I remember being a child in the ’90s, reading books about people who survived terrible things: the holocaust, bombings during world wars, pogroms, the plague, jim crow, slavery… the list goes on.
As a child I remember thinking how nice it was that all of those terrible things were in the past. My parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had traveled and starved and fought off disease and protested and battled, and now everything was ok. Of course I know now that that wasn’t even true then, but I never thought that things would become this bad. Even after 9/11 ripped apart my understanding of the world and my idea of what America was, I didn’t think things would ever become this bad.
I don’t recognize my government anymore, and I don’t know what to do about that.
Thank God I can at least have faith in most of the people in my country, at least for now. I don’t know how to thank the federal government agencies, protesters, and the ACLU for the hope they are giving me right now by resisting in the way that people were afraid we wouldn’t resist.
I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to relax again, knowing that this kind of fascist rhetoric can, and will, apparently happen anywhere.
weary traveler 