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| Our rental house, just like all the others down the block. Our immediate neighbor had fruit trees in the backyard. The small swimming pool was encased in a huge steel cage to prevent both human, and animal miscreants. |
My sister planned the trip: a week in Disney World in Orlando Florida, a large rented house with my parents, her family and my brother-in-law's father. Three rental cars. A pool and a trip to the discount mega store for provisions. I spent the first few days trooping along with my nephews and sister in a daze of jet lag, exhaustion and motion-induced/overkill of western food nausea.
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| Morning at Universal Studios |
My sister, in her unparalleled planning and efficiency, declared that we must enter the gates when they opened to secure shorter wait times for the best rides. As we pulled into the parking lot the first day, families streamed board the monorail to the park. There were trends obvious then: mouse ear headbands, shorts and black socks, strollers. By the end of the day, I counted 21 girls in princess dresses, 11 teams of family team jerseys ("Smith Family Reunion 2014" with "thanks Gamma Jo and Big Bob" on the reverse or "We WILl always rememBUR you" and a photo of Wilbur on the front. There were 9 meltdowns, including a woman my age with her forehead resting on the picnic table. And there were only 3 Caucasian-looking cleaning staff.
Just outside of Frontierland, I'd seen more than one elderly black man in a pristine white suit cleaning the area. This observation, combined with the news of the verdict in Micheal Brown's death and the ensuing riots in Ferguson, and the Splash Mountain log flume ride that featured the characters from Disney's Song of the South felt like a complete validation of the pervasive racism that characterizes my country. America's history- nearly 100 years after the Emancipation Proclaimation, blacks were finally granted the right to vote --and still men in particular still suffer considerably at the hands of the law, educational policy and social stature. The current events ares generating a long-overdue firestorm of opinions, questions, demands, violence and pleas for thoughtful dialog.
A recent editorial from the Hass Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at Berkeley, author John Powell writes," It is important to understand that the continued debasement and dehumanization of all those who are marginalized is not just to the detriment of individual communities, it is unhealthy for the health and well-being of our entire society at large.
The multitude of other black and brown people killed by police calls for more than a conversation. It demands a deep transformational movement, one that recognizes the unequal experiences of people of color and their white peers." The issues of disenfranchisement and of truly understanding the situation of people who do not have born priviliedge also starts with a conversation about class, as article by Gina Crosley-Cocoran explains here.
A pivotal part of my experience with Leadership Anchorage in 2006 was an exercise called the "Priviledge Walk", in which all of us: Alaska Native, Blacks, Hispanic where lined up on a single line. For each question that was affirmative for us, we took a step forward. After the exercise was over, we were asked to turn around and notice where our classmates were. I will never forget the feeling of looking back at my friend Tammina, whose skin was deeply, stunningly black, standing at the absolute back having barely taken steps from her place at the beginning. As I noticed all of our positions, progressively the people with lighter the skin color where at the front. Our answers to the questions were based on our personal experiences. So how can we judge how others feel from the things that they perceive? That experience has made me forever conscious.
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| Found while gift shopping amid an overwhelming aroma of PVC and schlock. Another bumpersticker proclaimed, "Know Guns. Know Peace. Know Safety. No Guns. No Peace. No Safety." |
In Disney World, I saw the masses of middle-class white Americans that were as foreign a culture as the Middle Eastern people that were milling all around Bumrngrad hospital during my visit there in early November. I was surrounded by different accents of English, enormous people with the characteristic rectangular bodies and rolls of flesh on their bones, giant portions of food and the people infatuated with the Mouse. I was truly in a different world and was not altogether comfortable there. I am American, but not this America.
In most moments, I appreciated the happenstance encounters with song and dance revues in front of the castle, the way we always seemed to score the best seats on the rides and serendipitous encounter with a very smiley baby and her family who sat next to us on both the Indiana Jones review show during a rainstorm and the steam train ride around the park the next day. It was wonderful to see my family, especially my nephews, and wait in a line with them undercover during a phenomenal tropical rainstorm that rivaled those here in Southeast Asia. I had fun.
After all my other family members left for their destinations, I forayed into the "real world" and went to the Florida Mall on the second busiest shopping day of the year in America. I heard Spanish all around me, people laden with multiple paper shopping bags, bright lights and provacative displays, a frenzy of activity and loud music not unlike some of the street markets I have traversed here in Southeast Asia.
A quick run through Macy's offerings revealed styles that didn't really work for me from the lineup of garment producing countries: Bangledesh, Guatamala, China, Cambodia.
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| The mall security workers having lunch. One was complaining about the divorce. |
It was there that I saw the real face of Orlando.. At the bus stop, I saw a family get off the bus. The kids were wearing weary clothing. The mother had a haggard, sagging face, blowing the smoke from her cigarette to the side and looking distantly into space. There were a number of folks muttering to themselves, others waiting in the weariness of uniformed service jobs and a $2 bus fare each way. I got off the bus with a few hotel workers and made my way to the fancy hotel my parents gave me for the night.
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| One of many nice small lakes in the region around the hotel. Sign says, "No Swimming. Alligators in area." |
48 hours later and on the first day back at work, I was returning home from work a little later than usual and couldn't find a tuk tuk. I started walking. Down the street in front of me, a 5 year-old girl was dragging an orange plastic basket. Clutching the basket, her father lay flat on the pavement and in an adaptive leopard crawl slithered himself behind her pushing with his elbows and ankles. I could only do a short Metta for them at that moment, just as I had for the two morbidly obese sisters that I saw chain smoking in the special section at Disney World.
There is so much suffering the world. We have to speak of our compassion, our anger, our pain and our memory. By acknowledging and sometimes speaking of our suffering, we can develop the understanding to move beyond it. And, for us to find our places of power and solace to renew and heal our pain. The bird titters outside of my apartment in the morning, the alligator swimming in the canal behind the sealed, air-conditioned house that we rented, the injured manatees eating romaine lettuce at The Living Seas at Epcot and this vast and fantastic sunset on the shores of Cape Canaveral.
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