It had been such a nice day. I’d driven all the way to Laguna Beach to buy a ticket to Pageant of the Masters. I had to go in person because the Festival of Arts wouldn’t accept my payment online, and being deterred by such an exasperating glitch only made me more determined to reserve a seat. Afterwards, I figured that I might as well spend the rest of the day at the beach.
I headed for Corona del Mar, a small stretch of sand between Newport Beach and Crystal Cove. There are tide pools to the southeast at Little Corona and the wonderfully named Pirate’s Cove to the northwest, where you can watch sailboats entering Newport harbor and intrepid surfers eating it on The Wedge. The cove is also the spot where a young Greg Laurie was baptized as depicted in the film Jesus Revolution.
Corona was my family’s go-to beach for years. My mom would buy grapes and sesame sticks and Hickory Barbeque Potato Chips and knock-off Oreos called Joe-Joe’s from Trader Joe’s, and we’d spend the whole day collecting sand crabs and digging “bathtubs” and “swimming pools” and getting “sand poops” in the linings of our bathing suits and thoroughly enjoying those precious, carefree years before puberty, self-consciousness, and body shame.
I found free street parking across from the entrance and lathered myself with sunscreen. The skin beneath my clothes was lobster-red, the penalty for dozing off at my secret beach the other day.
An Asian man across the street was leaning on the hood of his SUV with his phone pointing in my direction. It wouldn’t have been the first time that someone whipped out their camera at sight of my beat-up Toyota Corolla, but it would’ve been the first time that they did it when they knew that I could see them. I hoped to God that he was just texting or something because what the f*ck?
I walked down to Little Corona, past Inspiration Point, and ate my Famous Star with the sand crabs and sea anemones. On my way, I passed a group of people sitting on the grass, staring out to sea. “Beautiful day,” one of them called from beneath a shade tree. “It is,” I agreed. “Are you all waiting for something?”
“No,” she replied, “just relaxing.” I love how older people still interact with strangers like that.
Exploring the tide pools was less fun than it should’ve been. It felt like a hundred degrees and I kept thinking that I’d slip on one of the bony rocks and break an ankle. I tried to scramble back to the main beach over some rocks and encountered—more rocks. I swore and backtracked past the oblivious guy with the headphones. Then it was back up the hill, past the public restrooms and showers, where I sat on a curb in the shade and coughed my head off. I’d had the same cough for over a week. The next day, I actually went to the ER (redirected from Urgent Care because of a health insurance hiccup), but at the time, I just coughed until I gagged and gagged until my eyes streamed.
Finally, I realized that if I didn’t stand in line for the showers, more people would just keep coming (otherwise known as “An Introvert’s Lament” in FU minor). I was behind a Hispanic/Latina woman with at least four children in tow. One of the boys decided that he needed the other shower—my shower—to himself. “Let the lady go first,” the woman told him unconvincingly. He took his sweet time, watching me watch him because California has this weird law about laying a finger on other people’s children. When he was done, he said, “You can use it,” like a prince conferring a favor. Brat.
I rinsed the sand off my feet, splashed some water on my face and neck, and tucked my wet hair up under my baseball cap. This got me back to Corona, where I found the only bench with a little shade. Relieved, I sat on my beach towel, unfurled my umbrella, opened my book, and settled in to watch the sun set while waiting for traffic to die down.
A few minutes later, she arrives. Fake eyebrows, fake eyelashes, fake lips, fake boobs, fake butt. She’s obviously trying to look like a Kardashian. And this is her on a classy day. There are at least two unoccupied benches nearby but she chooses mine. And starts an intrusive phone conversation with her significant other. It’s the kind of behavior that’s so universally rude, it’s practically cruisin’ for a bruisin’, as my dad used to say. I find myself wondering what she’d do if the situation were reversed. Tell me off, probably. Bring the privileged white b*tch to heel as if she’s Saint Joan of social justice. On the other hand, if she were classy enough to care, she wouldn’t be acting inconsiderate to begin with, so what’s the point?
I try to ignore her but all I can focus on is her conversation (“Babe, you’ll be so proud of me”). After rereading the same paragraph several times, I catch her eye. “Can you take that somewhere else? I’m trying to read.” Duh.
She says, “I’m not going anywhere. If you don’t like it, you can move.” Her entitlement is breathtaking.
“I was here first,” I begin but she bowls me over with her narcissism. “Wow, what a f*cking b*tch,” I say. And mean it.
“Oh, you do not want to go there with me. I will beat your ass.” In broad daylight. In front of witnesses. A real stereotype-buster, this one. It would be funny it weren’t so cliché.
“And I’ll call the police,” I shrug.
“Yeah, I can see that about you.” Clearly, I’m the Karen in this situation, running to the police with my little assault charge.
“So, what—you just had to have a loud conversation on the bench where someone was reading? Like, you saw me sitting here, minding my own business, and it made you feel threatened or something?”
“Right, because you’re so pretty,” she scoffs.
Hey, she said it. I’m currently overweight, burnt, and bedraggled, so I was actually thinking along somewhat different lines. But there’s only one appropriate response for people who make derogatory remarks about your appearance. “Yes.”
She looks at me as if searching for weakness. Please. One of my ancestors fought for the Union. His widow spent the night at the White House. I’m not about to be intimidated by some jumped up cow with two-inch nails. The fact that my eyes are concealed by my sunglasses helps.
I end up in the middle of the bench (“Sure, slide it over,” she says) loudly reading Eat, Pray, Love as she struggles to continue her conversation. “See, it’s annoying, isn’t it?” By now, people have their phones out. Her family joins for moral support. Her sister says, “Come on, babe. We should go before we get into trouble,” as if I’m the one who threatened violence. But Miss Thang would rather ruin their family outing than admit she’s wrong. “Besides,” she says, “those people over there are filming, so we’re good.”
“It’s illegal to record people without their consent,” I tell them in no particular tone. We could be chatting about the weather.
“‘It’s illegal to record people without their consent,'” she mimics. What a great example for her children.
I actually laugh. “You’re acting like a five year old. It’s like you’ve been raised in a barn.”
She calls me a “freakin’ weirdo” for telling her that she can’t sit next to me. She says it loudly for the cameras. Obviously, there’s a big difference between telling someone that they can’t sit next to you in a public place and asking them to have their invasive phone conversation somewhere else. But there’s no point in saying this. She’s the kind of person who “wins” by out-yelling their opponent. The only way to beat someone like that is to stoop to their level or walk away, and I’m not about to jeopardize my future for the temporary satisfaction of proving that I can take her. Besides, who am I to ruin her big social justice moment? I was only sitting on the bench first. My family has only lived in the US for generations. So, every time she raises her voice, I roll my eyes and shut her out with my umbrella, and every time I do, she says “exactly” like she’s scored a point.
She must be some sort of influencer because she starts snapping photos of herself with freebees that businesses have sent her. I’m still monopolizing the middle of the bench, so every time she changes angles, my umbrella gets her in the eye. I’m also trying to block her from taking photos of me surreptitiously. “I swear if you hit me with that umbrella one more time—”
“It’s like you said, ‘If you don’t like it, you can move.'”
She soldiers on, snapping photo after photo. I don’t know if that’s how many it takes to get a good one or how many she needs to satisfy her ego. I don’t look at her, of course, but I can practically see her making duck face.
A girl walks by and tells her that she’s beautiful. Another asks if she wants to make a charitable donation and gets her Instagram. She responds to these moral supporters as if Salt of the Earth is her middle name.
Another fit of coughing seizes me and I make little effort to cover my mouth. I’m not actually contagious anymore but she doesn’t need to know this. Let her think that she’s a hack and a whoop away from getting COVID for all I care.
When she can no longer avoid getting up, she has her daughter take her place (which arguably doesn’t count). Funny how imperative it was for her to sit on that specific bench to watch her children; yet, she has no qualms about leaving one of them alone with the woman who she’s cast as the crazy white supremacist. I actually feel sorry for the poor girl. The Asians picnicking across the way (the ones who were recording earlier, I think) offer her snacks to show their solidarity. And their tacit disapproval of me.
So, this is what it’s come to, has it? Being canceled in your own culture by a bunch of self-righteous immigrants? It almost makes you want to vote for Trump so we can build that wall and start deporting people.
It’s not as if it’s the first time that I’ve had to put up with this kind of sh*t. I first noticed a difference when I moved from Yorba Linda to La Mirada, but I was hesitant to blame it on racial tensions then. How could I be sure that it was the times and not just the place? Perhaps the people who lived there were simply less courteous than the ones that I grew up with. Perhaps they were just rude to everyone.
Take the Target incident, for example. It’s Thanksgiving. It’s busy. I finally find a parking spot but there’s this kid spinning around in it. At first, I think that he must belong to the woman who’s loading groceries into her hatchback, but I start to second guess this when she sees me and does nothing to intervene. Surely, no one’s that inconsiderate. Not on Thanksgiving. I give it a full minute. It feels more like five. By then, the sports car behind me is fuming so I make my move—slowly—so that no one can accuse me of trying to run over a child. One foot, two feet. The boy looks at me but keeps twirling, gormlessly, like an overgrown toddler. Three feet, four feet. The sports car revs around me as if the entire delay is my fault, but I’m now blocking traffic from the opposite direction. Five feet, six feet. I’m practically touching the boy when the woman finally calls to him. So, he is with her. I park, grab my purse, and—the boy is sitting with the front passenger door wide open, boxing me in. I count to ten and crack my door. “Excuse me.” The woman shuts the door. “Sorry,” the boy whimpers as if he can’t understand why I’m picking on him. Then, as I’m walking away, his mother sneers, “You could’ve just waited.”
“No.” Hell, no. I don’t catch her reply but I yell “absolutely not” over my shoulder for good measure.
Then there’s the Middle Eastern guy who takes the right of away after entering through the exit driveway and gives me a “Whatchya gonna do about it?” smirk. Ditto the snooty Asian woman who almost bowls me over with her shopping cart. And the one who blatantly stares at me while blocking my polite attempt to pass her with a heavy tray of food. And the one who ignores my “excuse me” when there isn’t enough room to pass behind her chair. And the ones who start ordering at your elbow before you’ve even left the register. And the ones who forcibly try to pass you on the right, even though that’s not how we do things here, and essentially act like they’re still living in a society where I’m supposed to kowtow to their age or sex instead of acting like well-behaved guests in a nation that my ancestors have inhabited for generations.
Sorry, but you don’t get to disrespect me on my own turf because people I may or may not have been related to allegedly mistreated people you may or may not have been related to hundreds of years ago. You don’t get to accuse all Caucasians of being white supremacists and then behave in a racist, bigoted, discriminatory manner yourself. You don’t get to decide what kind of country the US is going to be as if her culture hadn’t already been determined by the people who were here before you—people who sacrificed everything to create a specific kind of society from scratch. That’s not how this little ethnicity scrimmage is going to play itself out. So (to quote Betty Scanlan in Hotel Portofino), “You can either like it, lump it, or leave.”
I mean, imagine the righteous indignation that would ensue if the situation were reversed. Imagine if my family, friends, and I showed up in Africa or Asia or South America or the Middle East—or even Europe or Compton—did our best to piss off the people who’d lived there for generations, openly mocked them for sticking up for themselves as if we were just giving them what they deserved, violated their privacy by recording and posting their reactions online, and played the whole thing off as if we were heroes of social justice (“Ooh, look at us sticking it to these stupid Africans/Asians/Europeans/Middle Easterners/South Americans who think that they belong here more than we do”). The rest of the world would think that we’d lost our f*cking marbles.
Meanwhile, people who could care less about America the Beautiful use her for her socioeconomic opportunities without embracing the culture that’s made those opportunities possible, expect to inhabit a subcultural niche while enjoying the same privileges as the majority, and accuse anyone who takes issue with this of being either bigoted (white) or brainwashed (non-white)—essentially treating Caucasians as badly as they claim that we’ve treated people of color and proving that history progressed the way that it did not because people of color lacked some sort of bigotry gene but simply the power to exercise it. And if that’s the case—if power makes them just as bad as they claim that we are and their idea of making the world a better, more equitable place is simply to flip the narrative—what moral, political, or social incentive do we have to give them any ground? Why succumb to their self-serving guilt trips if they’re prone to the same errors as they are? Why let them take what’s rightfully theirs when what’s rightfully theirs is more rightfully ours? Why shoot ourselves in the foot? Only an idiot would do that.
An immigrant who doesn’t embrace their host culture is just a foreigner living abroad. There’s nothing wrong with being an expat but it never has been and never will be as valid as being born on the soil. Nationalism has always worked that way. Ironically, it works that way far more in the East than it does in the West because nationalism and ethnicity (which includes culture, language, religion, etc.) are more enmeshed in those parts of the world. For example, when you think “Middle Eastern,” you automatically think “Muslim” and vice versa. And so do they. All good Middle Easterners are Muslim—all good people, some would say. So let’s not have any of this “white supremacy” bullsh*t. I mean, how long do you think that it would take for a fair-skinned Caucasian such as myself to pass for a proper African? When I moved to Africa? When I became a naturalized citizen? When I joined the military? When I married an African? When our children and our children’s children married Africans and all but canceled out my DNA?
America is remarkable not because immigrants are at liberty to erode our culture by practicing their culture on our land but because several generations of embracing our culture can actually make them one of us regardless of their ethnicity of origin. As opposed to other parts of the world, where several lifetimes of giving up coffee for tea and pretending to care about the Waitrose v. Sainsbury’s debate would still make them interlopers (incidentally, the “correct” answer is Waitrose).
Being an American is sort of like being a Christian. Christianity is about peoples of all tongues, tribes, and nations coming together in unity to embrace one God, not about every individual pursuing their own definition of the truth. In the same way, Americanism is about diverse peoples miraculously sharing one overarching culture regardless of their ethnicity, not about creating a patchwork of disparate interests, all vying for dominance, and expecting to feel united. “America has never been more divided.” Gee, I wonder why.
The problem with today’s immigrants—the so-called “threat” that they pose—is not their righteous crusade for equality but their sense of entitlement. Formerly, immigrants came to the US because they wanted to be part of American culture. Now they come with a “thanks for nothing” attitude and don’t even have the decency to do it legally. And after that—after they’ve lived and studied among us and taken full advantage of the privileges and opportunities that could’ve gone to an underprivileged American who had more gratitude—they identify not as Americans but as Africans/Asians/Europeans/Middle Easterners/South Americans. As if anyone cares what ancestry an American is when they’re at home. As if multiracial ethnicity weren’t the entire point of being American.
Thanks to the liberal agenda, today’s immigrants expect to have it both ways, or what the British call “having your cake and eating it.” They want to benefit from the democratic ideals that our ancestors died to defend, while simultaneously clinging to the cultures that have long made democracy impossible in their own countries. Theoretically, any non-Western nation could’ve created a democracy such as ours in the centuries before or after we did it, particularly after we’d set them the example. But most of them didn’t and haven’t because their cultures don’t lend themselves to democracy as we know it.
Thus, the founding of the US was a uniquely Western—a uniquely white—endeavor (the West literally means white people, specifically the Caucasian peoples of Europe). It was the unique culmination of centuries of British and European culture that can trance its antecedents back to ancient Rome. It’s a heritage that all of us can be justifiably proud of given that the West has been responsible for nearly every significant advancement in the last five hundred years. Moreover, it was Caucasians who braved the transatlantic crossing in search of religious freedom. It was Caucasians who dared to form “a more perfect union.” It was Caucasians who fought and bled and died to defend the precedent. And it was Caucasians who held their own against the European powers who hoped that the American experiment would fail.
People of color had virtually nothing to do with it. Caucasians laid the entire cultural, social, and political groundwork; yet, we still allow diverse peoples to live among us. All we ask is that they don’t confuse our culture with the cultures that they chose to leave. If that makes us white supremacists, what does it make them? Invaders? Expansionists? Imperialists? Hypocrites?
So, if you’re asking who has the greatest right to determine America’s overarching culture, the answer has always been us. We’re the ones with the greatest prerogative because we’re the ones with the greatest precedent—some would say the only precedent. This will always be America’s past regardless of how she continues to evolve in the future. When did it even become a question? When did we start listening to liberal invective as if the invention, misuse, and repetition of pejoratives such as “Karen” and “systemic oppressor” and “white supremacist” makes them anything more than petty partisan slanders?
And why are the nations with the most equality, diversity, and inclusion always accused of having too little of any of those things? Is it because “to whom much is given, from him much will be required” (Luke 12:48, NKJV)? Or is it actually a form of racism that expects less of non-white people because they’re less privileged than we are and somehow less capable of decent behavior? “That’s just how they do things there,” as a liberal coworker once remarked about the pay rate (not to mention the suicide rate) in your average Asian sweatshop.
“The system is broken. America’s going to the dogs,” they say. In comparison to what, exactly? Africa? Asia? Russia? South America? The Middle East? Other Western nations with similar “systems” (whatever that actually means)? The question isn’t whether America is perfect but whether anyone else is doing it any better. It’s a testimony to our ignorance that we’re unaware of how far other nations have traditionally fallen short of our own democratic principles. It’s a testimony to our privilege that we can afford to be that out of touch with reality. If we were actually going to the dogs, ignorance would be a luxury that we could not afford.
When Miss Thang returns, it’s finally time to admit defeat. She does this incrementally, the way people do when they know that they’ve lost and are trying to make it seem like they haven’t—as if dragging it out will somehow make it less mortifying. I don’t even say, “I win.” She needed the support of an entire crowd to make her prerogative seem equal to mine, and I’m still the last one sitting on the bench, secure in the knowledge that I belong there. And that’s what the whole thing was actually about all along.
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