The unthinkable yet inevitable has happened. Where do we go from here?

I began to follow politics when I was a child. Some of my first memories are of the LA Riots in 1992. I remember staring at the television in confusion at scenes of violence and I just couldn't fathom how or why anyone could be so angry they would hurt someone else so badly. My childhood was erratic and abusive, so I had some inkling of explosive, inexplicable rage. Something about the riots, though, had some quality I didn't understand. It took me fifteen years to understand what I was seeing was desperation and the collective scream of a population long silenced.

My immediate and close extended family was a very conservative one. Evangelical, Young Earth Creationist, anti-choice, anti-LGBT, and the other typical views you'd expect out of fundamentalist Christianity. We came directly from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest in my grandparent's generation, and a few decades wasn't enough to rid ourselves of the bigotry inculcated in them from a century of post-Civil War bitterness.

However, in the nineties the culture war hadn't quite reached the fever pitch it has now, at least in my neck of the woods. The violent rhetoric now spewing from podiums across America simply didn't exist in my church. I don't know about nowadays. I don't really want to. The simmering energy of bitterness and anger didn't exist in Oregon Christians like I observed in the south when we visited extended relatives with the multiracial parts of my family. I thought this meant that the fundamentalism we practiced in the northwest bore little resemblance to the sundown towns and gay bashing capitals of the country in the deep red states my family had left behind. I was wrong.

As I grew older and more aware of the words beneath the weasel words meant to cover bigotry with the shiny glaze of acceptance. LGBTQ people were welcome in our church - hell, my aunt is a lesbian and attends church, including that one - but not if they were too gay. Black people were fine as long as they didn't cause a ruckus. Past abortions were okay as long as you were remorseful and prostrated about "killing the baby". Essentially, you're tolerated until you're a bit too much like yourself or have needs that conflict with the rigid, Jesus-lite and Paul-heavy type of Christianity that conservative Americans have dragged with them from Puritan times. Microaggressions and stereotypes I'd never noticed abounded, and I realized that my loved ones weren't experiencing acceptance. They were experiencing the quiet, disdainful, condescending bigotry of those who try but just don't have the courage to do the real work of deprogramming.

Two incidents stuck out from those years. Once the pastor was preaching and mentioned the Emancipation Proclamation. I don't remember the context, but I remember him saying "and none of us knows how that would feel" in regards to being enslaved and freed. My uncle, who was the only black person attending the church at the time, simply raised his hand. The pastor seemed mildly embarrassed, and acknowledged the mistake. It was too late, because that tiny incident flipped a switch in my brain. Something as country-shaping and shameful as slavery was seen as a distant relic impossible to relate to for white people, while being a distinct and ever-present collective memory for black people. In addition, the pastor knew he had a black member attending and he still made the comment. As harmlessly intended as it was, it was a stark reminder that my uncle's experiences were quite in the minority and never considered in the same way that mine would be.

The other incident was my aunt having to sit through a sermon where the pastor she'd known much of her life spoke of how gay people were infiltrating the church and trying to change Christianity to match their own ideals. Seeing my aunt hurt by being rejected by someone she admired made me sick. She felt as though only my grandparents cared about her attending church and taking part in Christian community and worship. This was after years of previous rejection. Her partners left unacknowledged, my father trying to restrict us from spending too much time with her, and all the other traumas that LGBTQ people suffer from in even loving fundamentalist Christian families.

These experiences and others pushed me down the route of simply trying to pay attention with how groups other than my own were treated. I also became aware of women's rights in high school, when they begin giving the girls lectures of how casual sex essentially ruined women for men, and how our lives were pretty much determined by our marriage and family plans. Submission and control were the underlying or even stated messages, and I wanted none of that. I witnessed enough verbal and emotional abuse towards my mother from my father. There was no way I was trapping myself in what I saw as a fundamentalist Christian woman's hell. They were welcome to those men, in my opinion, but it was never going to be me.

My other teen and young adult experience solidified my observations and values. It's clear to anyone with eyes and a brain or even only one of the two that there are different rules and laws for different people in this country. Just because laws don't mention that they are targeted at a minority group doesn't mean that they don't primarily suffer and that was the intent. Exploitation for money is the goal for many, but others just enjoy the power and pain with riches as a pleasant bonus. The cruelty is the point, as an evil man said years later.

People seem to think that civil rights and freedom are a linear process. From point A to point B with minor deviations here and there, but overall headed towards equality and safety for all. These people are, forgive me, unforgivably naive. Human rights aren't a castle moat and walls between the vulnerable and those who'd do them harm. History is full of wrecking balls of hate and demolition munitions of regression that can instantly send us back into a world with no protection for the weak or scared. Human rights aren't a castle; they are a glass cage. They leave us staring at angry people with chisels and hammers. Those who are barely restrained as they gloat about their fantasies they'll enact when they finally chip through the glass.

I learned after the rise of Trump that the truism "you cannot reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into" was more accurate than I realized. Truth meant nothing in the fake news and alternative facts world. Feelings were everything, while the far right screamed "fuck your feelings" when their bigotry was called out. All the violence and death the Trump administration allowed through either direct or indirect action was denied or even justified. Inhumane policies such as separating children from their parents and throwing them in cages, even the result of the deaths and disappearance of thousands, were justified with remarkable callous statements such as "their parents shouldn't have brought them here" and a shrug. The apathy and complete lack of empathy couldn't be overcome by pleas, videos of crying children, the testimony of congress representatives describing the horrors, doctors pleading for more help to care for the children's health, or the discovery of Facebook groups of border patrol agents posting vile racism.

When the Trump administration argued in court that the children aren't even entitled to toothpaste and his supporters didn't care, I realized that no amount of bipartisanship was fixing this. Anger and fury and intolerance towards those who are forever chipping at our fragile glass cage only has one answer: resistance. Resistance isn't code for violence. It is code for whatever we can do to ensure that those who suffer the worst are protected the most, and that we refuse to let those who laugh when immigrant children die and pass laws intended to hurt women take over. We refuse to allow black people to forever be enslaved and under the thumb of a system that has spent centuries crushing them. We refuse to have trans people of all stripes stripped of their identity or lives. We refuse to have people jailed or harmed for their sexual orientation. We refuse to have our citizens denaturalized and deported.

We refuse.

This resistance can come in the form of anything. This is a resource for accurate information to help you decide and organize whatever you’re working on to resist this oppression. One of the biggest reasons we are being shoved back into the strangling system we just started to squirm away from is the nonstop deluge of misinformation and brainwashing that bad actors have deliberately been force-feeding the people for decades.

They won't win. They never do. But they will always try. Hope to see you as we take our country back.