One thing that folks don’t realize how memories drive us and how those form the basis for our present thinking. When we react, we react based on what we have seen before. We know where we came from and where we are today.
These are what come to mind as we weather this administration. I remember civil rights riots and beatings, I remember Nixon and those terrible years of the Vietnam War, I remember being told to love America or leave it, I remember Kent State and those National Guardsmen who killed students, I remember being mistreated because I looked like a hippie, I remember my family’s disapproval of my father, an Irish-Polack Catholic Yankee in 1950s and ’60s Georgia, I remember folks being scorned with nastiness for dating across racial lines. I remember when women had no power, when a woman could not even choose what name to have on her driver’s license.
I have historical memory of Hitler and the Nazis, McCarthyism and other witch hunts and dictators. I know way too much about that kind of history.
I hear echos of all of that today in so much of the rhetoric of our nation’s leaders. We have made great progress as a nation but now I fear for the soul of this nation.
There are many things I will not, cannot accept as normal behavior in politics and government. It is those things that are being called out into the light; it is those things people are protesting. If you ignore this, it will be you who are the victims of tomorrow.