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
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the author at the following:
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