American Shingles by Geoffrey Carter

Artwork by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

One of many stealthy threats to the health of older Americans is shingles, a painful condition in which a painful rash of raised blisters erupts over the body. It can last for weeks. Some patients cannot bear to wear clothes over the afflicted area.

Shingles is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is also responsible for the childhood scourge of chicken pox—and is closely related to the herpes simplex virus. It’s a nasty customer all the way around. Once the virus is inside the body, usually gaining entry during chicken pox—which most boomers went through, as the vaccine wasn’t available in the United States until 1995, it can remain dormant for years before flaring up, often without warning.

Shingles is painful but is rarely dangerous. It the rash spreads into the eyes, it can cause permanent damage. Patients over fifty and those with compromised autoimmune systems are also at higher risk, but the disease is mostly a painful inconvenience, an agonizing couple of weeks spent cringing at the slightest touch. But it does only usually last a couple of weeks.

The very personal physical suffering of this stealthy disease can also be seen as a pernicious aspect of out national psyche. An idea or a belief, like a virus, can lie sleeping and festering for years, even decades before interrupting into a full-blown scourge. Sometimes the dormancy of an idea is so complete and abiding that the patient—the people—might believe it no longer exists. While no one with any acumen can believe that racism in America is dead, the 2008 election of Barack Obama, America’s first African American president, might have started us thinking that perhaps our country might finally be ready to start putting racism behind us.

Fat chance. After Obama was elected, a rash of far-right groups began popping up all over the country. The Tea Party, on the surface an organization of conservative Republicans focused on fiscal conservatism, emerged, eventually gaining a major foothold in the party. After the Tea Party gained a major foothold in Congress, the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, a movement supported in large part by ultra-conservatives David and Charles Koch. The Tea Party seemed to fade but parts of its platform, including smaller government, tighter border security, and the nullification of Obamacare.

During his campaign for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump echoed many of the ideas originally floated by the Tea Party and subsequently absorbed the Republican Party, but Trump took things a little bit further. Showing bare contempt for political correctness and common standards of decency, this candidate paved the way for the deeply ingrained but hidden streak of American racism to reemerge in its full disgusting glory.

Shortly after Trump’s election, the far-right Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. The purpose of the rally was to unify the American White Supremacist Movement. Attendees included Klansmen, members of the alt-right, neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis and other sundry white nationalists. When a young female counter protestor was killed during a confrontation, the president refused to condemn the rally, instead saying that he believed there were “very good people on both sides.”

Later during his tenure, during a debate when he was asked whether he condemned white supremacist group, Trump told the Proud Boys, a far-right neo-fascist group, to “stand back and stand by.” (NY Times). On hearing this, The Proud Boys celebrated on social media, calling the occasion “historic”, and, according to one Proud Boy member, new membership spiked immediately after the comment.

Another part of the ex-president’s platform was to build a wall along the length of the 1,951-mile United States Mexican border, inflaming even more racist anti-immigrant sentiment. And so, not unlike the lethargic varicella-zoster virus lying inert before awakening to wreak havoc on the human body, the pernicious racist beliefs long buried within the hearts and minds of twenty-first century Americans have reemerged in the national dialogue as visible evidence of the disease within our very souls.

The blisters won’t stop rising. Besides the sharp rise in racist attacks and anti-immigration rhetoric, anti-LGBTQ sentiment is also rising. After the Supreme Court decision striking down Roe -v- Wade, advocates for gay rights expressed fear that the political right may be targeting the Obergefell -v- Hodges SCOTUS decision which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

The political has also targeted another paper tiger—Critical Race Theory. Protestors have flooded school board meetings across the country, demanding that their community schools drop Critical Race Theory from their curriculum immediately. The only problem is that CRT is not taught and has never been taught in primary or secondary schools. It is an academic idea stating that racism is a social construct, a series of institutionalized policies enhancing white privilege. Redlining, the practice of restricting minorities from access to home ownership in specific neighborhoods is a good example of this.

Although the idea of institutionalized racism is gaining traction in non-academic circles, the inclusion of lessons about slavery, manifest destiny, the Trail of Tears, and World War II internment camps into American History curriculum have raised nearly hysterical reaction across the country. Many school boards have banned books like Maus, The Bluest Eye, All Boys Aren’t Blue, and Gender Queer: A Memoir from school libraries.

Just last year, the state of Oklahoma passed a law restricting the teaching of racial concepts which might make white students uncomfortable. According to CNN:

“If any educator makes part of their curriculum teachings that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex” or that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” they could be suspended or have their license removed, according to the law.”(CNN)

The list goes on and on. Legislation restricting voting rights and poll access, the right-wing for a national ban on abortions, the rising violence against minorities, hateful antisemitic rhetoric spouted by national figures are all painful symptoms of our national disease.

One man or one political party did not cause all this to happen by themselves. Their actions accelerated and exacerbated a pre-existing condition, not unlike a bartender giving a pitcher of martinis to an alcoholic with cirrhosis of the liver.

A teacher I once worked with said that perhaps the hateful rhetoric might be a good thing, that perhaps it would expose the terrible racism in this country and that once the hate was visible, it might be possible to cure. I admire her optimism, but I am doubtful that any good will come of this. I think that, like the shingles virus, the hate is permanently embedded into the fiber of our country and that it is our duty to call it out and fight it however we can.

We can treat the symptoms, but I doubt if we’ll ever cure the disease.