I’m disappointed and anxious about where we are at in this country. I’m enraged to see the injustices and racial tensions. I live in downtown West Palm Beach. On the first day of the protests, I heard the crowds shouting, “I can’t breathe” and “no justice, no peace” as they walked. The roads were blocked, and even the freeway closed. After 8 hours of walking, night came and the climate changed. The protesters may have all gone home, and the criminals came out. I heard helicopters and sirens all evening. I woke up to images of the crimes that took place. The damage to our businesses and community enraged me even more. Speaking out against injustice became less important in the eyes of the media, and the looters hijacked the story. The country is now more polarized. People are criticized for every comment, or for the lack thereof. The topic of justice and race has divided us even more.
Still, I am deeply grateful to see the protests in my community and my country. I’m proud that people are free to walk the streets and speak without fear. As I think back to other moments in our history in which opinions, policies, and systems change in reaction to the voices of the people of this country, I am reminded that the quality of our problems in our country continue to increase. And we will continue to solve them. I would choose these problems over the problems that other countries are facing.
These protests also remind me of where I am and where I was fortunate to be born. I felt reassured that others can speak their mind, unite publicly, and organize themselves through texts, apps, and websites. They act in plain sight, and policemen stand by to protect that right. There was a time in my life that I didn’t have these freedoms.
While in China, I could not speak about politics, government, history. They were forbidden. Still, I had several nervous, whispering conversations with Chinese people about events in history that have been covered up. They leaned in close to tell me that they “knew” that the government was hiding their own history from them because they remember seeing the events with their own eyes. As they spoke, they looked around to locate the nearest camera. They seemed relieved to express the existence of events that are considered factual outside of China. According to the Chinese government, news, books, schools, etc. they did not occur. During the cultural revolution, artifacts were destroyed, teachers and intellectuals were fired, beat, or sent to the countryside for manual labor. Everyone else was threatened so they would never speak of it.
When people spoke to me about these topics, I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. I would have been put in jail and deported. It happened all the time, and the American embassy could not intervene on my behalf. When Chinese friends were in grade school, many of them remember having a teacher disappear one day and they assumed he or she was sent back to his or her country for saying the wrong thing. Parents also discouraged conversations about history. They were taught to not talk about it with friends or coworkers either. This will get them fired, blacklisted, or ostracized.
Thousands of government workers monitor every interaction, and will “flag” anything that could be perceived as critical of China. If they do, police will come to your door. This could also happen if anyone reports their interpretation, memory or a fabrication to the authorities. If a person is accused, there are no courts or trials, and no legal process to go through. The authority can do whatever they choose. And, in order to maintain control over their massive population, they have to keep critics from joining together. Activities viewed as “community organizing” or, said more plainly- strangers coming together for a common purpose- are forbidden. So, I could not locate these things while in China:
- religious or spiritual buildings or meetings- unless they were Chinese Buddhist Temples, where Buddhists would come and pray on their own.
- Nonprofit organizations/NGOs.
- I could use a VPN to access some online sites, but not consistently: Google, Youtube, Facebook, MeetUp, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Amnesty International, CNN, many Wikipedia pages. When using Google or Bing, search results were marked with the message: “censored by local government”.
So when I feel angry at the injustices and divides happening in this country, I am grateful that we can express these feelings and can be informed. Our schools have always valued critical thinking skills so that we can seek the truth from many sources, including history and scientific research. We can say what we think on phone calls, online, and in person, without feeling unsafe. We can find others who agree with us. Through speaking out as a united group, laws change, and our system adjusts to better ways. Free speech has led and can lead to progress in this country, and I know that there are people around the world who are starving for that. This country of mine, I love you. We have progressed and will continue to progress. It involves anxiety, fear, struggle, pain, loss, destruction of the old ways, and failures. But progress is the direction we are headed, so I can be thankful for where we are at.