Friday, August 28, 2020

KAMALA HARRIS AIN’T NO LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

 

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

 

Among all the statements Senator Kamala Harris made in her acceptance speech as the Democratic nominee for Vice President of the United States brought to us on television the other night, “I know a predator when I see one,” stuck with me for a couple of days. It made me look at the whole issue of predators anew. That the statement came from Kamala Harris lays evidence directly in my lap that she owns a perspective unavailable to me, for the reason of who she is, and who I am not—a perspective essential for us all at this pressing time, it seems obvious to me. She is telling us to wake up, to grow up—life in the United States, in fact in the world, is not the way many of us believe it to be, and she is the physical evidence to prove it.

I was a serious-minded five-and-a-half-year old when television broadcasting first came to my hometown. Actually, it arrived officially on April 3, 1949, two days before my little brother David’s fourth birthday. WLW-C (Channel 3), offering only four hours of daily air-time, was Columbus’ only station back then. Even though its lineup was restricted to a travel show, comedy acts, and an organ-music concert, and the reception rife with difficulties, the in-home moving pictures hypnotized us. An earthquake couldn’t pry us away. Oftentimes, we stared for hours at nothing but the squiggly lines of the TV’s test pattern, waiting with bated breath for it to switch to some show that would tell us what to believe. A family across the street was the first in our neighborhood to get a television set, a black and white, ten-inch screen, console model that was a sizable piece of wood furniture, its back comprising a nest of glass tubes and wires bewildering to the layman examiner.

My main purpose in life back in those days was to keep tabs on my little brother. He was born with an over-ripe leaning toward wanderlust, and he kept me desperately in chase of him. It was an assignment entirely compatible with my essential maternal nature, though. Six months or so before we got our own TV, many very early mornings I found David parked in front of our neighbor’s television, most of the time stripped down to his under pants and tee-shirt. I clucked and huffed—so often aghast at his naughty nonchalance. Even then, and as was true for all the rest of the sixty-six years of his life, rascally David delighted in flustering me. Over the years, and although he loved the fun of it, it also infuriated him that I remained such easy prey for him. He would turn red-faced and grab me by the shoulders: “Lin—what’s wrong with you? You’re too d#%& trusting!”

I fitted the archetype (model) of my generation, and generations before mine, of a particular and dominant class of overprotected white females. Although there were and are exceptions, among my pack of girlfriends of a particular age, many of us seem to have learned too little of how to maneuver around the dark forces of the world. It isn’t our fault, really. We want to believe in the invincibility of humanity’s better angels. We are conditioned to believe that this our long-held worldview is true. Questioning it feels to us like a betrayal of our very identity, a kind of dishonoring of our parents, a disemboweling of our society. I liken us to the gullible and obtuse Little Red Riding Hood, who says to the wolf attired in her grandmother’s nightclothes and installed in her bed, “Oh Grandmother, what a deep voice you have!” “All the better to greet you with,” the wolf replies. “Goodness, what big eyes you have!” “All the better to see you with!” “What big hands you have!” “All the better to embrace you with!” “What a big mouth you have!” “All the better to eat you with, my dear!” The original version of the fairytale has the wolf eating both the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood. The later and airbrushed version features a woodsman, who arrives just in time to save the girl from the wolf and extricate the grandmother from a locked closet.

Television fostered the myth that sheltered white girls like me had nothing to fear, screened constantly in such saccharin fare as “The Donna Reed Show” and “The Brady Bunch”. We were brainwashed to believe that coddled white females lived in a bubble of well-being, shielded by our personal hero-hunk, who slayed all oncoming wolves for us. Thanks to such a menu, few of us learned how to truly recognize a bad person. Meanwhile, on the other side of the divide, girls of color like Kamala were cornered and eaten alive by wolves every day, or they learned how to escape from them with their lives. In their world, the wolf also ate the woodsman. If Kamala doesn’t know a predator when she sees one, nobody does. And if she doesn’t know how to survive a predator, nobody does.

The world is at a point in which the wolves have gathered en masse. They are pushing against the people; circling, cornering citizens everywhere. People like Kamala, brown people, and black, white, red, yellow, and blended people in the know, are our hope to lead us to safety from the wolves. Red-faced with frustration like my brother, I feel Kamala’s hands on my shoulders, begging me to open my eyes to the threat. Whether as America’s next vice president or as a prominent figure in a different role on the world stage, I believe her to be one in whom Americans and friends need to place our trust to finger and prosecute the predators let loose on the planet. God knows, left entirely to the whitewashed among us, the predators will hunt down and eat us all in the end. ©

#Senator Kamala Harris; #Democratic Party; #Vice-President; #Little Red Riding Hood; #wolf; #predator; #television; #Linda Lee Greene; #award-winning author; #award-winning artist


2018 American Fiction Awards Cross-Genre Finalist - A woman’s search for the truth behind her husband’s infidelity unearths dark secrets and monstrous circumstances, chilling exposures that in the end illuminate her path to a new and better life, in Ohio author, Linda Lee Greene’s award-winning novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT.

Purchase Link: goo.gl/i3UkAV 

Contact the author at the following:

www.gallery-llgreene.com - Online Art Gallery

 

http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com - Blog URL

 

https://twitter.com/LLGreeneAuthor - Twitter URL

 

https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene - Amazon Author’s Page

 

https://www.facebook.com/#!/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor - Facebook Timeline Page

 

https://www.facebook.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor/  - Facebook Fan/Author Page

 

llgreene13@yahoo.com - Primary Email Address

    

  

 

 

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