The hypocrisy of the season

You may find it ironic, especially as the nation raises the ghosts of my ancestors and gives thanks for the colonization of our homeland, but you won’t find me rejecting Syrian refugees.

It’s been nearly 400 years since the Wampanoag welcomed the pilgrims to live in our territory. By the time our Massasoit, Oosameequan, made his peace with them more than half of the Mayflower passengers had died. They endured an incredible and harrowing journey packed like sardines in an ill equipped ship to a new frontier thousands of miles from their homeland. They were men, women and children who fled religious persecution. Sound familiar?

When I imagine what Oosameequan might have been thinking looking into the eyes of an English born child staring back at him with wanting wide blue eyes and wispy golden hair blowing over her fair skinned face, her only crime in her faith, his decision had to be easy. And despite what occurred in the next generation, I don’t regret the welcoming tradition that still thrives among the Wampanoag to this day.

As Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, along with more than half of our country’s narrow minded state leaders, paint Syrians and Muslims with a broad stroke of potential threat they achieve exactly what the terrorists want from us - fear.

I have room in my home and my heart for Syrian refugees. Because it isn’t the people that bring hatred, it’s an ideology that consumes them. Historically it was an ideology fueled by Manifest Destiny and endorsed by the Doctrine of Discovery that sanctioned the oppression, wars and genocide perpetrated on Native Americans. An ideology of intolerance to differences.

Turning that boatload of hapless pilgrims away wouldn't have changed that eventual outcome. Change will come when we are consumed by knowledge, respect and tolerance for others. Stripping the ideology of hate in the name of false gods of any integrity. Like the Parisian man who lost his wife in the attack on Paris earlier this month but refused to answer hate with more hate.

Last week I was comforted to hear President Barak Obama offer clarity on the issue of what to do with refugees when he said that our greatest weapon against terrorists is to be fearless. But who was really paying attention?

As you gather together on the holiday inspired by this nation's original refugees feasting on your cornucopia of good fortune will you be serving hypocrisy pie for desert?

Closing our country to fleeing Syrians is not only the wrong thing to do, it will only provide a false sense of security. Our borders, like those around the globe, are eminently porous. Even Donald Trump’s money can’t build a wall high enough to shut us in. And if he could, is that really what we want?

Are our memories so short that we don’t remember how our nation breeds terrorists? From the government sanctioned genocide on Native American reservations to the wholesale lynching of blacks in the south by the KKK? Have we forgotten James Huberty gunned down 21 people in a San Diego McDonalds in 1984? The 1986 shooting in Edmond, Oklahoma when postal worker Patrick Sherrill killed 14 people making the term “going postal” a household phrase? That in 1991 George Hennard killed 22 people in a Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas? In 1995 Timothy McVeigh was far more calculating when he made a 4,800 pound bomb of easily available materials and a truck load of fertilizer killing 168 people including children he knew to be playing in a day care in the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold set out to commit the most heinous and unimaginable school shooting the nation had ever seen killing 13 classmates in Columbine, Colorado. Their vicious act has since trended among mentally unstable teens with access to guns only to be outdone in particularly savage fashion in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut where Adam Lanza killed 20 first graders and six adults before he killed himself.

Carnage from mass shootings in places like Atlanta, Fort Worth, Honolulu, Wakefield, Red Lake Indian Reservation, Blacksburg, Omaha, Dekalb, Binghamton, Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, Washington, D.C., Charleston, Roseburg and too many other cities and towns across this nation to list have mounting body counts but can hardly be calculated in terms of devastated lives. All acts of terrorism committed here in this country - overwhelmingly by white men who are citizens of this country. The threat to America is already here and it’s called “U.S.”

Syrian civilians face a horrible fate. Trapped between ISIS militants and a corrupt and brutal government they have little choice but to risk their lives crossing dangerous seas in poorly equipped boats to foreign lands hoping to find refuge. Sound familiar?

To deny refuge to the truly disenfranchised and threatened innocents of the world, who are the real terrorists? Opening our boarders to refugees includes risk, but it’s risk far out weighted by the creation of a larger state of common good will toward an objective for world wide peace and understanding. Make that the dominant ideology, and while we are at it spread the word - killing in the name of your god does not make you a martyr and there are no virgins waiting for you in heaven.

Things my daddy gave me.

Obsessively I squirrel away a tiny neatly boxed bar of soap, the mini shampoo and conditioner, and even the shower cap I will never use and stuff it into a puckered side pocket of my luggage. In the morning a chambermaid will replenish the supply and I will repeat the hoarding ritual nostalgic of my father.

When I was a little girl he traveled frequently on business. Daddy was a big important marketing executive for Honeywell where the corporate giants of cutting edge computer technology proudly proclaimed him to be the first Native American to be promoted to such a lofty position in the burgeoning industry. Daddy smiled and posed for pictures like a rare bird just captured out of the rainforest.

Clunk – that would be the sound of Daddy’s head hitting the glass ceiling.

Thank God he ignored imposed limitations to pursue his dreams. What a legend he left.

He was among the founders of our modern day Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council in 1972 and lead the tribe for many years, blazing the trail to federal acknowledgement. During that time he also secured the piece of tribal land we call "55 acres" where our new tribal government center opened last week.

To me he was daddy first and when he was traveling around as part of corporate America he never forgot his little girl.

Honeywell was a household name in the 1960s that would rival Apple today. They toured my daddy around the country so he could sell information systems that filled entire rooms, spit out reams of cryptically encoded paper and operated on key punch cards. Today an eight year old can hold all that technology in the palm of his hand and operate it with his thumb.

Ask the kid what Honeywell is and perplexed, he will tap his tiny keyboard and within seconds “Google” the correct answer.

When daddy traveled I missed him terribly, perhaps more than my mother did. I was lonesome for his games and stories, his eagerness to curl up on the couch with me and my brothers on a Saturday morning to watch Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner.

“Beep, beep!”

Back then I was a shameless tattle tale, ratting out my brothers for calling me “gunky” or pinching me or stealing my Barbie and forcing her into G.I. Joe’s tent. Any of these offenses would work me into a tearful protest that was not nearly as effective when mommy was the enforcer.

Mommy was the consummate moderate when it came to the boy’s antics. She would retrieve my doll, admonish the culprit, acknowledge my hurt feelings and encourage us to play nicely. To the contrary my whimpering would inspire Daddy to bellow theatrically “who is bothering my little girl?!” Daddy would cuddle me close and wipe my crocodile tears as my brothers protested the obvious partiality.

So daddy’s homecoming was always a celebrated event for me. My biggest fan was home and he always had a souvenir from his trip, a surprise that was never really a surprise nonetheless cherished as if I had never seen one just like it.

Daddy would pop open his travel case on his bed and unpack his Right Guard, his shaving kit and wrinkled business clothes.

“Oh…” he would say in the same dramatic voice he used to acknowledge my temper tantrum, “is there something in here for you?”

Russell M. Peters III visiting his great-granddad's headstone. 

I was giddy watching him dig around in the pockets to produce the tiny bar of soap, neatly wrapped in paper with the words “Howard Johnson” written in orange on the package.

It filled me with delight that little soap did. Even many years later as I realized it wasn’t purchased, and in fact nothing more than a savvy marketing ploy to be stolen by design. To me it was uniquely the soap my daddy gave me.

Bathroom swag is standard hospitality industry marketing these days only now it comes in the form of a glycerin facial cleanser wrapped in a delicate organic rice paper. The bath bar freckled with exfoliating elements could be mistaken for soap that had been dropped in the sand (and quite honestly it probably was) and the shampoo and conditioner is keratin infused.  There are also bath salts, cotton balls and Q-Tips, a buffing cloth to shine your shoes, and a sewing kit. I take it all like a common thief and bring it home to my unimpressed children.

“Really mom? You went to Vegas and all I get is this bar of soap?”

Just a bar of soap…  I guess some traditions skip a generation.