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Trump

United We Resist

by Deborah Cruz 2017/01/30

The only option is to resist.

I have, literally, been trying to write this post since the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump but I can’t form my thoughts into coherent words because every day there is some new mind boggling executive order being passed down. What I do know is that we have to resist. We the people have to resist.We cannot go gently into that good night. The man is on the fast track to being a dictator the likes of Hitler, Pinochet, and Castro.

My mind has been having a hard time keeping up with everything going on during this first week of Trump’s presidency.My heart is heavy but my mind says resist. Resist the urge to lay down and curl up into the fetal position. Resist the natural response to drown in my own tears. Resist the wrong that is being inflicted. Stand up. Fight. Now. Use your voice.

I feel like we are all patiently awaiting the purge. Those who are complacent are part of the problem. Quietly disagreeing is no longer an option. We’ve gone way beyond that point. You must be prepared to stand up and speak out. You must be prepared to fight because your life is at stake. Your basic human rights are in jeopardy. This man is turning the United States into a sinking ship and we are all being held hostage aboard the S.S. Hate.

I am a woman. I am a Latina. I am the daughter of an immigrant. I am the mother of a new generation of Latinas. I do not have the option of being quiet and not fighting. I choose action, for my father, for my children, for myself and for you!

Women, United we Stand and Divided we Fall.

Ladies, what are you doing? We’re fighting with each other over who should march and who shouldn’t. And while we’re not paying attention, the government is slowly putting its hands on our uterus while Trump is single-handedly stripping us of our basic human rights. If you are a woman and this doesn’t scare you, you might want to get a dictionary and Google Women’s rights.

NoBanNoWall, resist, Trump, women's rights, censorship, muslim ban, deportation

Resist the urge to turn on one another. This is the time for unification, not separation.

Marching was not just about the right to choose. It’s about the government telling women what to do with their bodies. How we reproduce. When we reproduce. How we feed our babies. How we deal with the loss of our babies. The punishment for not carrying a pregnancy to term for several reasons, including rape, incest, medical reasons and yes, even choice. It’s about men having domain over our bodies when we don’t give consent and even when we say no. It’s about women being treated like livestock and not humans. It’s about every single human being born with a vagina and a uterus.

Ladies, our daughters are watching.

NoBanNoWall, resist, Trump, women's rights, censorship, muslim ban, deportation

Photo via Instagram @LatinasUnited

Last week’s March was an amazing show of solidarity in a time of turmoil. The American women came out in powerhouse droves to stand up for their rights as human beings and their reproductive rights. Women across the world put everyone on notice that we are no longer going to stand silently by as the patriarchy treats us like second class citizens.

I’m still having a hard time understanding why our reproductive rights are a point of discussion at all. Why is it anyone’s business what we do with our bodies? How does my choice to do what I want with my body fall under government jurisdiction?

If men can justify this behavior and the right to have dominion over women’s bodies, why can’t we women make federal law on how men use their reproductive systems? What if we banned all the Viagra, imposed vasectomies on any man we saw unfit to reproduce and, just for shits and giggles, give every man a good lecturing about how he should not be masturbating because it is fornicating and that is a sin under God’s law? What if we made touching your balls without permission a sin punishable by jail time, just because?

You know what’s even more disgusting than men having their hands metaphorically in our uteruses, controlling how we use our own bodies? Women who mock the feminists, the marchers and the women fighting for equal rights for women. The ladies who stand on the sidelines and support a man who categorically believes you are a second class citizen.

You ladies are self-loathing pieces of shit and I wish there was a way that you could sign a petition to show your lack of support for women’s rights so that when we do get our rights fully and unequivocally, you can have yours taken away. Your body, your choice. You don’t want them. Hand them over. But, I’m not going to fight against you, my sisters, because I will fight for you and whether you know it or not, you deserve to be treated and paid and recognized as a full human.

I will resist my urge to abandon and mock you.

We have to stop fighting each other because our daughters are not equal to our sons, not in the eyes of the law. Not in pay. We are not the same as men. We are not equal. Sit with that for a moment, we.are.not.equal. Not under our government. We are second class, at best. Is that what you want for your daughters?

Equal rights for others does not mean less rights for you, It’s not pie.

Censorship of the United States

We are being censored to our death. Since before the election, people who have defended their choice to vote for Trump have always prefaced it with,

“I don’t think he is actually as racist/anti-woman/homophobic/xenophobic/anti-disabled/anti-poor as he pretends to be.”

Apparently, none of these people have ever heard of the saying, “when someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Actions speak louder than words and your vote said everything.

Now, we live in a world of censorship where randomly shutting down U.S. government social media accounts that tell a truth that contradict the alternative facts, ignoring the press when they ask hard questions, shutting the press out and eliminating the transparency of the presidency, “alternative facts” and straight up lies are all acceptable behavior by our leader.

We are beginning to get only the news Trump wants us to have. Where was the coverage of the protests the night before the inauguration? The coverage of the women marchers and the #NoBanNoWall protestors? Trump even brings along his own people to applaud when he gives these unbelievable speeches to fool us into thinking anything he says is worthy of applause. It’s a tactic used to deceive us into believing we are misunderstanding because surely there would not be applauding for something so outlandish as the complete deconstruction of our government.

The man is playing the shell game with the American people, in one hand he is signing outlandish orders and while we are protesting he is quietly slipping Bannon, a known white supremacist, into his cabinet. The man is filling his cabinet, one-by-one, with less and less qualified people.

Trump is turning the United States into a sinking ship that he nor none of his cabinet know how to drive and all the American people are stuck along for the ride. His entire cabinet is made up of billionaires who are not qualified for their positions and who are so out of touch with the average American that it is ridiculous to expect them to be able to relate. Pay attention people, this is your life we are talking about here.

Resist like your life depends on it because it probably does.

We’re not paying for the fucking wall.

A few years ago, when I had my miscarriage, I got a bill for a few thousand dollars to pay for what the hospital referred to as a “Missed abortion.” To say I was insulted and hurt would be the understatement of the year. It’s like someone murdering you and you going to jail. The miscarriage happened to me. It was bad enough that I had to pay for it like it was a new bag or I got new a new nose or something but then to call it a “missed abortion” that cut like a knife. That’s about how the Mexicans feel about paying for a wall to keep them out. Are you kidding me? No, they’re not paying for a wall that so clearly puts them on the receiving end of the biggest insult the U.S. government could issue against an ally.

My dad is an immigrant who has papers to legally be here. He’s lived here for almost 50 years. That’s longer than he lived in his native Mexico. He is now retired and currently in Mexico, as he goes there for the winter months. I don’t even know if he will be able to come back, at the rate Trump is throwing people out. What if his papers get revoked? This is a very real and legitimate concern of mine.

Trump enacted the Muslim ban. If you don’t see the problem with this, then there is something wrong with you. Our government is actively detaining people at the airports and sending people back. People who have lives, families, and jobs here simply because their skin is brown and maybe, they don’t worship like we do. Saying all Muslims are terrorists is the same as saying all Christians are members of the Westboro Baptist.

I’m a Christian. I am Catholic under a pope who does not condone this Muslim ban. You cannot call yourself a Christian and disobey the fundamental teaching of the church to love your brothers and sisters as you love yourself. So to ban Muslims under the guise of Christianity is simply dressing your hate up as religion and it is not possible. The two do not line up.

America is a country born on the back of immigrants. The whole premise of our country is that it is a place where people could come when fleeing religious persecution and unjust, tyrannical governments to pursue a better quality of life. This is why we are known as a melting pot. This is what makes America great but Trump doesn’t agree.

photo via Instagram @nicoalexa

Keeping people out of our country, turning children in need away, sending people seeking political amnesty from a tyrannical dictatorship goes against everything this country stands for. It is issuing a death sentence. It’s like locking people in a burning house. We are killing them.

Calling people rapists, drug lords and terrorists are doing nothing but villainizing the victims. Have we all forgotten what happened to the Jews during the Nazi reign? And it wasn’t just the Jews that Hitler destroyed.

Hitler put 6 million Polish people (Jewish and Christian) into his concentration camps, as well as people from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Holland, France and even Germany. There were 11 million victims of the Holocaust. He targeted Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma Gypsies, Courageous Resisters, Priests and Pastors, Homosexuals, people who were disabled, Black children and anyone in an interracial marriage. Does any of this sound familiar to what we are looking down the barrel at right now?

“First we need to examine Hitler’s egocentric and maniac ideology. Hitler, who was Chancellor of Germany during the Holocaust, came to power in 1933 when Germany was experiencing severe economic hardship. Hitler promised the Germans that he would bring them prosperity and that his military actions would restore Germany to a position of power in Europe.
Hitler had a vision of a Master Race of Aryans that would control Europe. He used very powerful propaganda techniques to convince not only the German people, but countless others, that if they eliminated the people who stood in their way and the degenerates and racially inferior, they – the great Germans would prosper.
Neighboring Poland – The First Target: “All Poles will disappear from the world…. It is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles.” Heinrich Himmler
Hitler’s first target was Germany’s closest neighbor to the east, Poland. An agricultural country with little military power. Hitler attacked Poland from three directions on September 1, 1939 and in just over one month, Poland surrendered — unable to defend itself against the powerful German prowess.
In Poland, Hitler saw an agricultural land in close proximity to Germany, populated by modest but strong and healthy farmers. Hitler quickly took control of Poland by specifically wiping out the Polish leading class — the Intelligentsia. During the next few years, millions of other Polish citizens were rounded up and either placed in slave labor for German farmers and factories or taken to concentration camps where many were either starved and worked to death or used for scientific experiments.”

Do you see the similarities? To read more similarities, read more from this article about the Non-Jewish victims of the holocaust. Just in case you think you are safe from the New Nationalists because you are white?

Edmund Burke once said, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

Please know your history or you will fall victim to it. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be a part of a history that destroys our country under a government that cares nothing for us but for what we can do for it.

I will not stand idly by as my rights are stripped away one by one. I am a human being and so are you and we have to stick together to fight against what is sure to be history repeating itself. It’s already begun. It’s been a week. What do you think this will all look like in the history books in after 4 years? Viva La Resistance!

It’s time to mobilize. Get into formation ladies, gentleman, children, homosexuals, Muslims, Latinos, Disabled people and the poor and disenfranchised. Time to protect our freedoms and our human rights and dignity.

Give us your tired, your poor and your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

What are you doing to resist?

2017/01/30 8 comments

Blackish, racism, Trump, post-obama, election

Blackish Turns Trump Lemons into Lemonade

by Deborah Cruz 2017/01/12

written by Deborah Cruz

Do you watch Blackish? We do. It’s one of those shows that we watch as a family the day after it airs because simply put, we can personally relate to many of the topics of the show but none more than this week’s episode, “Lemons.”

In 30 minutes, Blackish brilliantly covered everything that I’ve felt in the past 2 months about the election. Some of it, I’ve said on here before and more recently, I’ve gone quiet because I’ve been processing. I’ve been preparing to keep on fighting for equality. This fight is nothing new to me as a Latina woman, and if you are an African American, a member of the LGBTQ community, a person of the Muslim or Jewish community, disabled or any minority for that matter that was looking forward and hung all of our hopes of equality on a white woman, you know exactly what I’ve been feeling.

In retrospect, I guess we were all a bit naïve. We got cocky and complacent and we thought Hillary Clinton had it in the bag and she was the change/ the chance for true equality that we were all waiting for and maybe we put that on her because she was a white woman. Maybe somewhere deep down inside we felt like we needed permission/ confirmation of our equality from a Caucasian. How ironic is it that white women are the very exact ones who failed us at the polls?

We’re equal. We’re human. We don’t need anyone to make it alright. It’s a fact. Just like no other candidate can make us less than. Our President-elect may think we are less than he is but it’s simply not true. We are all the same. I don’t need him to give me something we already have the privilege of being born a human being.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about race lately because things just got a lot more in your face. The other day I watched Birth of a Nation and I cringed at the thought that any human could treat another human like that. It, quite frankly, broke my heart. I watched it with my 11-year-old daughter and we both just sobbed at the inhumanity. The thing is that wasn’t very long ago.

Then, I watched Loving. In case you are not familiar with the story, it’s about an interracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, living in Caroline County, Virginia in 1958. Richard Loving, a white construction worker, fell in love with a local black woman and family friend, Mildred Jeter. Mildred gets pregnant and overjoyed, Richard asks her to marry him. Knowing that interracial marriage violated Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, they drove to Washington, D.C. to get married.

But soon, sheriff’s deputies raid Mildred’s home and arrest the couple for violating the anti-miscegenation law. When Richard points to the marriage license, the sheriff curtly tells him that it has no validity in Virginia and takes Richard and, a very pregnant, Mildred to jail. Richard makes bail but then is not allowed to bail his wife out. She is forced to spend the weekend in jail, pregnant and in her nightgown and robe because the government of Virginia refused to recognize their marriage.

They plead guilty to breaking the anti-miscegenation law and are sentenced to one year in prison. However, the judge suspends the sentence, on condition that they couldn’t return to Virginia together for at least 25 years. The Lovings moved to D.C. to stay with a friend of Mildred’s but return to Virginia so their first child, Sidney, can be delivered by Richard’s mother, a midwife. Arrested again, they are cleared when their lawyer says he erroneously advised them they could return.

From there, the ACLU got involved after Mildred sent a letter to Bobby Kennedy asking for help with her situation. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the case of the Loving v. Virginia, which finally invalidated state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. That was only 50 years ago.

In 1972, my Caucasian mother from Virginia excitedly went to tell her grandfather who had raised her that she was marrying my father, a Mexican, and his answer was, “You may as well marry a n*gger.” I never really understood the weight of that comment until I watched Loving.

My great grandfather disowned my mother and she was heartbroken that he couldn’t accept the man that she loved. We never met that man because she wasn’t going to expose her children to that kind of hatred. I’ve only been taught and ever known, in my heart, that everyone is equal. My parents taught me that. But not so long ago, even in my own family, prejudice ran rampant and divided loved ones forever.

Prejudice is nothing new to most of us. Now, it’s just less covert but it hurts either way if I’m being honest. Nobody likes to swallow their tongue why someone else berates and belittles them and we shouldn’t have to. I wish we could do more than change the laws to ensure equality but actually change people’s hearts so that they saw us as equal because until that happens, we are not treating the cancer that is prejudice, only the symptoms and truly, that’s not much.

I guess what all this was about was to tell you that you are not alone in your feelings and if you don’t believe it, watch Blackish the episode “Lemons” you can catch it on Xfinity, HULU or the ABC App. I have no affiliation with these companies, other than paying for subscriptions, I just really think you need to watch it. You’ll see that you are not the only one thinking these things. You are not the only one terrified, depressed and saddened by the unpredictability of the upcoming term.

But please, stop complaining. And don’t be afraid because I know many of you are and who can blame you. But sometimes doing the right thing has to make you be braver than the fear. We’ve got work to do and the whining and crying is just pointless. It’s like worrying, there is not purpose to it. What helps is doing the work. Fighting the injustice. Making your voices heard so we don’t keep ending up here, in the worst fucking episode of Groundhog Day ever. We can do it. Yes, we can.

If you are disheartened by the election results, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to work to change the situation?

2017/01/12 0 comments

#PrayforParis, Paris, ISIS.Humanity, terrorism, Beirut, Syrian Refugees, Human Rights, Trump, borders, Peace

News

In the Face of the Unfathomable Pray for Humanity

by Deborah Cruz 2015/11/17

written by Deborah Cruz

If you are the praying sort, please pray for humanity. I’ve not written about the situation in Paris until tonight because mostly, I was just trying to sit with it and digest it. I am having ripples of those same vulnerable feelings that overcame so many of us on 9/11. I am not an expert on what has happened, or what is going on in Syria, Beirut or any other place in the world where terrorists are wreaking havoc on our combined societal psyche but I am a citizen of the world.

Here is what I do know. I have seen what ISIS has done. I have witnessed the videos of random beheadings. I know that a terrorist and a Muslim are not the same thing. A Muslim is a member of a faith and a terrorist is someone who strikes fear into the hearts of others with no remorse. A terrorist sneaks in like a lamb and then attacks without provocation. Above all else, I know that we are all humans.

I know that terrorism is an act of cowardice and no matter who is in the line of fire, it is always a loss and we are all victims of the tyranny. The only way to overcome the brutality of terrorism is for those of us who have felt it’s wrath to rise up, band together and fight back. We have to be willing to make the sacrifice to stand up for what we believe in and be brave in the face of our greatest fears. We must believe in our purpose as much as they believe in their hatred.

People all over the world are splitting hairs in the wake of this tragedy. Trying to make sense of such a senseless act leaves heavy hearts making rash decisions and placing unwarranted blame on innocent victims. This is what is happening. Fear mongering is creeping in, perpetuated by politicians and those who already had hearts full of hatred. Bigots are using this as an excuse to proclaim themselves righteous.

The thing is this, we are losing sight of what is really happening. We are being manipulated. The terrorists are winning. If we live in fear and ban refugees from seeking shelter in our country, the terrorists win.

Trump and other members of the GOP are taking this opportunity to push their agenda. Even with fear and sorrow in my heart, in light of the recent terrorists attacks, I refuse to believe that we must shut people out to keep ourselves safe. More stringent vetting before we allow anyone to cross borders anywhere, I get but shutting entire populations out because of where they come from is insane.

Maybe my perspective is a little different because being a Latina I’ve already been on the politicians’ list of people who should be kept out. If we believe the politicians, all Latinos are rapist and drug dealers, all Syrians are members of ISIS and all Muslims are terrorists. The problem with absolute statements is that there are no absolutes in life. People are not an all or nothing sort of situation.

I get it, we’re scared. We are all scared of ISIS and terrorism in general and we should be. They are dangerous, they kill without discrimination and they hate us but I think it is appalling that politicians like Trump would use this terrible tragedy to push a political agenda.

How can we turn our backs on the people who need our help the most? How can we turn refugees seeking political asylum, which could mean the difference between their life or death, away and send them back to imminent death?

I’ve written before about the Latinos coming to the United States to escape persecution in their own country; to give their children a better life. They risk everything to come to the United States to keep their children safe and give them a chance in life, leaving behind everything and everyone they’ve ever known or loved. The Syrians who are seeking refuge are doing the same. They want to live. They have warrior hearts and they need shelter from the terrorism in their own country.

You know, not every Mexican is in the cartel and not every Syrian is a part of ISIS most of these people who are so desperate to cross our borders into the United States just want the chance to survive. How can we deny them that?

Hearts are broken, faith shaken and fear has taken hold of us all but we cannot let that happen because if we do, we condemn those who need us most and we let the terrorist win. We cannot live our lives hiding from the what ifs because in the end, danger can always find a way. We win by retaining our humanity in the face of this crisis. We win by reaching out to those who need us the most and giving them a helping hand, not kicking them in the teeth and sending them home. Remember, over half of these refugees are children.

Pray for Paris. Pray for Beirut. Pray for the Syrians. Pray for humanity. Pray for the whole world. Be safe. Do whatever you need to do to gain your bearings and then open your heart and remember who the true enemy is…ISIS not the Muslim people in general.

I know you’re afraid. We are all afraid but please don’t let this change your humanity.

2015/11/17 0 comments