Archive | Essays
Changing the Things We Cannot Accept
I have been silent here, partly to let others be heard during this week of historic unrest, partly because I have been struggling with a life-threatening kidney infection.
But my heart has been in the streets of my city and country, where protests have been righteously, rigorously practiced even as law enforcement thugs have responded with pepper spray, rubber bullets, tear gas, police cars—anything they could weaponize (even The New York Times). We know light shines only when we turn it on, and I feel deep gratitude and reverence for those who have been doing so–for all who’ve brought their precious soft underbellies into these lethally police and pandemic-addled streets.
As many of you know, yesterday would have been the 27th birthday of Breonna Taylor, the black female EMT who declared joyfully in tweets that 2020 would be her year. 27 is a make-it-or-break-it age —when you begin your Saturn Return and journey into authentic, rewarding adulthood. I have such confidence that this beautiful soul would have done exactly that had she not been murdered in her own home by cops conditioned to plunder every physical, legal, emotional, and moral boundary of a person of color. It is no coincidence that yesterday also was a massive lunar eclipse–in social justice-seeking Sagittarius, no less.
So let this enormous celestial release of energy—for that is what an eclipse truly is— support the release being rightfully demanded in America’s blood-lined streets.
Let the solar return of the soul of Breonna unite with these big big stars. Let righteous light, righteous labor, righteous love burn down the American infrastructures built on the backs of brown and black bodies whose work, let alone humanity, was never honored. And by the light of this bright full moon let something more enduring, encapsulating, and ennobling rise like a phoenix its place.
In every way I can, this middle-aged white woman will practice more reckoning and self-reckoning to resist the injustice built into this broken land. I am grateful to all else who do so. May Breonna’s birthday song ring around the world.
For concrete actions you can take to commemorate Breonna’s life and the fight for justice, here is a list.
In Love and Anger: Larry Kramer, 1935-2020
That Larry Kramer lived to 84 was a miracle. But it was not a privilege. It was a victory hard-won through the sheer voltage and focus of his beautiful, ungainly will–the same will that saved millions of “othered” bodies through his dedication to activating the passive, the phony, the pious-all the institutions that didn’t give a fig about a virus mostly killing off queers, POCs, addicts, and prostitutes.
I always say when a public figure dies, we are re-acquainted with his legacy, so the timing of the AIDS activist and writer’s departure is not a coincidence. And it’s not just because we are once again grappling with institutional indifference to a widespread lethal virus. It is because Kramer showed us that we have to enact our righteous fury if we are to ensure the justice and protections that every human body deserves.
For all through Trump’s reign, we have been wrangling with the bloody legacy of the colonizers we still exalt. This dangerous dehumanization always has been the law of this land (literally and figuratively) but our evil reality TV oligarch has newly empowered it—much as Hitler liberated a long-simmering national anti-semitism just as German gentiles were feeling disenfranchised post-WWI. Due to new technology, some Americans are waking to what everyone else lacked the luxury to ignore: that freedoms, including the right to live, are only a given for those whom our fucked-up Founding Fathers deemed human.
As a white woman–queer, yes, but privileged in so many other ways– it is not enough for me to say I am devastated by the lethal entitlement endorsed and institutionalized in my country. It is not enough for me to just write something here, which is why I’ve largely kept mum. It’s not even enough for my heart to break, though it really, really has. Larry Kramer’s legacy must be honored.
He taught us it was not enough to prettily and politely express our objection to institutionalized murder. He taught us to love each other enough to rise against the machine of greed, willful ignorance, selfishness, hate, and violence. He taught us we must act as if every human body endangered by institutionalized oppression is our own. And he taught us that the goal is for every body to live long enough to tell their story.
We still have much work to do but you have earned your rest, Cousin Larry. Thank you for your messy, heart-forward resistance.