Haven’t Rich White Men suffered enough?

The new president has ordered that government DEI programs be halted and has overturned LBJ’s executive order on affirmative action.

That is, the new president has taken action to ensure that women and minorities stay in our rightful places while Rich White Men can get back into their places.

Not like Rich White Men aren’t already running everything.

Not because the entire infrastructure of the entire damn world is set up to benefit them.

But because they are clearly the most qualified.

The smartest.

The most competent.

The hardest working.

The best of the best.

That is what they think.

They think they have what they have because of merit.

---

So if DEI means nothing more than unqualified women and minorities are put into positions for which they are not qualified and where they would fail, why would Rich White Men even care?

After all, if they truly are the cream, they will rise to the top no matter what.

Right?

---

Why are they so scared?

---

They know.

They know that they do not deserve what they have.

They know their rich fathers bought their way into an Ivy and then introduced them to their rich friends who hired them and promoted them beyond their competence because well, Rich White Men want to pee next to other Rich White Men at the office and at the club and at anyplace, really.

They know that if they had not been born to wealth and privilege, they wouldn’t even be able to get a job at a 7-11.

They know that if they had not been born to wealth and privilege, they would never have had the grit and tenacity to improve their circumstances.

They know that if they had not been born to wealth and privilege, they would be nothing.

They know that they are not very smart and that they are lazy and that everything – EVERYTHING – they have – the power, the shiny objects, the bootlickers – is only because they were born to a rich father.

They know they are pathetic losers.

And they are desperate to hide that truth not just from the rest of us but from themselves.

They know.

(Is “go home” bad? Because I like being home)

At the grocery store, a woman and I stared across a space that was too small for both of us at once.

I stopped and gestured her to go.

She scurried and apologized.

“You’re allowed to take up space!” I told her.

She shook her head and answered, “Not too much.”

---

I want to take up space.

I am so tired of the expectation that I should be small. That I am not allowed to consume space. That I should subordinate my needs to those of others.

I’m done.

---

Mr T and I argue about this when we are walking. He maintains a hyperawareness of his surroundings, including what’s behind him.

If someone is walking behind us, he will squeeze over so that person can pass.

I refuse to think about who’s walking behind us.

If I am driving, I need to be aware not just of what’s in front of me and to the side of me but also behind me, but walking?

No.

The person behind me can do what I do when I am behind someone and want to pass: She can say, “Excuse me.”

But I am not going to live my life anticipating and reacting to what someone else might want.

---

We were on the London Underground from the airport to town. The coach was getting more and more full, but the young man across us had a backpack on one seat and his legs sprawled open so wide that he took up a total three seats.

Nobody asked him to pull in his legs so they could sit. Or to move the backpack.

I probably would not have asked, either. For one, it was a foreign country and I didn’t know what the rules were, but also, this was 15 years ago when I had not reached Woman of a Certain Age Who No Longer Gives a Shit stage.

(I love this stage.)

I watched in fascination as new passengers boarded and stood rather than say anything to this scowling jerk.

I used to stand instead of asking someone to move a coat or bag on a bus seat or at the airport.

No more.

Now I (politely) ask the person to move the item so I can sit.

The purpose of a seat is for human butts, not for bags.

---

I also have reached the stage of Saying Something to the seatsavers on Southwest Airlines.

Southwest does not assign seats. You board by group. There is no saving of seats. If you are in Group A and your spouse is Group C, you probably won’t sit together.

Yet people save seats.

Last time I was on Southwest, a woman near the front had her bag in the seat. I asked her to move it because I just didn’t feel like walking all the way to the back.

She refused, telling me she was saving the seat.

I didn’t care enough to fight, but I did say out loud that there is no saving on Southwest.

It was a moral victory.

---

And as I write this, I think about Patriarchy Chicken, which I started playing years ago.

I wrote about it years ago.

When I was searching for the post, this one also came up: Another “Go Big or Go Home.”

Looks like I have a one-track mind.

Looks like I am still angry about this issue.

They lied to me. They lied to all of us.

Why did my high-school boyfriend, Shep, a white male raised in what I presume was a middle-class family, and I turn out so differently?

I admit it’s not like we were soulmates or anything. We dated for a few weeks and that dating consisted of going to see “Animal House,” spending an evening at a Panamanian casino (I borrowed a blue cotton sweater from a friend and I think I spilled something on it – I am praying that I got it cleaned before I returned it to her), and necking during lunch.

He broke up with me right before the prom and asked a girl from my gym class instead.

Wait. Did he even break up with me? I don’t even remember.

Anyhow he and his buddies spent prom night in a Panamanian jail. I don’t know why. Speeding, maybe?

He was not a catch, that’s for sure. (But he was a very good kisser.)

So maybe our paths always diverged. But we share some pretty significant background (dictatorships, colonialism) that, once examined, leads – or at least it led me – to interrogate what I was taught as a kid and to adjust my opinions.

---

I’m trying hard not to posit that I am somehow superior and more enlightened and that I now know All The Stuff, but I think I can safely say that someone who votes for a convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government and who thinks vaccines are bad is perhaps not a deep thinker.

Hence I will posit that I am, indeed, superior to an anti-vax felon voter.

I will also say that life and education is a journey and as much as I have already realized that I was so, so wrong about so many things, it’s possible that I will be wrong again.

If I am wrong, I will admit it and adjust my behavior, as I note in this post:

---

Here’s the thing.

I have come to realize that so much of what I was taught in school is a lie.

Maybe not a deliberate misstating of the truth, but man did they leave out a lot of facts.

For instance, I didn’t know until a few years ago – despite an entire year of Texas history in 7th grade – that the Texas fight for independence from Mexico was because Mexico had outlawed slavery and the Texans said hell no you will take our slaves from our cold dead hands.

The Mexicans were the good guys in that war, y’all.

I was taught that the US was empty and that the land was there for the taking, not that it *had been emptied* by the genocide of about 90% of the population thanks to the European importation of disease plus deliberate relocations and killings.

I was taught that there were three races and that they were separate and distinct and different.

I was not taught what a sundown town was.

I was not taught what redlining was.

I was not taught that the GI Bill, which is how my father was able to afford to go to college, was not available to Black veterans after WWII.

I was taught – by inference – that only men did important things. The only reason I knew who Marie Curie, Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisolm, Wilma Rudolph, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Blackwell were was because the base chapel had a small library with a shelf of biographies of famous women. I did not learn about these women in school. They were not part of the curriculum.

My college art history textbook, by HW Janson (in the image above) did not have a single woman artist in it when I took the class.

I didn’t know the details about abortion. I was raised to believe it was pure evil. I didn’t know how many pregnancies went bad. How many women were raped.

Or, even more importantly, how so many people want to see women controlled and trapped and want to take away our power to make probably the most critical decision we can make in our lives, which is if and when to have children.

---

I didn’t know I didn’t know I didn’t know.

But.

Now I know I didn’t know.

Which means now I am responsible for knowing. For educating myself.

And that’s where I think Shep and I diverge.

Either he’s never realized he doesn’t know.

Or he knows and doesn’t care.

Because the world as it is?

It suits him.

Maybe sometimes it’s better not to know

Did you know that if you look up someone on LinkedIn – let’s say an old boyfriend from years and years ago, that person can see who looked him up?

So if you have had no contact with a boyfriend from decades ago but are just a curious, NORMAL person who wants to know how the story ends and you do a normal person lookup on LinkedIn, you could possibly look like a deranged stalker?

That’s why, I discovered, you change your settings.

And it’s why you start with Facebook for looking people up because there’s not a way to know who has looked at your profile.

And that’s how you discover that your (very short time, as you go through a short list of names) high school boyfriend has turned out to be an antivaxxer trumper.

How does that happen?

How does it happen that someone who you thought you knew – who seemed reasonable? – is actually kind of – stupid? (Someone you spent a lot of time kissing behind the portable classroom at lunch?)

---

Shep – not his real name of course – Shep is not the first person in my life to turn out to be a trumper. I have several trumper relatives, including one who won’t get vaxxed because she thinks the vaccine will change her DNA.

Oh and she has a gay daughter who is married to another woman but yet, she voted for trump.

You don’t get to choose your relatives.

But what does it say about you when your friends are trumpers?

In my defense, this was in high school.

I paid no attention to politics back then. The only thing I knew was that the Panama Canal treaty negotiations meant that we had bomb scares at school, which meant we got out of class, and that the school bus drivers would go on strike, which also meant no school.

I was very happy with the situation.

This was also when Archbishop Romero was assassinated, just a few hundred miles away.

The staging for the recovery effort from the Jonestown murders happened just two blocks from where I went to swim practice every afternoon.

My neighbor flew the helicopter that took the Shah of Iran and his gold-laden suitcases from somewhere on the Panama mainland to the island of Contadora.

We lived in a dictatorship!

I was in the middle of world events but I never talked to Shep about them. They were background noise, issues my dad and his colleagues were dealing with. Why would I talk about my father’s work with my boyfriend?

---

Shep no longer lives in the Panama Canal Zone – he moved to Texas for college, I think, and stayed there.

I also went to college in Texas and stayed there for years until being forced to move for a job.

I wonder how two people with such similar backgrounds – our big divergence is that he had lived in the Canal Zone his entire life and I was there only because my father was in the military and happened to be stationed there – could end up with such different mindsets.

How does someone who has lived in a dictatorship and knows the dangers embrace a presidential candidate who says he wants to be a dictator? How does someone who grew up in a country run by dictators write something like this in 2024?

 If you wanted to board a plane, eat at a restaurant, enter the country (legally), have a job, etc you must be vaccinated. Same thing for wearing masks. I know this is all in the past now but we should never forget the tyranny of our government or we’ll go down the same road again.

How does someone who saw the inequalities created by a colonial power vote for someone who wants to increase inequality?

Although maybe if you are on the colonial power side, you think these inequalities are OK.

And maybe if you are a white man in Texas, you think things are OK.

---

Were there signs? Maybe. Who knows? We were kids.

But damn there are red flags all over the place now.

Shep shared this photo on his page last week.

He’s not talking about trump.

I don’t think I will be sending him a friend request.