Notes for the 70 million

And how is everyone today?

Well, I guess my magic eight ball failed me. Which means I’m out of the political prognosticating business.

My last post predicted, with great assurance, that Kamala Harris would be elected president. A historic achievement for so many reasons but mostly for the sake of the future of the country and the world.

Of course, personally, I’m not that noble.

The truth is I abhor racists, sexual predators and people who brazenly lie, break the law and prey on the trusting nature of those less cynical than I am.

Which means pretty much everybody.

Also, as a Scorpio, another of my truths is I have a weakness for revenge. I’m not proud of it and have to work to keep it in check. But somehow I convinced myself that shaming the biggest bully in the U.S. as a loser in the public square would be justice.

Well, nothing good happens when you let the righteous anger of revenge get the best of you.

How do I know that? Witness the results of the 2024 presidential election. Seventy-four million Americans took their own palpable rage out on the other 70 million of us who were trying to take the high road for the good of their country even though many of us were quite rageful and revengeful deep down. In doing so, they elevated a bully to the highest office in the land, and perhaps the world, hoping he’d…

Make their world better?

Protect them?

Beat up (Note: Or worse) the people they don’t like, disagree with or who look different than they do?

Get them some more money?

All of the above and quite a lot more?

I have ZERO idea.

Here’s what I do know.

As a college professor, advisor and mentor with hundreds of current and former students in my life, I heard stories from A LOT of traumatized young people this week.

Women in their twenties who were quickly obtaining birth control because they feared the next administration would outlaw their method, track their menstrual cycles and…much worse.
Sad students I had taught or am currently teaching who have non-white immigrant parents and are terrified for themselves and their families despite the fact they were born here.

Gay, lesbian and non-binary students so depressed they couldn’t speak about their present, much less their futures, even in a so-called safe space.
Trans students living openly wondering why they are so hated and others planning to transition who are now delaying becoming their true selves for fear of practical, and very public, retribution.
Very, very white students dreading Thanksgiving dinner with their gloating, MAGA relatives.
And across-the-board concerns, despite political beliefs, from all of them, about not only the health of the planet but their careers and economic futures under a president they universally see as a geriatric version of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. (Note: Their analogy, not mine).

The dancing is similar but you know Trump doesn’t do stairs

It was hard to know what to say.

Not to mention, heartbreaking.

This is not the world they imagined. It’s certainly not one I every fully acknowledged.

Or had I?

This led me to the only perspective and advice I had to give, that I’ve shared in bits and pieces on social media. It’s not a solution or a practical guide of what to do. I can’t think straight, or even gay enough, to offer much on that score at the moment. But what I do know is:

70 MILLION PEOPLE VOTING FOR SOMETHING IS NOT NOTHING. It is the possibility of SOMETHING.

As a gay man of a certain age, these days I try to not dwell on key events of the eighties. But like all trauma, and deep disappointments and losses, they are forever engrained in my psyche and have shaped me into what I hope is the decent, and mostly loving, person I am today.

Back then I thought it was all over after Reagan was elected and then re-elected thanks in great part to fear of “the other,” greed and Christian nationalism. In particular the latter (and Reagan) capitalized on a fear and hatred of the LGBTQ+ community, turned their back on the AIDS crisis and literally ignored the deaths of many tens of thousands of American citizens, not to mention eventually millions around the world.

A lot of them were my friends and peers and watching the mass indifference of so many of those so-called citizens basking in the glow of “Morning in America” made me sick to my stomach and uncontrollably angry. And, eventually, quite hopeless.

In those years I was convinced as a country we were soulless and probably doomed, not to mention completely morally bankrupt, and that nothing good could ever occur again for me, and certainly not US. I never, EVER imagined we’d get to Barack Obama. Not. A. Chance.

But now our country has clearly changed again (as it always does), has to some extent been deluded by disinformation, has to some extent chosen racisms/sexism/homophobia and others isms, and has to more than some extent chosen to be guided by fear and delusion vs. reality-based evolution.

So we’re going to have to go through some rocky times, most likely extremely rocky times, before we get to “the promised land.”

Fortunately, the nature of this country historically – especially in relation to change – is that there are huge swings back and forth as we evolve. It’s never easy and we often metaphorically, and literally, go kicking and screaming, but against all odds we manage to, if not get there, at least progress. Consider, more than a century and a half ago there was a CIVIL WAR. People you knew in the south were shooting at and killing those in the north they disagreed with. There should have been NO WAY for this country, much less any country as young as ours, to survive it.

Will it now happen again and include the Midwest, Southwest and Pacific coast states? As I said, I’m out of the predicting business. If only because I don’t even want to contemplate being trained in the use of a contemporary style musket.

Though, if needed, I could, and will, certainly learn.

Our CURRENT SITTING VICE-PRESIDENT, Kamala Harris, said in her concession speech – “The light of America’s promise will always be bright – as long as we never give up – and as long as we keep fighting.”

Endings = Beginnings = …Well, that’s up to us.

It’s okay to be sad and depressed and to escape with your vice of choice for a few days. Then it’s time to start again, all of us, as so many before us have done.

And remember, those aged 18-29 voted against the Bully by a clear margin – over 10%.

That’s the beginning of a whole lot of something. A seeable slice of hope in our always uncertain future.

Chappell Roan – “Good Luck, Babe”

02.21.21

by notesfromachair

History Repeats and… It’s a Sin

HBO Max’s It’s A Sin is a new five-part limited series about a group of gay men and their friends in Great Britain who lived and sometimes died during the HIV/AIDS crisis from 1981-1991. It is a critical hit and a must see.

Nevertheless, as a gay man who lived through it in the US, but didn’t die, it was the last thing I wanted to see or be reminded of during these pandemic days.

And yet…it was the first thing I began watching the very moment it dropped here in the States this week.

Why?

Well, many reasons. But the best that I could come up with is this begrudgingly timeless quote from an author long ago.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner, 1940

Writer extraordinaire William Faulkner first gave us those words in a short story he published in Harper’s in 1940.

They have since been quoted many times, most recently by both Barack Obama and Peggy Noonan in an attempt to address the issue of racism in the late aughts, and will no doubt be referred to many more times over.

Perhaps you prefer it in one of these standard internet formats

As a writer for none other than the Hindustan Times explained to us just three years ago, Faulkner’s words remain particularly prophetic because the past inevitably seeps into our present, informs it, even has a bearing on our future. The past cannot be wished away; neither can it be denied.

I would add this is the case no matter how expert we are at pretending and no matter how determined we are to move forward. The past, and its lessons, will ALWAYS resurface, whether you want to recognize them or not, and at times and in places you least expect it.

To not acknowledge it, learn from it, and at times live with it as you go on, is to be doomed – as too many countless others have warned – to repeat it.

How cliché. And yet, how undeniably true.

Take it from someone who is alive and well and just qualified to receive a Covid-19 vaccine.

Denial is a big part of It’s A Sin, but so is celebration and joyousness. Watching it reminded me that despite all my protestations to the contrary, those times were not solely tragic and funereal, colored forever in doom, gloom and sores of every type imaginable.

In fact and to its credit, none of the characters in this series are any ONE thing, and that goes not only for the young friends in their twenties at the prime of their lives but those middle-aged, older and even younger.

They are all a result of how they’ve allowed their experiences to shape them, the ways in which they choose to forge ahead or remain stagnant, and the harshness with which they treat not only others, but themselves.

How they existed and what they did back then is particularly resonant because of the harrowing drama of those times.

But as we all now sit in our homes (Note: Or wander freely), masked or maskless, hopeful, scared or bitter deep into our very cores for the future, it’s hard not to see our times as still yet another variance of their times.

Every decade has its costs and its joys and, if we’re lucky enough, we get to live through each to the next and adjust accordingly.

No one is saying denial doesn’t work in limited doses. I, for one, would have never sat down and written an original screenplay many decades ago that got bought and made had I accepted the true odds of that ever happening to a novice like me writing about the subject matter I chose to write about at that time.

Indeed, sometimes the only way forward is to defiantly block the facts in order to springboard you into defying the odds.

We humans all do this to some success and to some extent. However, experience also tells you (note: okay, ME) that this can’t be your ONLY strategy. Inventing your own reality means you also may be blind to the crumbling of the world around you with the thought your alternative world and your alternative facts will protect you.

Sadly, it’s not so. Not in the AIDS era of the 1980s, not in the latest pandemic era of the 2020s. Not even in the Deep South 1940 of Faulkner’s times.

The key is to be observant enough to acknowledge the cracks and take action before the crumbling starts. Patch it, consult an expert about re-cementing or entirely knock down the walls you think you smartly built before it’s too late.

All this construction has me longing for HGTV

Yeah, right, who wants to do that? But in doing so you might even let in those ideas or persons you banished to the outside and find out for sure if you were right or wrong about them all along. Imagine if you realized you were ignorant, selfish, misguided or had even misjudged while you still had time to do something about it?

This was the story of those five Londoners and their families in It’s A Sin just as it is the story of our survival in the midst of the worldwide pandemic we are now continuing to barely live through.

Any type of pandemic, much like any armed insurrection, is not any one person’s fault. Even if the worst, most xenophobic tropes were true and it was proven that a Chinese lab mistakenly unleashed CoVid-19 to the world and purposefully covered it up, that still couldn’t be blamed for the degree of medical severity we are now experiencing.

The politicization of masks, choosing economics and widely opening back up too soon over quarantining, turning our backs on our most vulnerable (note: essential workers, the poor, the non-Whites) and willingly letting them die early on and perhaps inadvertently become super spreaders through no fault of their own; a decided lack of interest in recent years of top international leaders to operate as a true global community and closely work together to ensure our mutual survival – arguably ALL explain the basic shutdown of the world as we once knew it.

Meaning, a virus, is a virus, is a virus. And people, are people, and continue to be, people.

All the homophobia, limited thinking and personal wall building and/or destroying won’t change the facts or the outcome once the stark realities of life has its way with you. Or us.

History is, at its best, a colorful kaleidoscope. But it isn’t always reliably pretty.

What it is is reliably prescient.

“History Repeating” – Shirley Bassey

Check out the Chair’s newest project, Pod From a Chair , now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

https://open.spotify.com/show/0RZiBJNbiYqRpp8LrzcWkm

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: aids crisis

Notes for the 70 million

History Repeats and… It’s a Sin