Jeremy hates watching Republican speeches with me. I hate
watching Republican speeches with me. I squirm and gesticulate, trying to keep
my protests on mute and either failing or else turning red and exploding with
the effort. Oh and then following up my outrage with a blog post.
Clearly the Republican convention was not going to have a
good effect on me. There they are, willingly misunderstanding and misrepresenting,
waving their flags and chanting ‘we built it’ as if it means something (when
really, if you look at its origin,
it absolutely does not). But for the majority of it I’m able to sit back and
relax in my socialist communist bubble (did I tell you I got called a communist
this summer? All because I listen to NPR. Unsurprisingly by the same relative who told me the UK has a higher murder rate than the US) while I watch the spectacle of the
thing. Until they get to talking about the American Dream that is, and Mitt
Romney’s “Opportunity
Society” (that one was a while ago
but I’m still smarting), and then I find myself dreaming of outrage and then writing
a blog post.
First, let me say this: I don’t have anything against the
American Dream. It makes for much less of a class focused culture – none of
that disdain for ‘new money’ and far less of the general snobbery we have in
England where accent and parentage dictate class even more so than profession
or accomplishment. The belief that America is a country where success out of
nothing is possible, is a good belief.
Except where it isn’t.
Because where, for me, apoplexy sets in and I have to go to
bed or risk bursting a few blood vessels, is when people get all smug about the
American dream and talk endlessly about
how hard they had it growing up but look at where they are today. It’s not
exactly that I have anything against
those people – well done etc – but I absolutely have something against the
blindness that says ‘my family made it, therefore, everyone can make it if they
work hard enough so we really don’t need to support them in any other way’.
For example, Marco
Rubio’s speech last night. He spoke of how his parents came over from Cuba
with nothing and invested everything they could into their kids so that they
could have the opportunities their parents never had and, oh look, there he is
on the RNC stage.
And what I say to that is, yes: if parents are able, have the capacity to,
invest everything – their love and time and money (but mostly their love) –
into their children then the possibility for success is absolutely there. But
for so many, poverty is toxic. It lives alongside addiction and violence and
the sort of trauma that makes people unable to fully connect and engage with other people, with their children.
Meaning that they’re unable to give them the love and care they need to grow
into adults who can then do the same for their children. In the job I do, going into homeless family shelters and supporting volunteers who play with the kids, I've seen that it's absolutely possible for a parent to shield their child from the trauma of living in a congregate shelter - where nothing is your own and all space is shared and all sorts of things happen right outside the bedroom door - but only if that parent has the capacity to absorb and deflect and maintain calm and love and presence in their child's life. For most though, because of their own history, childhood and circumstance, that just isn't possible and the children are just there un-shielded alongside their parents, experiencing their fear, vulnerability and uncertainty as if it were their own, because it is and because in all likelihood it will be.
I’m not saying that
this presents an impossible situation where nobody born into that can escape. I
am saying that it demands those who are out of it, who have had the privilege
of being loved and well-fed and housed, of having been raised into adulthood, to
do something to help. To create programs that mean those less privileged children
have access to decent education and health care and food, to nurture and
counsel their parents out of addiction or despair and into jobs. To do all of
the things the Republicans seem to think they shouldn’t need to do because
opportunity is just hanging around, waiting to be grasped.
The stubborn blindness of it makes me so incredibly sad.
OK, I think I’m done now.
