Today, Sunday, July 24, 2022, I feel completely exhausted. Should I avoid reading the news, shun any headline that BEGINS with the word TRUMP, and ends with WHAT IS NEXT? Should I just wish away the deadly doom of a new day, and concentrate on anything but current events? Can I afford to either keep my head in the sand or up my own anal opening? And then, what exactly can and does raising my voice via a Blog, or my commentaries written via articles on Facebook really achieve? But then I was a teen during the 1960s a college student as the decade of 1970 began, and there had been way too many moments in history where QUIET and IGNORANCE were nothing but COWARDNECE and AVOIDANCE! And to pretend one voice cannot make a difference is nothing but a COP-OUT!
I remained in the closet as the AIDS- epidemic devoured this country. I worried of course, that just being Gay might mean the virus would find me. I watched the activists of ACT-UP risk life and limb. I was at the University of Pittsburgh protesting the Viet Nam War when Nixon decided to murder students, my peers, at Kent State, and I wondered could if Nixon knew about a small college like Kent and what might happen in Pittsburgh. I registered for the draft and made myself 1-A waiting anxiously to see if it was my turn to fight a very questionable war. I watched my friends, brave and patriotic enlist and fight in a war, in which there was never going to be a peaceful end. I was a white kid, with no problem with the Police, but eventually, when I became friends with kids non-white I learned from them, from their personal first-hand stories, that not all people in this nation ARE considered equals!
So now, at the ripe old age of 72, I am scared, afraid, no longer from some foreign country army invading this nation, but more fearful of an enemy WITHIN my country. The fear I feel aches in my bones like arthritis, it pounds my head like a migraine, it paralyzes me! Civil War, say the MAGA who no longer have infested the GOP, but have been welcomed and received by the Republican Party. Fascism and Authoritarianism have become the guiding light for Christian Nationalists who delight in OUTING THE OTHER, who worship a vigilante God, who have a non-ideal of Equality. Freedom or Love. I have only my words so far from which to fight, but I will refuse to acquiesce to the BAD PEOPLE in this country, and I will FIGHT the fight for GOOD!
