I grew up in Texas. I was born not long after the end of World War II. I lived in Houston, Texas in a kind of bubble until I was in high school. I knew that Black people lived in my city but I had little or no contact with them. I saw them sitting quietly in the back of the bus that I rode to downtown Houston with my mother. I saw the separate water fountains and bathrooms designated for Whites only. Even as a child I understood that the accepted ways of life were wrong and I expressed my concerns to my parents who were unable to provide me with an acceptable explanation for why such things existed.
When I was growing up I only heard about members of the LGBTQ population in slurs that demeaned their very existence. I assumed that I would never know such people even as I later learned that it was not so. Some of my all time favorite people were hiding in plain sight, no doubt suffering from the anxiety of having to be secretive about who they really were.
Things would eventually change for both of these groups with laws passed to protect them and to allow them to become visible in society but the ugliness of my youthful years would never really go away for them. Racists still exist all over the United States and there are still people who somehow believe that members of the LGBTQ population are pariahs who should be scrubbed from society.
The truth is that here in the United States we still have individuals and groups who believe that only white Anglo Saxon Christian men should be running things. They operate from a belief that humans should be ranked according to race, gender, religion and sexuality. Anyone who is not a straight WASP is deemed less than. It is a kind of sick way of viewing the world that has infected our relationships with each other for most of history. It is a way of keeping certain groups of people in line with a kind of cruelty that is unwarranted.
Sadly the president of the United States has nursed and encouraged such beliefs to maintain his own power. He has little or no respect for women who dare to question him. He makes outrageous claims that create fear of people of color, immigrants, and even the tiny group of trans people who mostly live quietly in the United States hoping that they will be accepted and loved just as they are.
Surely we have advanced enough as humans to see that the most dangerous people are the ones who attempt to make us hate and fear certain groups of people. Right now that person is the personification of hate and his name is Donald J. Trump. In the guise of a great protector he is using all of the sordid tools of a vicious dictator to line his pockets and maintain his power. We should be wary of his attempts to poison our minds with outrageous and baseless fears of certain groups of people who only want the same respect and acceptance that most of us have just because of the luck of our births.
Many in our present day society demean women and then warns them to beware of less than a handful of trans athletes while their biggest threat is being used as sex objects by straight men who all too often get away with their depravity. Our president rallies his supporters with lies about Muslims and immigrants and trans citizens even as he has a long history of sexually abusing women. He claims to be our protector when he is often the source of many of our most egregious problems. He started a war. He ripped apart our economy. He has made good honest people afraid of the members of the groups that he claims will destroy us.
Trump’s communist rants are older than I am. It too is based on a fear that we will lose our rights and have to share with lazy people who do not deserve our help. The truth is that communism is not the same as someone who supports the idea of caring for all people in a democracy. Somehow the richest people in our nation have sold much of the populace a big lie that if they are exempt from sharing a fair burden of taxation they will insure that the rest of us have jobs. Even if we taxed them in a fair way they would still have more money that they would ever be able to spend in a lifetime. Their contributions would help us to feed every American and provide healthcare for all. Those are not communist ideas. Those are the ideas that Jesus taught us way back when he walked on the earth.
I don’t want to return to a time when only the wealthiest people ran things in this nation. I want every person to have a fair share of our bounty. I want our leaders to respect and protect our differences. We were never meant to be a white, straight, male, Christian nation. Our ancestors came here from all over the world seeking freedom and respect. We were heading more and more in that direction but have somehow lost our way. We are better than that and it is time to turn the tide and to remember the command to love our neighbors just as we love ourselves with no restrictions on who they are or how they choose to live. We can find our way back.
