AARP strikes fear and denial in 50-somethings

It started with this simple photo posted on Facebook by a friend with this comment: "Gift from AARP"

What followed was the best comment string I've read in a while. Here's a few choice ones:

• We are not that old yet!
• I'm 51 and refuse to join.....
• Actually joining has its benefits. It is not an "old fogey" org. lol
• I didn't get a free gift :( I did get my card though) I didn't want to join that club :)
• (From her twin sister) I am not eligible to join yet! You have to be 50 and over :)
• I got my card, bag, insurance...well what do you say? denial is not healthy. lol
• I love AARP and I use it all the time for hotels and rental cars. Been using it for years y'all!!
• AARP is a synonym for Senior Citizen. You're going to receive more junk mail for Seniors like crazy!
• All come on...it's beneficial and outside of that awful fanny pack...the benefits are GREAT! Even discounts at the movies. Besides. We're the NEW 50 somethings...I don't remember when I was young that 50 look as good as WE look. Ummmm maybe the phrase "when I was young". I wonder what we look like to 20 somethings?

I've been throwing membership mailings from the AARP in the trash for over four years now. Why such fear and denial? The AARP is more than benefits; they also lobby for older Americans. They are on our side, and will be even more so as we age. 

Yet collectively, when that dreaded membership mailing arrives just at our 50th birthdays (the first of many pitches to older people we are going to receive), we collectively scream in our heads or out loud, "BUT I'M NOT OLD YET! I DON'T LOOK LIKE MY PARENTS DID THEN. NOT AT ALL! I'M STILL HIP! NOOOOO!!!!"

Oh denial, you are such a sweet, kind friend.

Fellow baby boomers, we need to get over ourselves. We are there. We are on the young side of old. Most of us have grown kids. Many of us are grandparents. I know, it is harder to admit in our 50s and this is not a pitch to join the AARP (but I'm going to finally do it as soon as I finish this post -- after checking the website they do have great benefits and you can even get deals sent to your smart phone). I'm just saying don't be afraid of what it represents in our lives. 

Then put on your best club clothes and get out there and get your dance on. So what if kids your kids' ages (or younger) are filling the dance floor (or you bump into your actual kids there). 

Now that's not denial, that's living! 

Just make sure your heels aren't too high so you can walk the next day.

Girl child at the lake

I'm just back from a week's vacation at "the lake," a time honored Minnesota ritual for anyone lucky enough to have a lake place in the north country, or at least access to one. In my case, it's my dad's place. I've been heading up north since I was eight or so, when my dad, his two brothers, and my grandpa bought a small cabin on a lake near Grand Rapids. They crammed us all in -- the aunts, uncles, cousins. Nearly fifty years later we all head there still, with our (now adult) kids and sprouting grandkids in tow. 

A few years back my daughter and I dipped her daughter's infant toes in the water, christening the first of the fifth generation to travel there. Now that infant is five and jumping off the dock, like I did, opening her eyes underwater to look at fish, and scratching mosquito bites by night. This trip she exclaimed, "Grandma, look at the sun on the water! It's making diamonds!" My heart lurched at our shared love of the "diamonds on water." A circle back to my childhood and forward again.

Back home, I remembered a piece I wrote years ago about being a kid at the lake. Nothing's changed except the generations.

Girl child at the lake

I am ten years old and standing on the end of the dock. High noon in July – 85 degrees. Bright sun, blue sky, gentle breeze. Sugar Lake. Sissebakwet the Ojibwe name. My blonde blonde hair waves and whispers gently against my sunburned cheeks. My thin, lean body stretches to the water and jumps in. Cool cool surrounds me, and soft sand tickles my toes. I glide up to the surface for air and keep my eyes right at the waterline to stare across the lake at its tree-filled backdrop. The air smells lakey – a mix of fish, water, weeds, trees. I dive down again, opening my eyes to look for minnow friends.

Everything is possible and I am lying in wait for what’s to come.

Later, stretched out on the dock, my belly pressing into the sun bleached, splintery wood planks, my back hot hot from the sun bath, I can’t feel the edges between sky, earth, water, me. We just are. I just am.

This place of grace, this state of grace is in me still. That girl child runs roughshod through my veins. We are singing loudly, she and I, like a choir praising the power and the glory forever and ever amen. We are swimming in clear blue water and sunning on the dock. We hold hands and giggle, lying in wait for what’s to come.

Everything is possible. Still.

 

Fear of a Black President

The Tea Party, which is the epicenter of post-racial right wing conservatism, is at its roots all about race. The party's supporters, (un)affectionately know as Tea Baggers, and others like them, are at their roots, all about race. About being racist. About "Fear of the Black Man."

And what set off their maelstrom of hatred and lunacy? Was it that their daughter married a black man? No. This is 21st century fear and loathing. It's their worst nightmare come true: "Their" country (not "ours") elected a black man president.

I am 54. Demographers say the U.S. will become majority people of color in about 30 years. I'm hoping I live to see it. In the meantime, this fear-hatred-take-back-what-we-think-we've-lost mentality is menacing to me. Because it could get ugly. Way uglier. The right is systematically organizing, using fear as their central tactic. And the crazies are getting crazier. The central theme? Everything Obama does is a conspiracy against white people. For real.

Tim Wise nails it. Read every word of his latest entry in his dairy: Black Power's Gonna Get you Sucka: Right-Wing Paranoia and the Rhetoric of Modern Racism.

Here's a few excerpts, but please. Read. It. All.

"Prominent white conservatives are angry about racism.

Forget all that talk about a post-racial society. They know better than to believe in such a thing, and they’re hopping mad.

What is it that woke them up finally, after all these years of denial, during which they insisted that racism was a thing of the past?

Was it the research indicating that job applicants with white sounding names have a 50 percent better chance of being called back for an interview than their counterparts with black-sounding names, even when all qualifications are the same?

No.

Was it the study that found white job applicants with criminal records have a better chance of being called back for an interview than black applicants without one, even when all the qualifications are the same?

No.

Was it the massive nationwide study that estimated at least 1 million cases of blatant job discrimination against blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans each year, affecting roughly one-in-three job seekers of color?

No.

Is it the fact that black males with college degrees are almost twice as likely as their white male counterparts to be out of work?

No...

...Maybe it was because of those guys over at the popular right-wing website, FreeRepublic.com who called the President's daughter, Malia, "typical ghetto trash," and a "whore" whose mother likes to entertain her by "making monkey sounds?"

No.

Or perhaps they finally had enough when they heard about how Rep. Ciro Rodriguez was called a "wetback" by one of his constituents and told to go back to Mexico?

No.

Or maybe it was that lawmaker in South Carolina who called both President Obama and Republican Gubernatorial candidate (and Indian American) Nikki Haley, "ragheads?"

No...

...It is none of this. Neither the evidence of systemic discrimination against people of color in every walk of American life, nor the repeated examples of blatant racism directed towards people of color individually moves them.

But they're angry nonetheless about racism in America.

They're especially angry about the tax being placed on those who use tanning salons. Because this is racist. Against white people. No, seriously.

Oh, and the President criticized a white police officer for arresting a black man for a crime that, turns out, the black man didn't actually commit, according to state law. That Obama would do such a thing--namely, criticize an officer for making an unjustified arrest--means that white police officers are "under assault" from Obama, and that the President is trying to "destroy" the white officer, no doubt because he's white.

Oh, and since people of color disproportionately lack health care coverage, the President's plan for expanding coverage is obviously a racist scheme to get reparations for slavery...

...Oh, and the President nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. And she's a Latina, who notes that she sees the world through the lens of her experience, and that she hopes that experience would positively inform her decision-making. And that means she's a bigot. And the fact that Obama nominated her, as well as Eric Holder, proves that he "views white men as the problem" in America, and that the only way you can get promoted by Obama is "by hating white people."...

...Yes indeed, they all agree, Obama is a "reverse racist" who has a deep-seated hatred of white people...

...And for sure, Obama is the reason race relations are so strained: not because of the ongoing discrimination against people of color, which the data indicates is commonplace, or because of the incendiary rhetoric coming from conservative commentators...

...Or by a prominent conservative commentator insisting that white men are experiencing the same kind of oppression that blacks faced for years, even as that commentator has previously reminisced fondly about the days of segregation... 

...Or perhaps by having a right-wing talk show host announce a plan for conservatives to "take back the civil rights movement," and compare himself to Martin Luther King Jr. This, even though conservatives were almost uniformly opposed to the movement and King, and even though the talk show host's favorite authors, whose work he promotes regularly, viewed the movement as a communist conspiracy and referred to civil rights activists as animals...

...No, none of those things could strain race relations, or further racism.

And certainly not when compared to a tanning booth tax.

While on the face of it, these kinds of right-wing inanities may seem so absurd as to hardly merit being taken seriously, it's important to step back and think about the internal logic of even the most outlandish claims. I mean, no one can honestly believe that health care reform is reparations...

...But the intellectual strength of the claims is not the issue. It doesn't matter. From a political perspective, even the most insane-sounding claim about Obama's supposed hatred for white people makes sense. It's a perfect way to prime white racial fears and anxieties, to say, in effect, they're coming for your money white folks, and then your children. In a nation where the population will be half people of color within 25-30 years, and where the popular culture is now thoroughly multicultural (and thus many of the icons don't look the way they used to), and where the President doesn't fit a lot of people's conception of what such a person is supposed to look like, and where the economy is in the toilet for millions, playing upon white anxiety is the perfect recipe for political mobilization.

They've said very clearly that they want their country back. And if we who oppose the right don't challenge these folks for the racists they are, or continue to shy away from making race an issue (as if it weren't already), they just might get it.

Did you read that? One more time, for the record:  

"They've [white right wing conservatives] said very clearly that they want their country back. And if we who oppose the right don't challenge these folks for the racists they are, or continue to shy away from making race an issue (as if it weren't already), they just might get it."

Need a little something after reading all that? Me, too.

Here's Tracy Chapman's prophetic "Talkin' About a Revolution" to sip on.

LeBron James/Oscar Grant

As I sat in a bar tonight celebrating a friend's birthday the TV on the wall was broadcasting live the spectacle otherwise know as LeBron James announcing he will play for the Miami Heat. At about the same time my Twitter feed was lighting up with news of the insane injustice otherwise known as the cop who shot and killed Oscar Grant and got convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

Baratunde Thurston, aka Jack Turner at Jack and Jill Politics says it far better than I could, so here you go:

Oscar Grant will not be playing for Miami cause he was murdered by a cop

Excerpt:

In July 2010 America came to a standstill and watched television as Lebron James held a much-hyped press conference to announce he would be leaving Cleveland to play for the Miami Heat.  In January 2009 America came to a standstill and watched YouTube as BART transit officer Johannes Mehserle pulled out his gun, pointed it at an unarmed, pinned down Oscar Grant, and shot him in the back. Today, Cleveland wept as it lost a star basketball player. Today, Oakland wept as a Los Angeles jury returned a guilty verdict of involuntary manslaughter in Mehserle’s trial.

We have seen this movie before, and it’s genre is Horror, but it also goes by the labels Absurdity, Farce and Injustice...

...Two black men dominated the news this evening. Lebron James was honored with national attention as he announced his plans for future success. Oscar Grant was dishonored as his death was treated like a nuissance. Maybe Grant should have been a better basketball player.

 

I got nothing more for you but outrage.

And if you are not outraged then you have truly not been paying attention.

At all.

7/9 Update -- Read this fierce poem by outraged poet Christy NaMee Ericksen: My Son Runs in Riots

President Obama: Yes he is!

Need a list of our President's accomplishments to date to carry around in your back pocket? Well here it is, electronically anyway. Rachel Maddow brilliantly sums up the astonishing accomplishments of Barack Obama during the less than two years he has been in office.

Watch this clip and save it (or memorize it) should you need a reminder of how great this man is, and what he is doing to make our country (and our world) a better place. And Maddow doesn't even mention his nomination of two exceptional women to the Supreme Court (who are both young, with the potential to serve for years).

To my fellow progressive friends who complain he is not doing enough, that he has capitulated to the middle: Get over it.

That President Obama has accomplished this much after inheriting a nation in economic free fall and suffering from nearly a decade of repressive politics is astonishing. That he has accomplished this much while being under constant virulent attack from the far right, and while enduring the ugly onslaught of the overt and covert racism at the core of their tea bagging insanity, is the true measure of his character.

Maddow sums it up by saying, "The last time any president did this much in office, booze was illegal. If you believe in policy, if you believe in government that gets things done, cheers to that."

Amen, sister.