United States – On Second Thought

What the Hell Happened, Joe?

I dug this up from a year ago. Given today’s announcement of President Joe Biden’s run for a second term, I thought this commentary would be appropriate. I’ll have more to say about his decision soon enough.

The news doesn’t look good from down here, Joe. Can I call you Joe? The polls look bad. We were so optimistic eleven months ago. Now, they say you’ve lost contact with reality. That you said that inflation is just a nuisance, and it will be soon under control. That the courts are just messin’ with you about vaccine mandates and that it will just be a matter of time before they all come to their senses. All these people screaming about vaccine mandates are just looney tunes, and we shouldn’t worry about them. And what the hell happened with Build Back Better (who came up with that name?). The moderates and the progressives are making fools of you at our expense. What the hell happened, Joe?

Then, I’m reading about Kamala, you know your vice-president. She is either the most incompetent or just the most ignored Vice-President in the nation’s history (okay, so I’m exaggerating). You made a big deal about the first person of color, and then it looks like you threw her under the bus. WTH is happening there?

Every day, I click open a news website, and it just seems like there’s nothing but bad news coming out of Washington and New York and Florida and Texas and pretty much most of the Midwest, South, and the West. All I hear and read about is how you don’t have a consistent message. Honestly, I just want to listen to a message, any positive message. I don’t want to hear about 3 trillion or 1.5 trillion. I want to know about the specific programs and policies that are going to help everyday Americans. About how you’ve united your political party so you can get something done before you get thrown to the GOP wolves who are already circling your body, and you’re not even dead. Yet. They’re sitting back doing nothing but throwing hand grenades with the assistance of that maniac in Florida and Fox News and every GOP member of Congress, and you seem to not realize the seriousness of the next two elections, 2022 and 2024.

Americans may not know their ass from their elbow about science and COVID and economic policy and inflation and that the GOP stands for Totalitarianism. Still, they know when someone ain’t shooting straight with them. They want reassurance that someone really cares about them and the issues that affect them. And the list is long: jobs with good pay and benefits, affordable housing, the price of gas (holy crap, what’s up with that), and making sure that we’re going to have Christmas gifts and food for the holidays. People are just trying to get their pre—COVID life back even if they are still doing their darndest to extend it by not getting vaccinated, hanging out without masks, and ignoring simple protocols. It doesn’t matter because, in the end, they will blame you because, well, they must blame someone in the White House. They say they want Leadership, Sanity, Calmness. Something that we didn’t get for four years from the maniac who was there before you.

Look, Joe, I can’t even imagine what life is like for you, and I’ve known you long enough to see that you do have a good heart, but a good heart is just not good enough these days. This country is splitting up. Breaking apart in all kinds of ways. We need some healing. We’re just trying to heal as a nation without getting jammed in the heart by the crazies out there. We need your help to unite us while at the same time protecting us and our democracy from millions of nut jobs out there.

I keep wondering what the hell happened to this country, and then I realize that as long as I’ve been alive, all seventy-three years, there have been nut cases out there, both right and left, who just can’t help themselves. That it’s always about them and screw the other person. My Way or the Highway kind of BS. I know from personal experience how easy it is to fall into that hole. We love to talk about how we are in this together and waving the flag and sacrifice and America the beautiful, but I know they don’t mean it. What they really mean is what’s good for them, and everyone else can eat dirt. Or is it cake?

Americans. If the GOP wins this year, you and we are screwed. I will never understand how a political party that has pledged allegiance to an idiot can win against a person who can think like a human being and dish out so much humanity. I just can never understand them. That political party is not the friend of People of Color, the working class, young people, or older Americans. They only want to screw us so they can help the rich. No debate about it.

But the Democrats have their own problems. Some of them are also out of touch and think that figuring out a way to allow most Americans to succeed with some help from our government is making them into a dependent group. I’m talking about you, Senator Manchin and Sinema. Look, I’m not looking for a handout. I’m just looking for some breathing room. An economic policy that doesn’t benefit just the rich. Talk about a dependent group. Dependent on a tax system that maintains them. Come on, we weren’t born yesterday.

Here’s my advice, Joe, talk to us every day. Go on national television and use your bully pulpit. Talk to the middle straight about what you’re doing to solve our problems. Press Conferences, Oval office speeches, one-on-one interviews, visit family homes, town halls in Des Moines and Bakersfield, not on CNN. Come on out and see us like you did on the campaign trail. Talk to us straight. We’re ready to listen. And bring Kamala along with you.

DNA: Searching for Me

One in an occasional series of essays on identity

DNA — Simeóna Marte, my 2x great-grandmother

She stands there in what appears as a photography studio in a possibly manually colored picture, her hair gray and short, dark eyebrows, left hand on her hip, her right arm leaning on an elevated small table of some kind, a pink full body dress with a pink cinch wrapped around her wide body. It is difficult to determine her height but not her stern stare. Serious, like maybe she was anxious for the session to be over. Her name is Simeóna Marte. According to a recently discovered cousin, she is my 2x great-grandmother, who was born in the Dominican Republic sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century.

I know nothing about her, but the strength visible in her stance and face shout out to me from another century, another country of which I know very little. My mother’s place of birth, the Dominican Republic, shares an island called Hispaniola with the poorest country in the Caribbean, Haiti. For most of my mother’s life in New York, she spoke little of her heritage and ancestry to me. My mother, Ana Estrella Ruiz, was married to a Puerto Rican man, my father, Antonio Ruiz, whose heritage and ancestry dominated our view of where we came from. He proudly proclaimed that his grandfather was from Spain, the colonizer of much of the Caribbean and Latin America. And for years, growing up in the South Bronx, I called myself Puerto Rican, ignoring my Dominican self.

In my later Puerto Rican Pride teen years, my mother couldn’t help reminding me that I was also half-Dominican. She didn’t proclaim as if to belittle the Puerto Rican heritage but to remind me that my roots were complicated. While Spain may have played a significant role in determining our origin, it was not the only nation that either colonized a path through the two Caribbean islands or contributed to the DNA pool through indigenous settlement or importation of enslaved people.

My family is a study of diversity. We like to call ourselves rainbow people, from the noticeably white European features of my father to the brown features of my mother. While we, as children, spent more time with our father’s Puerto Rican family, we would occasionally meet my mother’s Dominican family. Her aunt and uncle sponsored her immigration to the Bronx, New York, where she would eventually meet our father.

Her mother, whom we called Mamita, did not like leaving her home in the Dominican Republic. Something about the big city. She spoke no English, just like my father’s mother, and I had previously lost my Spanish, so communicating was not easy. Her brown skin revealed years of tropical living. My grandfather, her husband, and I only met once for a few minutes (the disrespect of a teenager who had other things to do). All I remember was his white hair, even darker than his wife’s skin. I kissed his cheek and asked for his blessing, and I was out the door losing an opportunity to discover from him and my grandmother the answers to all the questions I now have at seventy-three. Questions haunt me as I search for my family’s history, from the nineteenth century to now.

As tested by Ancestry.com, my DNA reveals that Spain (28%) and Portugal (22%) comprise fifty percent of my ancestry. That is not surprising considering what my father told us and, of course, the historical record for Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Of course, one would expect France (8%) to be in the mix since that colonizer once controlled the island of Hispaniola, where French is a dominant language in what is now known as Haiti. What did surprise me were the other thirty-eight percent. Twenty-seven percent were from countries of Africa, including Egypt. Of course, it shouldn’t be surprising considering the transatlantic African slave trade committed by European colonizers along with Arab and African collaborators throughout the Caribbean and the Americas.

All the long DNA lines from Europe and Africa flow through the Caribbean and my father and mother’s family, including Simeóna Marte, into the body of their oldest son, me, born on December 8, 1948, in Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. The DNA would continue through my second marriage to a woman of Puerto Rican ancestry born in New York.

My oldest son, named after me, married a woman of white European heritage, and a girl from their union was born who is now five years old.

Clockwise: My son Antonio, me, Antonio’s wife Crystal, and my granddaughter Anabella

Then there is the third marriage (yes, I’ve been married three times) with a woman whose mother was Japanese and whose father was a Black American from Louisiana. We have a son with dreadlocks who cannot be mistaken for anything other than a Black man, except he has a Japanese name with a Spanish middle name. Let that DNA story settle into your imagination for a minute.

35 years — With our very young son, Daichi Gant-Ruiz

Searching for me is not only recording your life events and the family you know as you grow up. It is also about understanding the history of where you come from, the people and their history, the towns, and cities they lived in, the culture they celebrated, and the horrors and successes of life. I wish for that knowledge because it is who I am today and what I have passed on to my two sons and granddaughter.

It is not about what label to use to call myself but the totality of my DNA, my family, my children, the cultures that have shaped my outlook and helped define me, and the people that have surrounded me all my life and that I seek out now in search of new ideas, new visions, and new futures.

What the Hell Happened, Joe?

It’s Finals Week, so there is no time to come up with something original. Here’s a recent favorite from last Fall. Tragically, not much has changed.

What the hell happened, Joe?

Americans. If the GOP wins next year, you Joe and we are screwed. I will never understand how a political party that has pledged allegiance to an idiot can win against a person who can think like a human being and dish out so much humanity. I just can never understand them. That political party is not the friend of People of Color, the working class, young people, or older Americans. They only want to screw us so they can help the rich. No debate about it.

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