Congenial-speak #39

Raising Hate

Kids rarely learn hate. Those that do, by the way, are the young adults we saw in Charlottesville. We did not know hate on any level like this in the 70s. (A few in Vietnam may have. Yet another side effect of that war.) I was the beneficiary of a liberal environment, with judicious and harmonious senses from which to grow. At some point we were exposed to the worst human behavior in modern history. We came to know, through travel, TV, stories told, books, America's and Europe's history, warts and all. It was an overt education, subtle, almost subliminal, at our curiosity—as I mention in my book. My dad is a Holocaust refugee. Gradually, we learned of the violence he witnessed as a boy in Germany. We also were made aware of the precursors to that violence. He told us of the gradual removal of rights for Jews. The laws began in 1933 and escalated to the two-day pogrom known as Kristalnacht (night of broken glass) in 1938. But, more importantly we learned of the consequences of turning a blind eye, or not realizing the harm intended, of thinking it will run its course and be done. We learned of consequences. We learned of 6,000,000 of them, usually at our Passover meal. All Jewish children's brains are encrypted with the words NEVER AGAIN. I can't forget to never remember what my dad saw. As an eye witness to the sparks that engulfed into what produced round the clock “black smoke from crematoria, my dad imparted the lessons to us, to me and my sister. I will never forget what he, his family, and the lucky ones of '39 narrowly escaped.

Immersion

Politics was usually somewhere on the table at our house. In August 1968, in the chapter from Ten Years and Change called “When Cats Walk,” my dad went to the Democratic National Convention as a delegate for Gene McCarthy. I was three-years-old and doubt I comprehended much of what went on. I am certain though that I knew of the violence that went on in Chicago well before I wrote my book. As a delegate, as were most inside the amphitheater attending the convention, my dad was unaware of the extent of the violence. In writing my book I asked him about his experience, overall, at the 1968 DNC. To me what he said had a different texture. He said he was learning a lot, meeting people, generally happy to participate in a, I must say, much splintered democracy and Democratic Party. His reaction seemed to not quite equal the “sickness” within the party that US Representative Alpha Smaby identified. He did not seem horrified, surprised that a city's police force could use “Gestapo tactics” on its own people. He probably was very satisfied to have been chosen as a delegate, to have followed and supported his candidate from the local to the national stage. My guess, as I state in my book Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota is that the brutality by Chicago's finest did not have the same shock value on him that it had on natural-born Americans like Smaby. He'd seen it somewhere before in his past.

I imagine that when my dad saw the mobs, the swastikas, the torches (tiki? Com'on) that the fear of reliving the past, that's been omnipresent since January 20—eerily close to the date in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor—took another angry step forward. People who survived the Holocaust can identify. But, let's be serious, any educated human with a good heart could have seen this coming. Anyone, on either side of the aisle, to whom preservation of American ideas trumps party politics, can see the corrosive impact a man like Donald Trump will have.

Who fingered Fred (Trump)

Hate can lurk beneath the most pleasant, unoffensive exterior. It cringes deep in the channels that marrow through the jaw-bones of the most docilely silent asses. Look in the mirror. Is the image you see painted with white? Is it white to your chagrin, to your shit-eating grin? Can you see Charlottesville in the background? Can you easily imagine the angered young men, now identifiable, wearing starch white peaked sheets? Can you see the man who swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States (the one the founding fathers wrote) embracing the hooded mobs? If you answered yes to just one of these, I would take another hard look. What are you really? Who the hell are you? What have you been telling yourself and others you are? Rachel Maddow, who scrupulously tenders her show to be objective, pointed out in her MSNBC show that many of the alt-right comprise young angry men. They are frustrated young men who have been failures with women and other aspirations. These are the putzes whose arms suddenly rise to a full 90 degrees from a nascent part of their being.

The truth of this is sketchy, but police records from 1927 show that 22-year-old Fred Trump was arrested in the Queens borough of New York at a KKK rally. Decades later, when confronted with the incident, Fred's son Donald profusely repeated that “It never happened.” My money's on that it (like the Holocaust) happened. Donald was born almost a decade later. The behavior, the intolerance, the paranoia and bigoted mentality was passed on to him. Many stories of his learning the real estate business at his father's side suggest he learned to hate, to not rent to blacks, to know stereotypes like wanting Jews only for lawyers and accountants. It is glaringly obvious he was never taught of the consequences of those ideas, the long-term ramifications of those prejudices. So, surprise, surprise, it is a product, a benefactor of ignorance that we have resting his fat can in the chair that launched so many decisions to build a democracy. I doubt he even knows the half of history, of the teeth pulling progress of civil rights through the decades. As Orthodox Jews it see like a safe assumption that Jarred and Ivanka know of the centuries of oppression, of the calculated attempts at the annihilation of Jews. They are either a ganz shande (total shame) für the Jews, or father Trump is too self-absorbed to listen. He does not care about any consequences except those that might steer his nail-biting base away. I also believe there is little communication in the Trump family. Daughter and son-in-law never gave dad a history lesson. You lean to hate or not to hate. You learn the consequences of hate. And, if given the education, you choose to pay close attention to or ignore the lessons.