Yowzer! Mary pulls no punches!
Why don’t we protest?
by Mary Grabar
Townhall.com
Apr 11, 2006
While thousands of illegal aliens and their supporters converge in major American cities waving Mexican flags and signs in Spanish, polls show the vast majority of Americans opposed to their demands.
So why don’t we protest? Why not simply show our strength and wave the American flag and signs in English?
For one thing, we’re keeping the country going. We can’t afford to lose our jobs. We are neither the elites of the alternate universes of the academy and major media, nor are we “artists” supported by tax dollars or trust funds. We are not the beneficiaries of the tax-payer supported largesse that these elites are agitating for on behalf of the illegals. We are not high school teachers who through the brainwashing of our educational system believe that participating in mob protest is a good civics lesson. As the evening news has shown, many of the protestors are jubilant, defiant school children playing hookey and getting taxpayer-funded school buses to take them back to school.
The fact that the economy of Georgia or of the United States did not grind to a halt, as protest organizers predicted, indicates that it is the real workers of America who keep the economy going. The only disruption from the “Day of Dignity” protests and work stoppages in Georgia on March 24th seemed to be that some people could not go out for Mexican on their lunch hours.
But the fact that the majority remains on the job, while the elites protest, is nothing new. During the 1960s, what many baby boomers think of as the time when they ‘changed the world,’ it was overwhelmingly the well-to-do or government-supported students who were out there getting stoned, attending teach-ins, and occupying deans’ offices. But it’s easy to buy the grooviest clothes and participate in such activities if Daddy is paying your tuition and living expenses. It’s easy to take up arms and organize Black Panther meetings if you are attending an Ivy League school on special scholarship. It’s easy to substitute rap sessions for actual teaching if you have tenure.
But those who have to work do not have time to march and protest. I know that from my own experience. As the daughter of Eastern European blue-collar immigrants, who both worked, I was denied the financial aid that went to those of special racial groups or income levels. I started saving the money I earned from housecleaning and babysitting from my pre-teen years and continued working throughout my college years. If one is writing a check for tuition from tips, she is not likely to skip class and take to the streets.
But today “activist” has become a profession. It is listed in a kind of resume on a billboard for “urban wear,” in which a youth strikes a sulky pose. Radical chic today means looking the part of “activist,” and that includes dreadlocks and designer chic clothing.
What is the job description for “activist”? It includes a rejection of everything that has come before the “activist” has discovered his own profundity—usually by the age of eighteen. Often this youthful wisdom matches that of his Marxist teacher. An activist sees violence in a positive light, as a sort of aesthetic display. But most activists live far away from such violence. From their offices they just like to write about the redemptive qualities of violence as Norman Mailer did in his The White Negro. In this little known 1957 pamphlet, Mailer presents the “Negro” male as the new model for the rebellious white male. It was the black male’s “authenticity,” manifested by his propensity to violence, that Mailer praised. Thomas Pynchon, literary darling of the 1960s radicals, similarly equated a rejection of traditional values through violence with manhood. For the readers of the New York Times Magazine, in their penthouse suites, he presents them with his insights in a 1966 article titled “A Journey into the Mind of Watts”:
<<< As this summer warms them [the residents of Watts] up, last August’s riot is being remembered less as chaos and more as art. Some talk now of a balletic quality to it, a coordinated and graceful drawing of cops away from the center of the action, a scattering of The Man’s power, either with real incidents or false alarms. >>>
In this article Pynchon shows his empathy for disaffected residents, “boys who like to wear Malcolm hats, or Afro haircuts,” who reject the job-seeking advice from counselors at government-sponsored programs. For Pynchon, “Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who you really are.”
But for me, as a school girl in my working class neighborhood of Rochester, New York, the riots that devastated my neighborhood and school hardly had a “balletic quality.” Rioters beat up Otto, a man close to retirement who had spent his working life patiently filling bags with penny candy for school children. His boarded up corner store, the former site of Friday after-school sugar “happy hours,” was hardly aesthetic. Nor were the other boarded up businesses like the barber shop that my father had patronized.
It is the liberal elites who have the means to protest and disparage what others have worked hard for. It is the intellectual elites who think of themselves as too enlightened to engage religion, particularly the Christian. It is the leftist elites who reject the idea of God and see it as their mission to bring about salvation by their own ideologies. Some of them are like Cardinal Mahony, Catholic bishop of Los Angeles, who confuses ideology with religion, as his sermons calling for the support of illegal aliens demonstrate. These elites preach charity, but a charity that comes from the force of government.
But while the mobs continue to run wild, we will continue to worship God. We will drop our hard-earned dollars into the plate. We will adopt abandoned children. We will volunteer in our communities. We will support missionaries who preach the Good News about freedom, self-determination, and a sense of self that comes not from attention-getting displays of contempt for the hard work of others, but from a relationship with a loving God and a loving respect for one’s neighbor.
So while those out there protesting on behalf of the latest group to which they can attach to make themselves look good, relive the rush they and their parents experienced in the 1960s, the rest of us will continue to work and keep the country going. We will shake our heads as we watch them on the evening news. And like those quiet hard workers who voted in a new Republican administration with Richard Nixon, we will bide our time and remember those disgusting displays of contempt for this country by lawbreakers and their leaders.
Mary Grabar teaches at Clayton State University located in Atlanta, Georgia.
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