Rush Limbaugh is responsible for this era of distrust, not Bill Ayers

[The Backlash Cometh]

From my personal experiences, Bill Ayers nor anyone else prior to the 80s, has anything to do with this current era of distrust.

First, I was raised overseas on a military base where racism was not apparent because Americans, white and black, were in the minority. Racism was there, but not so obvious. There were just too many other positive experiences to worry about it.

I came to the US to attend college, possibly benefiting from Affirmative Action as far as placement was concerned, to attend a private college. But not one penny of tax-payer money was spent on my education. Again, racism was not apparent, but maybe because I hadn't yet learned to recognize it. What I first witnessed I attributed to ignorance from anglo-Americans in regards to minorities. At first I brushed it off as social class differences, since the wealthy parents of our classmates kept doing incredibly stupid things, like handing over valet tickets to black students who were invited to their classmate's weddings, thinking they were "the help." Okay, there you see, maybe I was a slow learner. But that's the point. No minority member, ever taught me how to hate. Frankly, Rush Limbaugh would have a direct impact on forming those ideas. But that would came later.

When I joined the work force, after a one year honeymoon, I most definitely felt like I was being targeted by the clerical crew in the office. Every mistake I made was amplified and it was later that I understood that they felt I got the job only because of Affirmative Action. At the time, the hostility was easy to explain in other ways. Every now and then the company would pull from the clerical staff to fill the kind of position I held. It was an incentive offered to the clerical staff to encourage them to work harder. But, for the most part, my job description required a college degree. I had it, they didn't and they resented it. That's what I thought it was all about. Resentment of my degree. I didn't see it directly related to race. Only one staff member was openly hostile and allowed those feelings to express themselves, but in the end, everyone hated her. White and black. She had a meanness about her that no one could explain. The day she was fired it was a day of celebration for everyone in the office. The idiot even brought watermelon flavored bubble gum to a black co-worker, thinking it was funny.

Then I married and discovered my husbands family were marginal ditto-heads. I say marginal because none of them, to my knowledge, listened to Rush Limbaugh. But I got to see the transformation begin. Slowly, the prejudice and hatred that was attributed only to the senior-most members of the family, began to spread to the baby boomer generation, and from them, to their children. This coincided with the cutting back of jobs, corporate anorexia is what they called it back then. At the time, outsourcing wasn't so obvious and so they blamed their loss of good jobs to Affirmative Action and minority rights. The irony was, that in the end, it was young white male managers, who eventually took their jobs.

At the beginning of the transformation, I would have long soulful discussions with my husband's parents. The thing is, they listened. There was a polite give and take. They recognized the racism that they participated in, in their time, like keeping jews and blacks out of their Home Owner Associations. When there was an active debate, I would always take the "liberal" side of the arguments trying to convince them that racism still existed. It was a point that they continually denied, and I especially began to get alarmed at the next change, when the baby boomers in the family, began to sound like their parents. The evangelical sister-in-law, was the worst. One time she tried to stop me from taking the side of the "Minorities", by claiming that I was not hispanic, but white.

Then the Rush Limbaugh years began and the real Republican hate-fest started. I think it was in the late 90s and early Bush years. Every Thanksgiving I was bombarded by the kind of talk that you commonly hear on the Rush Limbaugh show. I heard it from three generations of Republicans, and when they started to attack my parenting skills and upbringing of my children is when I emotionally could not stomach another family gathering with them.

At first, the attacks were directed at me, like putting me down for not finding work in order to put my kids in private school. This was the odd thing. They couldn't support my decision to stay at home to raise the family, though the decision was hardly a choice, at first, due to health reasons. As I got healthier, however, I began to see the benefits in being there for my kids 24 hours a day. We made sacrifices so I could stay at home, and somehow this was viewed as having a lack of ambition. Why would I want to skip a chance at earning enough money to buy trinkets, instead of staying home to make sure my kids didn't get side-tracked? That was their point of view, without saying it. I was setting a bad example because I wasn't out there working for the the $40,000 Lexus. That is when I realized that you can never satisfy a Republican, so don't even try. And then they got really personal. Like questioning if my son had the ability to take a physics class, or putting my daughter down because she looked a little bit chunky. It was a release for them, and they grew bolder each year, using me to vent their frustrations. One time I tried to point out an example of racism, and three of them practically came out of their chairs, denying that it existed. It was then that I realized that we were no longer debating, no longer exchanging ideas. They had become resolved with their ideas, so it was then that I began to become resolved with mine. If I had to pick a moment where my transformation was complete, it would have been right there, in that living room.

It has been a very lonely ride, but once I accomplished putting an end to these negative family gatherings, the next step was trying to give my kids as many positive experiences, as possible. It wasn't easy since we were stuck in a Republican county, and, basically, you have to find ways to put blinders on your young family so that they do not wither from the bad experiences that surround them. The one beam of light came from my mother who I had spent a lifetime clashing with because of our differences. There were many things that she did wrong, but the one thing she did right was keep the traditions alive, kept us rooted as a family, gave us something to look forward to each year at Christmas, for example. While she was alive, she anchored three generations of the family. It was not an accident, in my opinion, that she died on Christmas eve. That will always be her time to shine and be remembered.

Now, back to Rush Limbaugh. I think Rush Limbaugh is terrified that blacks have been taught to hate, because he knows that he's responsible for creating that hatred. He stoked the Angry White Male syndrome, and because they freely expressed their hatred, they created the suspicion that now surrounds them. Limbaugh will personally be responsible for any blow-back from the last ten years. Imagine how you would feel if you lost ten or fifteen years of your life, constantly taking the brunt of their anger and prejudice. It certainly would encourage someone to separate themselves, which is what I did. But it's not because any minority group has taught me to hate them. The way I see it, they painted themselves in a corner. And that's not my fault. That is a mistake of their own making and they will have to figure out how to get themselves out of the mess they created for themselves.

Personally, if it were me, I would begin by tuning out Rush Limbaugh.