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Blackbird Singing in the Dead of
Night |
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| Kamala Harris’s
brown-skinned, immigrant parents are what has Made America
Great. |
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By
Debby Long |
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“ My parents fell in love in that most
American way — while marching together for justice in the Civil
Rights Movement of the 1960s… That led me to become a lawyer, a
district attorney, attorney general and a United States
Senator." - Vice-President Kamala Harris in her 2020 acceptance
speech at the Democratic National Convention 2020
I am writing this in my new house, a house built 184 years ago
in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. My new house,
with its walls made of giant 20” wide, hand-hewn poplar beams,
are partially chinked with old newspaper from a century ago and
its glowing pine floor that creaks and slopes from the footfall
of almost 200 years of families born in its rooms, reminds me of
how old our country is and how long it has survived in a chaotic
world.
I moved from Asheville, NC to these nearby mountains because, at
my age, I wanted to, as Thoreau wrote in 1857, “live
deliberately … to front only the essential facts of life and see
if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came
to die, discover that I had not lived.”
I began this essay on the night of September 26th, as a 100 year
hurricane swirled and howled around me. And since then, I have
not had electricity, water, heat, or phone service - much like
the people who live in the lovely hamlets that surround me. My
house sits at 4,700’ in altitude on Bald Mountain, and my
backyard is the watershed that provides fresh water to the
neighboring mountain towns below. But now, many of these
beautiful little villages have been simply washed away along
with some of the people who lived there. But from my perch atop
this mountain, surrounded by ancient lichen-covered woods, I
have certainly gotten my wish. I can finally think clearly,
undistracted by the malevolent clown show that is threatening to
upend 248 years of our American experiment.
And I think of Kamala Harris, hopefully the first female
president of the United States. Vice President, Kamala Harris,
whose parents came from “shithole countries”, as Donald Trump
would put it. They were immigrants who came to America - to a
country Harris describes in her acceptance speech at the 2020
Democratic National Convention as:
“A country where we may not agree on every detail, but we are
united by the fundamental belief that every human being is of
infinite worth, deserving of compassion, dignity and respect.”
Her immigrant father, born in Jamaica, went on to become an
economist and professor at Stanford University. He was the first
Black scholar awarded tenure in the Stanford Department of
Economics.
Her immigrant mother, born in India, went on to become a
biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory. Her work contributed to advances in oncology
research.
Kamala Harris’s brown-skinned, immigrant parents are what has
Made America Great. America didn’t inherit its competitive
advantage in the world; it earned it and continues to earn its
unique dynamism because pluralism is the mother sauce of
American Democracy. Without it we ossify and become yet another
museum of the past. Today, travelers visit Egypt to see the
pyramids; they visit France to see the masterly preserved
treasures of the Sorbonne; and they visit Jerusalem to walk the
Stations of the Cross. But in America, the future is still
happening, still emerging. American culture is famously
characterized by its willingness to jump off a cliff and build
an airplane on the way down.
America is a hegemonic power, not in spite of immigration, but
because of it. In 1945, when tens of millions of people lay dead
in smoldering fields for the second time in that century, many
of Europe’s survivors emigrated to America. But Europe didn’t
send us its best. It sent us its survivors.
And just as Donald Trump learned from his mustache twirling
father how to be successful in an Old World by using brute
strength, cruelty, and rapacity, Kamala Harris learned from her
immigrant parents how to play that most American of games, the
real game of survival, the game played most vigorously in
America: the game of Natural Selection.
In our game, success is a function of adaptation to change.
Donald Trump’s father demonstrated to him that success is a
function of a zero-sum game known as Survival of the Fittest, a
term coined by Herbert Spencer at the turn of the 19th Century.
Like Spencer, Trump’s is a fundamental misunderstanding of
Charles Darwin’s great discovery in 1859 of the algorithm of
biological life on earth – of how life continues to survive in
the presence of constantly morphing conditions like drought,
disease, and other natural disasters. Knuckle dragging brutes
like Donald Trump fail to understand that Darwin’s natural
selection describes a process - while survival of the fittest is
a temporal consequence of that process. The lesson is to find
the key to Natural Selection – not the key to the weaknesses of
one’s enemies.
American Conservatism has been making that same mistake for over
one hundred years. It is modern tribalism strolling pompously in
the sturdy brown oxfords of the 19th century. It opposes
societal change in favor of preservation of the status quo. But
today, Conservatism stubbornly continues to plow the sea while
American Liberalism, in welcoming diversity, shares in the
prosperity brought about by cultivating the soil. Conservatives
have historically opposed civil rights, labor rights, women’s
rights, solutions to halt climate change, and now even solutions
to manage immigration. But now, because of the evolutionary dead
end that they have created for themselves, American Conservatism
is increasingly becoming a dead language, only spoken among
those who have given up on America and its promise.
Donald Trump is an anecdotal man in an ever-evolving world; all
he knows is what he learned as a child at the knee of his father
– a man who was born early in the 20th century. And today’s
Conservatism stubbornly continues to lag behind scientific
advancement because it seeks validation by referencing medieval
certainties based upon the faulty logic of teleological
analysis. Instead of championing modernity and adaptation - the
philosophy that underlies survivability through the process of
natural selection - it grows stale in its self-reinforcing
circle of antiquated wisdom.
American Conservatism keeps Social Darwinism alive in the minds
of its adherents. Over the course of the 20th Century, Social
Darwinism has been equated with racism, Nazism, and the eugenics
movement - perhaps explaining why those same themes play center
stage today in Donald Trump’s dissolving brain.
Art historian, Hal Foster, says of the Trump era: “[Many]
American plutocrats regard the trashing of constitutional laws,
the scapegoating of immigrants, and the mobilizing of white
supremacists as a small price to pay for even more capital
concentration through financial deregulation, tax cuts, and
corrupt deal-making.” Implicit in that master plan is the
necessity of discrediting democracy as a governing principle.
I’m in a hurry. I want to see this thing happen before I die. I
want to see women hold their power in the palm of their hands. I
want to watch them look at the power sitting there and shake
hands with their sons. And I want to watch them welcome men into
a world where aggression and violence are finally consigned to
an evolutionary past where safety arrived on the wings of
conquest and brutality. Today, it feels like America has become
a boomtown for grifters. And wannabe grifters like J.D. Vance
and virtually all apparatchiks in the GOP, make our political
stage look like a risible Mr. Olympia Contest.
But Kamala is the real deal. Isn’t it wonderful that she comes
to us, like her immigrant parents, to Make America Great Again.
“Blackbird singing in the dead of night… all your life, you were
only waiting for this moment to arise.” |
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