Politically-Incited Repressed Memories

Remember this: Emotions are linked to previous traumas. Invoke the memory to free the emotion, and watch it run rampant.

Since this election, I have found myself the observer and participant in bridging some strange gaps between me and other people.

By the way, the best way to bridge a gap is to sit down with someone, extend understanding by listening fully to their concerns instead of diminishing them with rhetoric and hate. They have to talk the poison out. For important issues, talk to the horse’s head and not its ass. 

I was sitting across the table from an African-American woman who said, “If Trump thinks I am going to go back to the way we lived when people of color couldn’t mingle with white people-then he is wrong.”

I said, “I was born in (blank space). I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

She said, “I will not have a white person telling me what to do.”

She was angry and wanted nothing to do with me; a week separation from her was required. 

I took a pause and thought: What could it be? I was a stranger to her.

I was having a burden placed on me that wasn’t my shame to bear. By God, I wasn’t going to bear it either. I didn’t care who I had to fight to figure it out. Yet, where could it possibly come from? It came from her memories. Mine too.

You really had to be a part of the busing that went on around 1974 to understand. This was a time when schools were being desegregated and equalized so there was a certain proportion of Caucasians integrated with African-American children. We were tossed together, regardless of home training and expected to integrate as one.

It worked where I lived so long as you didn’t have the awful whispers of ethnicity hate at home.

If you were poor and Caucasian, you were sent to the rural African-American schools. If you were a financially capable Caucasian, you were enrolled into a private school.

Without reliving the details, children from this era were raised within the bosom of desegregation and the stress it caused by generating situations where conflict was present. It was rough on Caucasian and People of Color because both sides were indoctrinated with predisposed familial-inherited hate and avoidance, then thrust into a situation were previously both groups were conditioned to avoid.

What made it somewhat of a success was there was integration of teachers of different ethnicity with the belief they could work together and educate children of varying ethnicity, without falter, and succeed.

That is the Power of Love.

I had some of the best teachers in the poorest school district because they loved us, and worked because they loved us in spite of what surrounded us outside of the school walls.

One can’t forget the parents brave enough to be okay with sending their children to ethnically equalized schools.

Here you see a multiple-joint effort to get a desired outcome.

Eventually, differing people in a community began to begrudgeonly get along.  The world passes with each new dynamic to challenge an old system that segregated people out. People died for this change.

Years and years later, you begin to see groups self-segregate on their own under the belief they are not being served equally as other groups.

All previous hard work is drifting like broken continents.

All these different groups have their own agenda that moves within the realm of an ethnicity’s majority taking control of the Power, whatever that power may be.

There is no overall unifying harmony in this dynamic. There is no broad spectrum for it to feed into. It is a selfish intention spotlighting to get power over another group in the hopes of controlling the destiny of the main group and the other targeted groups.

It is the emotion of fear, anger, and an avenging Nature fueling the idea, that if one has control they can alleviate the suffering on the chosen group, but end up elevating the suffering on another lesser desired group for justifiable reasoning. There is no balance in this system-ever.

When Trump became the President elect through the Electoral College, everything that he spoke of as a means to gain control and cater to a certain group of people in America, set all those that were not considered into a series of repressed memories and ideas from a long time ago. What wasn’t repressed was now clearly invited into the open to show its ugliest faces.

Society lives with the truth that ugliness lives with us constantly and we hardly ever get a break from it.

When someone is not saying terrible things and making innocent people look bad, corporations are using brutal and less than sanitary means to beat down on a people to get a project finished regardless of the future consequence for profit's sake.

Cast your eyes to Standing Rock. The Sioux are protesting against DAPL placing a pipeline in proximity of their water supply and the possible consequence of a breach in the pipeline polluting their only source of water. There is the truth it was redirected from Bismarck for the same reasons Standing Rock didn’t want it near their water. DAPL didn’t budge because they figured no one cared about Standing Rock and it would be a breeze to knock them over and the world wouldn’t even notice the thump in the night.

When you are an observer looking at the images coming out of Standing Rock, you realize all it takes is the right thing applied to you, and easily you could be in the same predicament.

You can look back over different time zones of history and see images reflecting the exact same thing. It is the brutality, the lack of diplomacy, the lack of understanding, and the overall lack of not listening to the concerns of people, and taking them seriously while treating them as if they are “scum of the Earth” as one DAPL employee uttered on a video easily accessed online.

Where is the mutual respect? Do constituents not deserve it?

Information bleeding out into the social media zones clearly articulate how one stranger can have no regard for human life. That same person could be riding on the Subway with you, or sitting with a cup of Starbucks coffee at Barnes and Nobles.

When you have someone coming along, stating they care nothing for you, or your issues, it echoes back into government especially if governmental agencies, banks, and anyone else with power are backing these people.

The very last thing the American public needs right now is the idea now seeded in our heads that we cannot trust our government to listen to us, act on our behalf, and take our needs seriously.

These traumas bore several ideas with it.

It brought about the idea that someone in a trusted position of power could use that position, and that power, to inflict great pain on innocent people employing them. That position is the Presidency an any other governmental position with means to invoke a power play affecting the populace. The Presidency is not a place for a hate and fear monger. Nor should it be a place where the majority control of a group for self-serving interests should take advantage of the American public to condone a fascist regime geared to support Republican rule, as the majority.

Diversity matters in more ways than one.

It was the idea that someone in power could wield it in such a way to incite broken trust, anger, and contempt among constituents where outward displaces of pettiness ruled the social media strata.

This infliction of harm could happen to minorities, LGBT, immigrants, and pretty much anyone regardless of creed, or ethnicity; all it needs is a target.  People could be subjugated. Those not doing the subjugation would carry the crime for someone else’s actions.

It was already bad enough that daily individual race relations at the basement level were difficult to hurdle, but having it flaunted on a national amphitheater magnified its effects way out of proportion.

Everyone is guilty for being judgmental and labeling others even before we get to know them. In Trump’s case, he was already a person with a Celebrity facade who slipped from one facade to another much to his benefit.

One of the indicators plaguing this Presidency is: the notion and idea, be it a glaring light, that all the hard work done by people all over the world, and here in the United States, could be destroyed in the swipe of a pen, like a mean child would kick down another person’s sand castle that took hours to build. These people and their actions have done great things. These efforts are to move society to become more independent from the addictions that are ruining our planet and its people.

In a nutshell: Our bad memories of the past should not be allowed to affect our children’s future. Nor should we be enslaved to it forever, or have it wielded against us as some kind of unintentional psychological manipulation.

We have a right to say “No” for ourselves, other people we stand with and for, our children, the World, and the condition of our Earth.We have a right to “say No to that”.

Trump could be the ultimate trickster-for good or evil, or his own boogie man, who knows?

What Trump needs now is a Jiminy Cricket because his behavior is unbecoming of a President.

Written by: Angelia Y Larrimore "Redivivus et ultor"