Reject Fascism, demostrate for our future!

A brief, personal call to action.

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Today is Friday the 13th, and it's the day before the No Kings rallies are taking place across the United States. I haven't edited my next interview, so this is a well, it's not actually that short, but it's a personal reflection offered as another interlude before we dive into a different person's experience. So I just want to say this. Tomorrow is our opportunity to rise up as a nation and declare that there will be no rest and no peace until our president stops using terror and oppression in our communities. In some ways, the struggle has always taken place as a nation. We ripped children away from their families and indigenous communities and murdered entire nations. We sold children from their parents during slavery and we lynched brown and black people for demanding dignity and freedom throughout our whole history. Gay people of all colors have been attacked and killed for who they love. And in other ways, this feels new and feels more insidious. The white Christian nationalists that are driving the US to fascism are using brown and black men and women as their foot soldiers to attack their own communities. I've seen numerous police officers and so-called ICE, so-called ICE agents who are black, who are brown, who are Indian, who are Southeast Asian, who are saying, oh, we're here to do wellness checks, or, you know, who are on the streets of Los Angeles right now. Women are facing the possibility of a death sentence for a miscarriage in Georgia. They are, there are multiple states that want to monitor women's movements because they're afraid that they're going to exercise their rights to control their own their own bodily autonomy by traveling to a different state to get uh to get medical care. And in one horrific case, they are even forcing birth after a woman has died and against the wishes of her family. So if you hear this episode and you are having any doubts that you should stand shoulder to shoulder with your neighbors and defend everyone's rights, please hear me. Please. Your presence and your voice is necessary. If we are able to, we need to put our physical selves on the streets in a way that cannot be ignored. If one person's rights are violated and denied, all of our rights are violated and denied. This protest cannot be an end. It has to be a beginning. It has only strengthened since the beginning of the year. And the stronger we are and the more we protest, the less that the people can ignore that the majority of Americans disagree with what's happening. We must stand strong together, or we will fall further into darkness. The United States is not perfect and it never has been. No country on earth, no nation ever has been. No indigenous nation, no European nation, no African nation, human beings are fallible. However, in order to form a more perfect union, as we state in our founding documents, we have to stand united against the forces of greed and corruption that are currently driving us to violate the most basic tenets of freedom that underpin our nation and have underpinned a lot of the understanding of how society should operate for the past 50 or 60, 70 years. I really wish more people would read the Declaration of Independence to our troops and police officers. I wish they would read it more at protests. And maybe they don't because they don't think it's a very exciting document, but I think that it really perfectly encapsulates all of the reasons why it's so critical for us to defend our nation and why it's so obvious that what's happening in Washington, D.C. and with the president is a violating the foundational tenets of our freedoms and our country. If you have not yourself read it in a long time, then I urge you to find it online. It's still available, surprisingly, hasn't been altered or taken down. And I urge that you read it and you compare the grievances that we stated against George, King George, you compare them to the actions taken by our president. If you have to do that and you can't see the bald-faced incompetence and be outraged and angered and disgusted by what's happening on the streets of our country, if you need to do that, I think that you should do that. I think everyone should re-familiarize themselves with the way that our founding documents talk about liberty and freedom in this country. I'm not an essentialist, but I do think that it's important that we understand we can't change the past, but we can take from the past to build a better future. So all of that requires that we get out, that we march, that we use our voices, that we put our bodies on the streets if we can, and that we do it over and over and over again. I think we're in kind of the exciting phase where it's thrilling and it's new and we see things happening and we can't lose this momentum. People have a short attention span these days, but this is not going to be the work of a few weeks. This isn't going to be the work of one protest. This is going to be the work of months and even years. We are seeing a fundamental shift in our country and much of the ugliness that bubbled underneath the surface. Much of the anger and the ugliness of racism and classism and ignorance is on full display now. And we're going to have to grapple with that as a nation. Hopefully, we don't have to grapple with it in decades. Hopefully, it's shorter than that. But the world is changing. Our nation is changing. And if we don't get out and consistently show up, then it will change in a way that will lead to all of us experiencing violence and loss and fear. And our lives and our children's lives will be worse in the future for our inaction. So I urge you to get out there, sign up for a rally, show up. You don't need a sign, you don't need a shirt. You just need to be there. You need to be more than a witness. You need to be an active participant as history is made on the streets today. Stay safe and stay safe. Just stay safe, but be active. Don't be afraid. Be angry.