Big Yellow Taxi

I recently stumbled upon a word I’d never heard before.

‘Hiraeth’ is defined as "a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places in your past."

The word is Welch and has no direct English translation, but this is as close to a defined translation as possible.

I was watching a documentary on Gloria Vanderbilt and she mentioned the word as resonating with her on a personal level, and didn’t offer much more explanation besides that. In deciding how to frame and express my opinion on this topic these two things seemed, apropos. And if I mean to make myself understood, then I will start at the beginning so to speak.

In the United States, the period from the 1940s through to the early 1970s is often referred to as 'The Golden Age' of America. We had helped win the war. Americas interest were secured. Wartime had proved profitable, not just for the private sector and industries but for the economy on a whole. The drain of males into the armed forces meant that an educated, capable, female workforce abound, and upon the wars end, the G.I bill ensured that a returning male populace was educated and reintegrated into a society that would see an evening out of wealth distribution and a swelling middle class. War had been good to America; technologies were making leaps and bounds as a result of investments in the automotive, computing, and media industries. A sense of patriotism had United America like nothing else in modern history had. Morale was strong. If you were to reference any sort of media illustrating life during the 50s and 60s, the image of perfectly coifed, educated housewives and college girls excelling at what we now call ‘administrative’ duties will flood any search, men in suits driving to and from work greeted by their loving families, smoking cigarettes for leisure, baseball games on the weekends, drive-in movie theaters, sparklers and hot dogs on the Fourth of July. In retrospect, whether in film, the music of that time, or in print, it is as close as America ever got to a utopia. And that idea of thriving, unfettered greatness was systemic, buoyed at an institutional level, a duty of any governing body to its people, to its nation.

And it was also, inherently white.

The golden age coming to a halt in the early 70s is not incidental.

1963 saw several things come to a head: the assassination of President Kennedy, definitive US involvement in the Vietnam War, and of course, the civil rights movement swelling past the point of denial on a national scale, with Dr. King at the helm. For better and for worse the world has changed since then. For minorities, many agree it has changed for the better, but what many people see and associate as a turning of the tide, imbuing minorities with rights and broad powers, both lawfully and economically, also inadvertently alienated the majority. For the past 30 years the black vote and the female vote has been decisive in politics. In 2016 the Latino voting block is now the largest growing voting demographic in the second largest Spanish speaking country in the world (USA).

The argument has been made that in all this progressive, libertarian, feminist wave of thinking and enacting law in support of these movements, that the interests of ‘white America’ have somehow been deemed unimportant or sidelined as at an institutional level, white Americans have always had their interest served. A more objective and simplistic view might point to still existing issues, such as the wage gap between genders, rampant cultural appropriation, and whitewashing in the media, persistent stereotypes that continue to paint individuals in broad strokes often to the detriment of their character and with no benefit of the doubt. The aforementioned, are all legitimate issues, but if one were attempting to encourage someone either ignorant or unwilling to acknowledge your argument for inclusion and fairness, then restructuring and explaining the way and why behind the argument must be examined.

Human beings have always been competitive for resources, regardless of how abundant or scarce they may be, particularly when ‘doing the right thing’ is not an adequate enough reward. Individual value systems are often rooted in self benefit. This has not been taken in account when addressing any of the varied humanitarian issues that abound today. Why should LGBTQ individuals be treated as equal to Cis individuals? Why should immigrants be given the same opportunities as born citizens? Why should diversification be a requirement? Why should a woman earn the same as a man? Because it’s the right thing to do. Because it’s what’s fair. Because the law of this country exists free of religious bias and assumes that all men are born equal. But all these things aside, why? A capitalist democracy implies some sort of benefit, tangible benefit, must exist to warrant ones personal investment in something, or anything for that matter. It is the reason that we do not labor for free and do not generally part with goods or services rendered without reciprocation of some sort. Everything has been assigned a value in the name of fairness and for two or more things to be considered equal then their value must be the same. And it is within this context that the rub, so to speak, lies. If ‘White America’ exists in a paradigm that seeks to serve only the interests of its members to the detriment of anyone who is different from them, then those existing outside of this caste, being equal would have rather undesirable avenues available to them to achieve perceived equality. The idea of minority’s achieving the same level of overall success as non-queer, white America implies doing so at the cost of either systemically taking advantage of white Americans or ensuring that resources that previously were exclusively available to only very specific individuals are now available to all people. Obviously this is not the intent of those working towards equality for all peoples, but the omission of explicit language leaves room for the assumption of many things. If the argument we presented to white Americans on behalf of ourselves as minorities, also detailed how true equality did not mean denying opportunity or resources to anyone and in fact outlines how white Americans stood to benefit from this widespread inclusivity and integration, maybe then this growing discourse would quell. This is how helping our cause helps you. This is how it benefits you. The government offers tax breaks to those who donate to charity. Rather than demanding a seat at the table as a means of reparations, maybe just pulling up an extra chair will do.

This is not to say that the anger of both perceived and real injustices are not legitimate, but if we hope to channel those feelings and emotions into actionable intelligence and actual change, then the conversation must change. Bipartisanship requires compromise in order to close the gap across the isle. Demands must illustrate how the change benefits those who we require to change. This is essential because the truth is, even in the golden age, this time of greatness and prosperity that so many want to return to was a facade. It was a time that many would like to believe meant that yes, America had moved past the ugliness of slavery, and the genocide of the indigenous people, and the suffragette movement was over. However the ghosts and remnants of those things lingered and linger still and the collective cacophony of what were once silent minorities can no longer be denied. ‘The Great America’ never existed and it is not a place that we can return to, but is rather an ideal that ALL must strive towards. A mirage, a paradise to abolish and remade in a new image. And this cannot happen while bigotry, millennial apathy, western entitlement and intellectual elitism exist. The attitudes that our broad freedoms have birthed now threaten those very same freedoms.

The great paradox of freedom and equality is that it requires that we relinquish our right to it, for the sake of change.