I Do This Now So I Don’t Have to Hide a Family in My Attic Later.

Photo credit to @kevjustdraws https://www.kevdraws.com/new-page

I came of age in an interesting time in America, graduating high school in 2004. We are like Tolkien’s elves that have seen the light of the two trees of Valinor, I can remember a world before the internet and even better a world before it could fit in your pocket. I remember the immediate aftermath of 9/11 where we all went insane and stated there for a long while. Country music became the stadium country that we have now, they even played “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” at my basic training graduation.

We had been attacked for the first time since WW2 and no one really knew what to do. The amount of propaganda happened so fast and so hard that I didn’t even think of it as propaganda until decades later, I’m not a smart guy. Things slid so far that it was easy to think that it was always this way. The NRA has been around my whole lifetime but it kicked into over drive after that, maybe I had just started to notice it.

20 years of the nationalism, encroaching fascism, and school shootings lead us here. People being killed in the streets on American soil by an untrained private army. These guys wear some semblance of a uniform I wore for decades but none of the accountability that makes it something more than just cloth. Many of the actual warzones I was in had rules of engagement that we do not fire until someone fires at us.

People like to misquote George Washington that he wants us as well armed as the Swiss, but it sure goes hand in hand with the accountability that is missing. Yes, guns are a tool but they’re a tool to kill. That’s what they do. We were told that school shootings are the price we have to pay to live in a “Free Country” but these things don’t have to happen. Freedom does not and cannot look like this.

31 Jan Escucha Mi Voz is having legal observer training at St. Paul’s church and I will be listening to their voice.

We as a nation are better than this.

Bullies can’t stand to be laughed at and Portland showed us that it works to degrade their propaganda. The twin cities show us that they are willing to go door to door and steal people off the street.

I cannot do nothing and I will not hide. The solution to this is community and we have to build it and cultivate it while we can. I’ll be there, you should be there with me.