Seeing all these cries about how Obama is ruining the U.S., turning the country socialist, and generally changing everything for the worst… I was just kind of surprised. It hit me while watching a news clip of a woman at a town hall meeting exclaiming in tears that she was horrified at what ‘my America’ was becoming. Somehow I think her American experience has been different then mine.
I was a sophomore in high school on 9/11, when my father’s religion and my family’s ethnicity began to matter. My mom is a Catholic of Mexican descent and my father is a Sunni Muslim immigrant from Pakistan. If racial profiling is correct my family has come to the U.S. to take jobs and then blow them up. While I am agnostic myself and was as typical a teen as possible, if a bit of the goth side, things got a bit weird.
The occasional comment at school was pretty easy to ignore since I was a bit of an outcast already and my school’s large Asian population and my own group of mostly White and East Asian friends would throw a hissy-fit is anything really happened. But shit gets real when the local mosque has cameras pointing at it without any notification and getting on a plane involves unscheduled interviews. A handful of hate crimes latter and suddenly it was surreal. I could barely believe I was still in California.
In my America these thing shouldn’t happen. While I am not Muslim myself, I had been to my dad’s mosque and it was about as radical as a peanut butter sandwich. The sermons were mostly about beening kind to your neighbors and the importance of maintaining the family. Since Obama has been elected, the atmosphere in my local community has relaxed. The camera boxes were removed after the local newspaper started poking around, though this actually happened shortly before the elections. After Obama was elected, both the Pakistani side of my family and the Mexican side feel like we are no longer targets, or at least not directly targeted by the government. Heck, for the first time last month my 13 year old brother was not pulled aside for an extra check at the airport because of his name, as was done for the last 8 years.
Another funny fact, I did eventually drop out of High School. Mostly because of teenage apathy and general screwing up. However, after a couples of years of community college, I got into U.C. Berkeley and graduated magna cum laude. If it wasn’t for the wonderful safety net that is the California Community College system, I would have been completely screwed. Now I am trying to pick between Stanford and U of Chicago for grad school. So when the possibility of a heath care safety net for uninsured people is decried as an invasion of the government, I say let them in. The government has been intruding in fear creating, destructive ways for the last 8 years, give them a chance to introduce an optional system aiming to actually help some people. Full disclosure, until I accept on of my schools’ admissions offers, I am uninsured myself.
My America embraces people of all creed and colors, tries to help its citizens when they need it, and generally attempts to assist more than restrict both locally and internationally. On these criteria, I think I am getting my America back after a long freaking time of living in Bush’s America.
Sorry if that was long-winded but I just wanted to provide an alternate point of view then what I have been seeing lately.
I dropped out too... Thank god for Community Colleges.
