Yes, Barack Obama, We Are Bitter
This piece submitted by my friend “Muscle Daddy” - By Mary Grabar on Townhall.com
Sphere: Related ContentYou’re talking about white people who have neither the family connections nor the racial credentials to gain entrance to the world that you inhabit. Many of the people you’re talking about are those whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe who came to these places to work in steel mills, coal mines, and factories. We know the code words.
You’re talking about people whose culture is little known. We have been pretty quiet. We never tried to impose our culture on everyone. We never insisted on putting pictures of ourselves in our native dress into schoolbooks or mandating that our stories and songs be part of the curriculums.
We tried to maintain our culture without government aid, by forming our own churches and groups, and building Polish, Ukrainian, and Slovenian halls.
We never wore buttons declaring “Slav Power” or grouped together for purposes of intimidation or violence.
The power we asked for was the power of the paycheck which we earned in factories, steel mills, coal mines, or by cleaning houses. Yet, we were taken aside and told that because of affirmative action it was no use trying to advance off the assembly line; we were told in “diversity workshops” that people of color had to be promoted over more qualified white people. I know this, Barack, because I have family members and friends who worked in factories.
We used to trudge in to work and change into work clothes, like my father did. He began by knowing only one word of English, “Okay,” which he found to be the most useful one in the language. When the boss man handed him a broom or pointed to a piece to be welded, he fairly leapt to the task. My uncles were injured in construction and mining accidents, and went back to work.
But what did we get for that, Barack? We paid cash for our houses and kept impeccable yards, yet saw the value of our homes plummet after marauding hoodlums came into our neighborhoods in riots that were celebrated by the intelligentsia in Manhattan penthouses, who saw such violence as justified expressions of outrage over past discrimination.
We went to public schools in those same neighborhoods only to be accosted for our skin color and the presumed “privilege” that teachers said we had. Rather than teach us what was good and beautiful about Western Civilization and the country to which our parents had fled, teachers gave us Marxist nonsense, if they bothered to teach at all. Our schoolmates saw the evening news, mimicked their elders by wearing “Black Power” buttons and felt justified in roughing the white kid who didn’t seem tough. Because we were “privileged”—despite washing our fathers’ sooty work clothes while our mothers went off to clean offices and houses in the suburbs—we were not eligible for scholarships, not even to the Catholic schools. Teachers never cut us any slack. Guidance counselors told us to be secretaries or work in the factory, despite our volunteering and demonstration of academic abilities. Our brothers, cousins, and uncles went off to fight in Vietnam, while those from your class took up arms against their campus administrators.
True, we had our problems, as all people do, with such things as alcoholism and family violence, but we handled those ourselves, and never blamed “society” or a history of oppression. Still, many of us did carry legacies from the old country, of hunger and persecution, of watching family members and villagers murdered by atheistic regimes. So we were grateful for the opportunity to work and buy our own little patches of the American Dream.
We were happy to use a welding torch, shovel, or broom to get them. We didn’t insist that we should all get college degrees. We didn’t have our documents translated for us or get bilingual instruction. If we didn’t know English we made sure our children did and we relied on them.
Your white friends in San Francisco, Barack, probably had cleaning women like my mother (and me when I accompanied her and then had my own cleaning jobs from age 12). As white people from a certain class and with certain connections, your donors knew that their futures would be secure because of their inheritances and the connections they could make in the media, politics, and business. In fact, it would benefit them in the world of “radical chic” to hang around those like you and support your policies. (Great opportunity to be photographed next to a black person!)
Your black friends there, like your wife, see no end to the amount that this country owes them because of what happened to their ancestors. It makes no difference that many of the whites in previous generations also had experienced persecution and hunger and worked in dangerous, dirty, and degrading jobs. Or that blacks and Native Americans were among the slave owners.
In fact, you and those wealthy donors sneer at white people who have had to do manual labor and who have paid for tuition at community colleges with the money earned that way, while our classmates received special scholarships and government grants—from our taxes.
You sneer at those like us who put our faith in God and not in those like you who would presume to know what’s good for us and tell us what to do with our money and our children, and leave us with no ability to defend ourselves.
Well, Barack, coming from your Ivy League world, you would not know much about us. You would not have learned that because we come from people who, rather than letting their communist benefactors redistribute the food, burned the crops in their little fields before they were forcibly “collectivized.” In Slovenia, they fought Tito’s Partisans from the woods and held mass at night when the Communists banned church services. They remember what it’s like to be hungry, ill, and living in little more than huts, while Marshall Tito and his communist cronies lived in villas. Now you live in a Chicago mansion and sneer at those like us who simply want to keep and defend our little three-bedroom ranches. You don’t know what it’s like to have family members die for the right to attend mass.
I know your liberal cronies, Barack; they make me check off my skin color on job applications and ask me during job interviews of how I teach multiculturalism, yet don’t know where Slovenia is on the world map. They couldn’t care less about my culture, nor about Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, or Lithuanian culture. Your supporters often feel free to mock my Slovenian heritage in letters and comments on the Internet when they disagree with me. I guess it’s like being called a “dumb Polack”—something that has never gained quite the opprobrium of other ethnic epithets.
See, Barack, we know the system: Some are more “equal” than others.
And we know how you really feel about the “proletariat.” We know this from our experience either directly or as an inheritance from our parents and grandparents. And that is why we came to America.
Addendum: Many of my non-European correspondents, like those who came from Cuba, agree—as their letters to me indicate.
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Mary Grabar earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and teaches in the Atlanta area. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and published fiction writer. Visit her website and get on her mailing list at marygrabar.com
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May 2nd, 2008 at 5:23 am
Yep, Mary nails it. That’s what my family (grandparents from Poland) went through. They got out before either the Nazis or Commies took over, but one grandfather had had a few encounters with the Czar’s secret police when he decided it was a good time to leave. He never regretted his decision. He was a already skilled tradesman (machinist), so he could command a higher wage right off the boat, and he had a gift for languages, so he was able to assimilate more easily than most. His wife (my grandmother, obviously) and the other set of grandparents never had marketable skills or learned to speak English very well, so they had to work at whatever came along. They were never given anything; all these “dumb Polacks” ever had, they had to work for, and work they did. Like dogs. They’re all long gone now, as are most of my parents’ generation as well, but their work ethic gave me a good start.
I hold no resentment towards people like Obama regarding where they went to school or how much money they make. Hell, if I could have afforded Harvard instead of a state university in the Midwest, I would have gone there, too. And while I’m not rich, my university degree (and, thankfully, my ROTC scholarship) opened up employment horizons for me far beyond the factory floor. So I’m not hurting, not at all. But what I do resent is their complete, if not willful, inability to understand what we’re really about. Like my parents and grandparents before me, I earned everything I ever got (to include the scholarship) through hard work. Nothing was ever handed to me because I happened to be the only guy of Polish descent in the class. Yeah, that’ll be the day. But because I had to work for what I have, I value it that much more. People like Obama, who seems never to have worked hard a day in his life, are not so much “elite” as “elitist”. They have their own little echo chambers of like-minded people who rarely have extended interactions with people outside of these circles, but nevertheless have the unmitigated gall to tell us that they know what’s best for us. Worse yet, they seem to think that we should be happy and grateful to have them direct our lives for us. No, thanks.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:05 am
OMG, this lady is like, so full of shit. Everybody knows that white people have never been oppressed or suffered ANYTHING, ever. Nope, all our honky ancestors came to this continent spurred by the sole impetus of killing off some Reds and whippin them some slaves, not because the prospect of a months-long sea voyage on which they’d most likely die followed by years of more deprivation and illness and back-breaking labor was still a hell of a lot better than what they faced back home.
Jeez, Snoop, stop posting stupid crap like this. You’re making yourself look silly, like you actually BELIEVE that not every white person in America is descended from a mint-julep-sipping, election-rigging, old-money beurocrat.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:19 am
Reading back over this, I see that it can come off as angry/bitter or sad …
– Answer: Mostly sad.
A few (or perhaps ‘many’ now that I think of it) years ago, I had the idea for a book about “Us” - you know, “Those People” Barak talked about.
The shift in what constitutes “recognized culture” was quite pronounced for me, as we moved from a predominately Polish/Czech neighborhood in Chicago, to the Tampa Bay area of Florida when I was 13.
I vividly remember going from “Czech/Russian” to “White”
- from bringing Kolachkies to school for “Nationality Day” to sitting through interminable re-playings of “I have a Dream” for “Black History Day/Month/Season/Year”.
- from knowing that the old men in the neighborhood were watching the early development of my hereditarily-prodigious physical strength - and wondering where it would take me - to “but can he jump?”, as wrestling/boxing/field-events faded from cultural popularity and basketball became the dominantly sport.
My father was a diesel mechanic and my mother was a waitress, who later got her real estate license, and eventually settled on being a secretary.
My family has had cops, soldiers, metalworkers & mechanics (and I have been all of these) - but beneath it all, we were also Those Who Had Come Before Us.
We carried with us those places we had come from - and everything that went along - and those places, experiences & cultures we carried were recognized by the rest of our community and anywhere else we went.
Now we find ourselves homogenized into “White” - with all & intended ‘colorless’ implications - and all the culture, flavor and uniqueness of “our people” relegated to a couple of old boxes occasionally pulled out for the kids at family gatherings (only when they’re young - before the conditioning takes effect and they “learn” that their heritage is as meaningless as it is “white”) - and the infrequent traditional foods, made in honor of visiting older relatives.
After reading this column, I wrote to and told Ms. Grabar that the title of my book was going to be “When We Were Ethnic”.
I’m not going to write it - my life has moved in a different direction.
But I promised that, if she wrote it, I would buy one for every member of my family and hound them until they’d all read it.
Man, I hope she does.
- MuscleDaddy
P.S. - Waltj, thanks for making the distinction between “Elite” and “Elitist” - too many people have come to sneer at ‘Elite’, having been manipulated by the culture into forgetting that it means ‘Selected as Superior by virtue of actual value’.
Rather than undertake the work involved in being better, the socialists in the culture would drag down the great into the morass of mediocrity, then celebrating that as the new ‘goal’.
“When everyone is Super, then no one will be.” - The Incredibles
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:38 am
And you mitzebel are making yourself look like an asinine racist.
Ok…you’re a satire troll right? No one could possibly be that nonsensical in one simple statement. If that were true, then I want to know where my mint julep and my old money is dammit!!
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:28 pm
There’s a great deal to be said for a good mint julep…
- MuscleDaddy
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:23 pm
“…from bringing Kolachkies to school for “Nationality Day…”
I’ll take pierogi (with plenty of sour cream), galobki, and kielbasa myself (sorry, don’t have the special Polish fonts on my computer), washed down with a bottle or six of piwo. Heart attack on a plate. Now that’s eatin’…
May 5th, 2008 at 7:53 am
Mitizbel is Snoop’s kin (daughter-in-law) and she specializes in satire and sarcasm. Sorry if it was too thick to cut through! But she was KIDDING him!
May 5th, 2008 at 7:57 am
We really need to develop a universal symbol to denote sarcasm on the Internet. Myself, I like the winky emoticon, but sometimes I fear it looks too damn cute when I’m trying for snark that isn’t cute at all. Hmm . . . Snoop, we should do some shots and brainstorm.
May 5th, 2008 at 8:31 am
All is not lost, MuscleDaddy. See, my parents (and I) come from a part of the country where all of that marvellous cultural history has been pretty much erased, or more aptly, over-simmered into a big homogenous mush called “redneck”. Sure, my father’s family was mostly German, and my mother’s a crazy mix of Italian and Native American, but by the time I came along, it was all just “white trash”. So rather than pierogies and kielbasa, the traditional dishes of my native culture are dump cake and mashed potato salad (with lots of yellow food coloring, natch). But you know what? The foods, the hard-to-pronounce city names, all those trappings of the “original” cultures may have been lost, but the values haven’t, for the most part. All but a few fatass dicktards in my family have maintained seriously hardcore work ethics—working yourself into an early grave is considered pussing out, you’re supposed to work yourself into a very, very late one, preferably one you dug yourself—not to mention a sense of fierce (and sometimes stupid) independence and utter disgust at the though of relying on outsiders for help. You stay with your family even if you hate them, your life, and yourself–until your wife throws you out, then you go about drinking yourself to death while voluntarily giving her all your income. You don’t quit your job–ever. You spank the hell out of your kids for acts of disrespect and rudeness, right there in the middle of the Wal-Mart checkout aisle. You have your folks over for dinner on Sundays even though you can’t freaking stand them. You do the right thing even–maybe especially–when it makes you miserable. I think those are all traits of honorable-but-”uneducated”* cultures all over the country, regardless of whether they identify as Czech or German or African or get-the-fuck-off-my-property Hillbilly.
Now, the question of why some families, cultures, what have you, disintegrate into honorless, amoral messes while others preserve their core values is much more complicated that what I’m prepared to deal with this early in the morning, but I’m going to hazard a guess that it the process starts when outside agencies–be they governmental or otherwise–start providing the sorts of things like food and shelter that the community heretofore had committed themselves to providing *for* themselves, no matter how much shit they had to eat to do so.
*that word is in quoties for sarcasm. My grandpa never finished fifth grade, but he could do more useful things, like drilling gas wells and distilling gin, than I’ll ever be able to, and I consider myself to be vastly uneducated compared to him, despite my pile of university credit hours.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:38 am
WaltJ,
MMmmm….Pierogi…
Mitzibel,
You seem to have hit it - ‘Redneck’ ended up being the social group I fell in with upon being moved to FL, for those very reasons.
Also, when I’m laying on the snark really hard, I tend to fence it in with [snark] otherwise offensinve stuff [snark]
- MuscleDaddy
May 5th, 2008 at 10:43 am
WaltJ,
The more I think about it, the more I realize that anyone who can correctly identify “heart attack on a plate”, is someone I need to hang out with (though I’m partial to Czechvar, myself).
Snoop has already suggested beer before - sounds like we’re working our way up to a full-blown shindig, here!
what other sites do you frequent?
- MuscleDaddy
May 5th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Aw, hell, I see a Kansas blogger barbecue coming up. Who’s up for grilled fat and bourbon?
May 6th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Hey I’m always up for BBQ and some FRIED CHICKEN!!
May 6th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
What about the other two food groups?!?
- MuscleDaddy
May 6th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Oooo we can have some collards, cornbread, fried catfish……awwwww
Oh MD, you said you are in Denver, since Hillary is close to stealing the nomination from Obama I may have to take a road trip there.
I can’t resist the temptation of watching legions of liberals fight it out in what could become the world biggest protest event.