Lesbian Dad

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a grumpy night

Thanks to the fortuitous location of the annual National LGBTQ Task Force Creating Change conference, I find myself in Philadelphia, birthplace of American democracy, on the day this struggling, noble experiment will take arguably its greatest body blow.

(Last night in a call to my kids I said that today democracy would be developing the biggest zit in its 240-year US history*, and my Know It All Brother-In-Law later quipped that such a statement was an insult to zits world-wide.)

I could go on about how appalling it is that we’ll be inaugurating someone so flagrantly derisive or ignorant of so many fundamental elements of our system of government. But by now that would be akin to my pointing out how wet it is in the midst of a monsoon.  That’s established; we need no more new evidence; there’s nothing further much to add by enumerating Trump’s appallingness, again.

 

I think we all do it as a means of apprehending the unapprehendable, processing what seems still very threatening to digest, that we are quite definitely looking down the maw of a cryptofascist and are faced with the daunting responsibility of acting, decisively, to counter that. (And act we must.) I forgive myself and others this tic of reciting and marveling over each new low-water mark in his march to power, but also remind myself it’s time to get to the next step in this process and keep the mind on tactics of response.  Yes, it’s wet outside. Now let’s get back to building the dam, or what have you.

For my workplace I gathered this list of things families can do to get active around civic engagement: links to spiffy booklists, the Solidarity Sundays ideas, and more. If you get too queasy watching or reading the news today, I welcome you to check it out.

* Let the record show that the Six Nations, known to French and other white folk as the Iroquois, beat the U.S. to the whole democracy concept by hundreds and hundreds of years.

 


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