BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT: On "Survivor: 2016," America's Tribal Council Has Spoken

On November 8th, I naively prepared to post the YouTube link of Maya Angelou reading her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning" to celebrate the election of the first American woman as President of the United States. The late, legendary African American poet wrote and recited that lyrical rallying cry at the first inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton in January of 1993. I thought it would be poetically fitting to hear it again on the morning Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton assumed the role of President-elect.

But instead of Angelou's epic words, I should have just posted this last sentence from F. Scott Fitzerald's novel "The Great Gatsby." Now that I've had time to reflect, I'll do it here:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

A few months ago on LinkedIn, I wrote about rivers and rage. I noted how my hometown of Cairo, Illinois sits on the banks of the Mississippi River halfway between Baton Rouge, Louisiana and St. Paul, Minnesota. Those two cities were the sites of cataclysmic shootings of unarmed black men by police officers this past July. I explained how I'd spent the prior year as a Voice of America editor steeped in the political anguish of Juba, South Sudan, a city on the banks of the Nile River in a country that's being obliterated by mindless ethnic violence. And because of my hometown's tortured racial past, I know about trying to stay afloat while facing an overwhelming tide of anger and vengeance.

In the echo chamber of hindsight, I now realize that throughout the explosive Summer of 'Sixteen, I knew Donald Trump was going to win. My soul knew. My bones cried out. My heart felt it.

And as I noted in a post earlier this week, I have been watching "Twilight Zone" episodes a lot these past few months. They're available on Amazon Prime, which I didn't have access to while living in Nairobi. Each one is a creative gem. In this era of hi-tech animation and computer-generated bedazzlement, I find comfort in those brief basic black and white psychodramas that don't try to short circuit your brain with every other frame. Each chapter of the "Twilight Zone" ends with a sobering bottom line conclusion about some fragile, easily-conscripted aspect of the human psyche.

Consider the 4th season episode starring Dennis Hopper entitled, "He's Alive." It's about a young white supremacist punk who along with a couple of hapless buddies stages impromptu rallies condemning blacks, Jews, immigrants and anybody else they don't like thrown in for good measure. Most people in the neighborhood ignore him, and his only true friend is an elderly Jewish man who took him in as an abused and neglected boy. He also has a shadowy mentor who pops up at critical intervals to offer advice about drawing bigger crowds. His boldness and brutality strengthens after each session with that anonymous specter, even causing him to kill one of his two henchmen for the sake of the "cause" and to attack his kindly Jewish guardian. At the end of the episode, his unseen advisor emerges from the shadows.

I probably don't have to tell you who it was. But if I had to condense the "Twilight Zone" into one massive thesis statement it would be this: Human beings never learn from history. That's what series creator Rod Serling was warning us about more than 50 years ago. Here's the closing line from the "He's Alive" episode -

?"Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare – Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami, Florida? Vincennes, Indiana? Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive."??

That's why I'm sitting here days after Decision 2016, my limbs still tingling from remnants of the numbness that literally paralyzed me on November 9th. It's like I don't even recognize the Rachel Jones who could have been so foolish as to believe Hillary Clinton would win the election. Now that I think about it, Donald Trump didn't really "win." Not only did he get fewer popular votes than Clinton, but like many other observers, I honestly believe he doesn't really want the job. No, the real victor in the 2016 American Presidential Election was History. That immutable, gaunt-faced potentate whose Military Commander is Greed and whose Secretary of State is Tribalism.

In fact, out of all the pundits, bloviators, policy wonks and pontificators who've been predicting the election outcome this past 18 months, there was probably nobody better qualified than me to have started shouting from the rooftops, from the moment my plane landed in the U.S. back in May, that we all needed to start accepting the reality that Trump would win. For nearly a decade, I've been a front row witness to what blood lust, greed and tribalism yields. Why did I think even for a second that America would rise above the tide?

Oh, wait--of course, it was because we elected Barack Obama. Twice. But while we were so busy patting ourselves on the backs, we didn't notice History standing in the corner, with a face like a melted Halloween mask, snickering. By electing Obama, we actually thought we had done something noble, something grand. I believed that America had finally grown up a bit, was finally coming to terms with the fact that while our country was changing, we were mature enough to embrace that shift.

I suppose History isn't completely evil, though. It provided us with the brains, class and dignity of the Obama family as a small consolation prize for the hellscape that was in store. History sat patiently these past eight years and then on November 9th, 2016, it lunged and yanked the blanket off the festering wound that has lived in the heart of this nation from its very inception. In America, it all boils down to this: One group of people believe this is their country, and they are the only ones qualified to lead and deserving of control. They tolerated dramatic exercises in inclusion over the past half century. But as History has taught us, when the group in charge gets tired of conceding, they are more than willing to adopt a scorched earth policy if they don't get their way.

Turkey, Armenia. Germany. South Africa. Sarajevo. Rwanda. Aleppo. Kenya. South Sudan.

America?

Now, some might see this post as just the paranoid whining of a sore loser, and that people who don't support the President-elect ought to put their differences aside and come together as one nation. Besides, they say, the real Donald Trump is nothing like the man we saw on TV over the past year and a half. But the man we saw on TV over the past year and a half allowed the Ku Klux Klan to use him as their poster boy. He called Mexicans rapists and murderers. He pledged to deport Muslims. He's alleged to have sexually harassed and molested many women. And half of America just shrugged and said, "So what?" That's because they believe his past behavior won't affect the quality of their lives going forward. They're counting on the jobs and prosperity to come rolling in after January 2017.

Meanwhile. I'm grappling with the consequences of my otherwise impeccable timing. I moved back to the U.S. from Kenya almost 6 months ago hoping for a joyous reunion with my homeland. Nine years earlier, I had lived in the pock-marked post-civil war battlefields of Northern Uganda. Then I landed in Kenya 5 months after the brutal 2007/2008 post-election violence ended. I lived less than a mile from the 2013 Westgate Mall terrorist attack in Nairobi. I flew in and out of Juba, South Sudan in 2015, while a civil war raged.

This morning, I read online that the Ku Klux Klan is planning a rally somewhere in North Carolina next month, to celebrate Donald Trump's victory. As a police reporter for the St. Petersburg Times back in 1988, I covered a Klan rally in Clearwater, Florida. During the first few minutes I laughed at the absurdity of grown men prancing around in bed sheets and dunce caps that covered their faces. But then they came for me. I refused to let them think I was afraid, so I stood my ground and listened to their vile insults and threats, hurled close enough for me to feel the spittle. When I got back to the office, I threw up. But I managed to write my story and then I went home and stared at the ceiling all night. I watched the shadows of the leaves on the walls in my bedroom, and prayed that I would live to put that incident behind me.

Then a week later, I was sitting in the newsroom when I overheard someone say that a house on his block was being sold, and he hoped none of "them" would be moving into the neighborhood. His back was facing me, and I wanted to believe that if he'd known I was there he wouldn't have said it. But then maybe he wasn't talking about Black people. Maybe he meant Hispanics. Or Jews. Or Muslims. Or Gays.

Whatever he meant, I hoped I would live out my life without ever personally seeing another Klansman. And after my African journey, I came to North Carolina to decompress at a slower, more genteel Southern pace. One Charlotte police shooting and a Presidential election later, I am now more scared in America than I ever was in East Africa. You see, a conciliatory attitude won't protect me from being shot or beaten by one of Trump's most vocal, jubilant supporters who might catch me in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are on a mission to reclaim what's theirs, to end all of this talk about affirmative action and equal rights and #blacklivesmatter...and tolerance. and justice. And Trump's moderate conservative white supporters who SWEAR they're not racist won't be there when that immigrant gets lynched, or when that church gets bombed.

So I don't want anybody, anywhere on the face of this globe to ever say a word to me about the backwards, base behavior of Africans, or the crude inhumanity of African politics. America's Tribal Council has spoken, and it is open season on anybody who is considered different, unwelcome and expendable. When this dust settles, I fear America has just enough power, know-how, ingenuity and can-do spirit to make South Sudan's political quagmire look like Disneyland.

We are indeed boats against the current, steered by Commodore History, borne back ceaselessly into the past. We never, ever learn. We just have to find out the hard way.