Captain America is a Nazi, but who cares? (Whoops, looks like I'm back to depression!)
65 Days Until President Trump
A while back, Captain America became a Nazi.
The change was due to a time-manipulating girl/doohickey named Kobik, and of course the Red Skull. They essentially rewrote history to give Steve Rogers Nazi sympathies, turning him into the ultimate sleeper agent.
Comic booooooooks!
Read MorePining for safety
66 Days Until President Trump
I’ve been a huge fan of Captain America since I was a kid. He’s had a huge influence on me over the years - pretty much the greatest role model I can imagine.
I’m also a writer, and so sometimes I get story ideas in my head. Before Rick Remender’s run on the book (in which Steve Rogers de facto adopts a child), I’d had an idea for a storyline entitled, “The End of Captain America”. It was about Steve Rogers and his longtime love Sharon Carter having a baby. (The Red Skull was also involved, because comic booooooooooks!) The crux of the conflict in my story was that Captain America has to be fundamentally selfless, but a parent has to be fundamentally protective of their child. Captain America has to put the entire world ahead of his own needs. A parent has to put his child ahead of the world. In my story, when Steve Rogers became a father, he would be forced to realize that he could no longer be Captain America, because he had to choose: the world, or my son?
And for a parent, that’s no choice.
That brings me to the safety pins that we’ve been seeing all over social media lately. If somehow you aren’t in the know, the safety pin has been adopted from Brexit survivors to show that the wearer is an ally: if you’re getting harassed or assaulted or are just having a bad time all of a sudden with the reality of a Trump Presidency, then the wearer is someone that you can count on to help you out. It’s a mark of solidarity, but it’s also a promise: When you’re with me, you are safe.
I read a fantastic piece about the safety pin yesterday. It goes into a lot, but the bottom line is that the safety pin is a responsibility. It’s a promise to stand up and defend. And you have to ask yourself what that means. How will you protect? What will you do when the time comes?
If it comes to it, will you engage in violence to protect others from violence?
And, hoo, boy, did that one keep me up last night. I haven’t thought about being in a fight since high school, twenty years ago. I found myself asking, “do I need to bring a weapon with me when I’m out?”
I’m a white, rapidly-approaching-middle-aged father of three. Wondering if I need to bring a weapon with me when I go walk around town. With my kids. I was wondering if I needed to teach them to take video of me if I’m ever in a confrontation with someone. And then I started wondering what would happen if I got into a confrontation in front of my kids who were taking video, and it went bad, and then the other guy realized that one of my children had a camera, and then he went after my kids while I was down…
Yeah, I didn’t sleep real well last night.
I’m a parent. If I’m forced to choose between my children, and the world, that’s no choice at all.
But my kids also have to live in this world: it’s their world, too. They have to deal with its bullshit when I’m not around. So it’s not just a choice between my kids and the world. It’s a tightrope act where I balance their safety and security on one side, and social justice on the other. What’s safe, and what’s right.
If either side drops, so do we.
For the record, I’m not planning to go out Kick Ass-style and start teaching my kids to be ninjas. I’m also not planning to go looking for a fight. It’s extremely unlikely that I’d find myself in that situation, and I don’t want to scare them with ghosts of what will never be. If, somehow, I do find myself watching someone get shoved around and become the victim of violence, I have a phone that dials 911 very nicely, and I have lungs that can shout for help until it arrives. I won’t put my kids in the middle of that.
But I can’t believe how lucky I am that I get to make that choice. I get to decide about my commitment to confronting prejudice. I’m asking these questions because I’m signing up to ask these questions. I’m putting on a pin. I can also take it off.
Black people can’t take off their skin. Muslim women can take off the hijab, but not if they are being true to themselves. Immigrants can try to earn citizenship, but it takes years - and they’ll always be immigrants, even once they become citizens.
I can take the pin off. They can’t. They are what they are. We’ve already pinned them down.
Trump is hurting me right in my privilege. Not that he’s taking it away: he’s forcing me to face it. He’s forcing me to think about the things that my neighbors think about every day. Will I be safe when I go outside? Will I get harassed? Is it safe to shout back? What will I do with my kids if they come for me?
I wish I didn’t have to ask these questions. No one should. I put the pin on, and I mean to live it until we like the answers.
Not everybody can be Captain America. But we can all work for justice.
Truth in the streets
67 Days Until President Trump
A couple of days in and I’m still having trouble with the outcome of this election.
I mean, obviously I’m having a problem with Trump, because… obviously. That part is terrible.
And it’s terrible that sixty million of my fellow citizens either were down with that, or were willing to overlook it in order to shake things up.
I mean, good grief, how the hell do you overlook that?
But I overlooked something, too. I’m also having that “ah-ha” moment when I realize that the Hillary Clinton who I know is not the same Hillary Clinton that most Americans know. That’s because most Americans didn’t do a shit ton of research into her politics and her history - as I did - which would have led them to conclude - as I did - that about 95% of the public perception of Hillary Clinton was the kind of garbage that even a raccoon won’t touch.
I did my homework. I felt pretty comfortable in thinking that, if facts could be known about Hillary Clinton, I knew the important ones. I know that she’s not a liar - though she spins the truth in her favor. I know that she’s not a close political ally of corporate America - though she did accept speaking fees there, because, hey, even liberals like money! I know that she’s basically a progressive dreamboat - I literally had a blog post drafted, entitled, “Hillary Clinton: Progressive Dreamboat” about half-finished when the primary ended - but she ironically ran through a tough primary with one of literally maybe two other Senators who could be accused of being more progressive than she is. (I am here thinking also of Russ Feingold, because even though he’s no longer in office, they served together, and man is he progressive!)
But I got lazy. I never published my findings. I told a few people around me, but mostly they were people who were going to be Hillary supporters, anyway. The constant slew of people who were all, “I’m going to vote for Hillary, but I mean, I don’t like Hillary” - it should have set off alarm bells, right? But I was happy with their votes and I’m conflict-avoidant enough to not make waves.
Hillary Clinton has had Republican attack dogs writing some really amazing lies about her for thirty years. When the 2016 campaign got started, I had to do my homework because I couldn’t separate fact from fiction in my head. But not everyone did that, and I as a Hillary supporter did a terrible job of messaging to the world the truth that I'd found in a vast sea of spin and falsehood.
Sure, she’s a Beltway insider. But you want to talk about shaking things up? How about affordable childcare for all families? Because that’s kind of a big deal. If you’re struggling and trying to make ends meet, would an extra $10,000 a year make a difference for you, personally? Eight hundred bucks a month sounds pretty good to me. I don’t know about you, but I’d be okay if she were giving the reacharound to Wall Street if it also meant my wife and I didn’t have to keep having the discussion about whether or not we can afford for her to go back to work full time.
It’s stuff like this that makes me crazy when people start going off on “crooked Hillary” rants. I’m not asking her to babysit! I want her to go to the mattresses for me and my family! I want someone who has a decades-long history of demonstrably having my back! That’s who I want for President.
I was excited about Hillary. But I assumed that, because I knew my facts, that others did as well. I knew true things, and assumed that others knew them too, just because they were true.
As it turns out, Truth is more slippery than that.
Truth doesn’t set itself free. You’ve got to do that work. You have to shout it from the mountaintop. When you know true things that other people don’t know, you can’t leave them ignorant. Truth is more important than that.
This doesn’t mean just shouting them down. I think that the Trump Presidency is pretty fucking good evidence that people are tired of being talked down to. They voted for literally the one guy in politics who doesn't talk down to anybody, because he's already there. (Here may be a racist, xenophobic misogynist, but he isn't condescending about it!)
It's up to us as progressives to figure out how to speak the truth without sounding like assholes. Mansplaining is a real thing, but prog-splaining is, too, and we've got to cut that shit out. Nobody who's teetering on the edge of whether or not they can feed their kids gives a crap about high-minded ideals like "equality".
But they do care. I have to believe that. They care about nice Mr. Jones, the church organist and confirmed bachelor. If you asked them, most of them would say, "Sure, he deserves a shot at love. I don't know how I feel about gay marriage, but I'm with him, yeah."
We progressives are really good at seeing the big picture, and really lousy at seeing the individual people in it. We have to find a way to reveal that picture, that Truth, without ignoring the million little truths out there that are heartfelt and sincere. We can't keep talking down.
We have to get off the mountaintop and sing our Truth from the streets.
#OccupyLove
68 Days Until President Trump
It’s Saturday morning in occupied America.
OK, that’s total hyperbole. But it’s how it feels when you’re progressive and you’ve just realized that the vast majority of your country’s geography is home to people who mostly voted for Donald Trump.
I mean, look at that map. You’re surrounded.
The problem with “occupied America,” though, is that America is occupied by… Americans. We can certainly look at the Trump Presidency through the metaphor of war and enemy occupation, but we had one Civil War and it was bad news. Many progressives abhor the United States’ warlike posture abroad: the actual notion of taking up arms at home is ridiculous.
Also, let’s be real: we’re way outnumbered. And then there’s the issue of the fact that the enemy commander is also the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces. Nobody wants to fight that with guns.
Hearts and minds, then. The conservatives derided it the last time we had this discussion, but it’s critical that we persist in this. We can talk tough, but the first part of the descent to war is the dehumanization of the enemy. Our enemies are our neighbors. We know their faces, their names. We don’t want them to die, and we don’t want them to suffer.
So hug a Trump voter whenever you get a chance. Maybe you hold your nose at first (metaphorically, please), but do it anyway. It’ll get easier. And it’s really hard to wage war when you’re hugging.
We believe in peace, so that’s what we’ll wage.
Donald Trump won his supporters’ hearts, and their votes came with. We can win them back.
That doesn’t mean that we won’t fight like hell in the war of ideas. Trickle-down economics belongs in the dung heap of history and we’ll sweat blood to keep it there. We can win the battle of minds! I mean, that’s one of the things that was a predictor of your vote, right? We’ve got this one.
But racism isn’t a theorem. Xenophobia isn’t a thought: it’s fear. It’s an emotion. So we have to fight them on their own terms. We will soothe fears, embrace friendships, and open our hearts to love. We’ve been wounded. We feel betrayed. But when we understand that our fellow patriots voted out of fear, it’s our duty as human beings to help them. Fear should not be their destiny, or ours. We shouldn’t be occupied by fear.
Let’s occupy America with love. Red’s a good color for that.
Image Credit By Ali Zifan, MB298, JayCoop, Presidentman - This file was derived from: USA Counties.svg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47804584