those same white privileged jerks hasn’t always turned out so good.
I’ve always felt that kids that were very popular during high school basically end up peaking early. They’re the kids who invested so much time and effort into their popularity that there’s little room for study and hard work.
And then when they graduate, they’re like ‘what next?’ All their friends end up going their own ways and they’re stuck with little education and few prospects.
Basically think of the movie Grease. You know that Sandy and Danny get married and after a while they’ll pop out some babies, get fat, bored and drift apart.
These people have grown up with a certain mindset of hierarchy. And in their little minds, white people are ALWAYS ALWAYS on top.
They’re like that stupid RNC senator who couldn’t think of any contributions to civilization from non-white people.
In their ignorance, just because they don’t know of any contributions, in their minds that means they don’t exist.
When I look back at junior high school, at how PATHETICALLY I tried to fit in, how HOPELESSLY I tried to please the popular kids, the Danny’s and Sandy’s and whatevers of my classes, I cringe.
Thing is the first thing immigrant kids try to do is fit in. It’s only when that doesn’t work. When the kids are completely cruel and not only dismissive, but actively do things to humiliate you, that you have a choice to make.
Either you agree with their evaluation of yourself and your culture, or you don’t.
Either you step into their idea of hierarchy, or you forge your own.
More and more immigrants are forging their own. And this is what is upsetting these people the most!
Their’s is no longer the only paradigm.
They’re no longer ‘cool’, because they’re older and looking kind of dumpy. But what they find worse is that their’s is no longer the only way of doing things. And things are changing. Society is accommodating those changes in demographics, as it should.
When I started wearing hijab in grade eleven, in 1979, in that same small town of Dundas where I grew up, and David Archer started saying that I wore it to keep the lice in, I ignored him. For the second time in my life I really didn’t give a damn!
But I must admit, I never imagined that hijab would become as common place as it has. I never imagined I’d see women wearing it all over the place and I wouldn’t be one of the ‘few’ Muslim women who embraced that Islamic injunction, that I’d be one of many. I thought the lure of Western influence would be way too great for girls to resist.
And so did those insecure white people.
They can deal with one or two weirdos who are bucking the trends. But when they see a lot of them, and THEY’RE NOT GOING AWAY! And even the newspapers and local media are starting to include them like they’re GASP normal! Then it shakes their little hearts!
Like so many other Western countries, Canada and the U.S. never bothered to legislate assimilation.
It is part of the arrogance of their mindset that they never thought they had to.
They thought that the lure of their way of thinking would be so strong that no minority culture could resist.
But they should have realized that they’re not that irresistible.
The first clue should have been when native cultures maintained their cultural identity despite being forced onto reservations, and despite EVERY SINGE TREATY VIOLATION AND ATTEMPT TO INTIMIDATE THEM!
So what did the insecure white people do? They forced assimilation. They STOLE the children from their families and brought them to RESIDENTIAL schools in order to indoctrinate them.
Can you believe that they actually thought they were doing these kids a favour???
My heart goes out to them because the native community is still trying to recover from such a rape of their cultural identity.
According to the law of the land, both in the U.S. and Canada, religious freedom is a right of every individual.
And both countries strive to accommodate as much as possible, the religious observations of any sincere individual.
That’s because the U.S. was founded by people fleeing religious persecution in Europe.
And it’s just part of being civilized.
But when these same insecure white people grow up and see people actually being religious it irks them. They feel like a minority in their own land, and they have to watch what they say.
It’s the authorities who have urged Muslims and other minorities to step up and expect accommodation.
We’re Canadians, they tell us. We have the same rights as everyone else.
And in order to be a peaceful society, they try to accommodate those religious requirements as much as possible.
So if some women using a public facility like a swimming pool, ask for black out curtains so men outside can’t ogle them, and if they ask because of their religious requirements to be modest, then the authorities think, okay, how can we accommodate them?
What is wrong with that?
Why should it bother you?
Thing is, we pay our taxes too.
Why shouldn’t we be accommodated???
It doesn’t take anything away from you.
You can go and strut your stuff as much as you want to. You can let your butt cheeks hang out and your boobs dangle as much as you want. Why is their only a hue and cry if we don’t want to join you?
If we actually want to cover up and leave something to the imagination?
(This is actually one thing I like about Donald Trump. Somebody once asked him about the niqab and hijab and he said to leave those people alone. He’s spoken to some women and they want to wear it so let them.) (I never saw him say this but one of my niqab wearing daughters did, so I believe her.)
Ultimately why should the cloth on my head and body bother you???
Why should the xenophobes in France send a girl home because her skirt is too short and they accuse her of wearing it as a religious symbol??? (that really happened! She was a girl who converted to Islam and they sent her home because they said her skirt was too long!)
The French are probably the most insecure of all the Western countries!!!
Because they can’t understand how anyone having grown up in their land or in the land of the free and the home of the brave and the truth north strong and free, how anyone could cling to a religion that they think is so backward.
And seeing people who continue to follow their own customs and religious practices seems to shake their faith in their own superiority, in their own paradigm, because maybe, just maybe, they don’t know everything.
Maybe they think, ‘hmm, perhaps there’s another way of doing things, another way of thinking?’ but they quickly reject that as a threat to their idea of hierarchy and all they hold dear so instead, these immigrants these people should be forced to assimilate FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.
Citizenship isn’t supposed to be conditional. As long as you follow the law you’re supposed to be able to live your life as you wish.
The rights of a citizen are supposed to be the same whether you’re black, brown, white or mixed. The law of the land says that the rules apply to all of us, but it’s the INSECURE white people who rig things in their own favour.
And when the ‘freaks’ that they harassed in high school seem to be ‘taking over’, these insecure white people see Donald Trump as their own priggish high school bully, putting these foreigners and ‘freaks’ in their place and re-establishing their own paradigm.
They don’t care if he lies.
It’s not about any sort of truth or any sort of logic.
So you can point out the inconsistencies of what he says and how he can’t deliver on his empty promises till you’re blue in the face.
They don’t care.
And they won’t care.
It’s their last chance to ‘MAKE AMERICA ‘GREAT’ AGAIN’.
Great for them, that is.
But that said, there are a whole lot of other white people, who are secure within themselves, who see right through the bloviating, and the high school bully tactics of Trump and want nothing to do with it.
They are part of the new paradigm.
The paradigm where all people are allowed to live as they please and even though we might have different races, religions and sexual orientations or gender orientations and we don’t agree on everything, as long as we’re committed to a peaceful society, we can live our lives the way we want and let others live theirs.
And God bless the U.S. and Canada for these people, because without them there really would be anarchy.