I turned 13 in 1985. At the time, the discrimination and hatred and violence and murders that historian Heather Cox Richardson documents so well in last night’s “Letters from an American” post (below) seemed like ancient history.
It was hard—impossible, actually—for me to grasp how ANY of that could have happened in my country, much less just 20 years earlier. We had all moved forward, I thought, and the idea that some of my fellow white Americans had forced my fellow Black Americans to drink from separate water fountains and use separate bathrooms and attend separate schools only two decades earlier was simply incomprehensible, even ludicrous.
Now, at 50, I'm watching Christian nationalist governors and state legislatures of numerous former Confederate states (Florida, Texas, and my beloved Tennessee, for starters) propose and pass increasingly radical laws explicitly designed to target and marginalize their fellow citizens based on their skin color, their intellectual interests, their gender identity, their sexual orientation, or their political leanings.
They are banning and even burning books, outlawing academic majors, shrinking voting access, inserting themselves into doctors’ offices and hospitals between patients and their physicians, and even passing laws about what type of clothing their constituents are or are not allowed to wear in public. They are a menacing and transparent threat to freedom and liberty, all while hollowly claiming to champion both.
And so I now find that the discrimination and hatred and violence and murders that HCR documents below seem shockingly near, so close I could touch them, though they are almost three times as far away as they were in my teens.
History repeats itself. Hatred is stubborn and strong, and it may yet win, if we let it. If you haven’t already, it's time to come off the sidelines, to stand up and speak out and try mightily to push back the surging tide.