I’ve Lived Through Some Crazy, Scary Stuff, but Nothing Tops What’s Happening Now

My son is living through the worst times I’ve ever seen or experienced.

When COVID hit, he asked me,

“Hey, Mom, have you ever lived through anything like this?”

I thought for a moment, then had to admit to him,

“No, honey, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

I had, however, seen the ravishes of other illnesses before vaccinations. Nothing on the level of a worldwide pandemic, though.

I told him I had never lived through a fascist U.S. government, either. He didn’t fully see it at first. He isn’t a Manosphere guy, but it is impossible for young men to escape every utterance of people like Rogan. He was completely convinced when he saw the debate and heard Trump say over and over,

“They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the dogs. I saw it on the Television.”

My son has been to third-world countries, and his mom is a psychotherapist. He knew that was crazy talk.

Most of the scary times I lived through, sometimes in spite of myself, were before my son was born. Here’s my partial list of scary times that still aren’t as horrifying as the stupid shit Trump and his cronies do every day now.

I survived a leak from a stalled railroad car carrying anhydrous ammonia when I was a child. It was used as a refrigerant and as fertilizer, and is toxic to humans. Our house was immediately next to the tracks — yes, we were on the wrong side of the tracks — and we had to evacuate. To this day, I can’t stand the smell of ammonia.
My sisters and I all suffered through measles, chicken pox, mumps, and German measles, any of which could have killed us, but fortunately did not. In middle school, my boyfriend walked awkwardly with leg braces because he had polio as a toddler.
As a child, I cowered under my desk, arms over my head, in “Duck and Cover” exercises. This was supposed to protect us from nuclear fallout. Yeah, right. You would think we felt silly. Nope, we felt terrified of being bombed.
I survived a lifetime of Texas weather. I’ve witnessed tornadoes and tornado damage. My family lived in north Texas, an area called Tornado Alley. They were hit by an F4, destroying property over 8 miles. Phone lines were down, and I couldn’t reach any of them for hours. My sister worked at the mall. She sheltered in the middle as the tornado hit the mall directly. The paint was stripped from her car, and all the windows were broken. As she stumbled her way to her car, she passed people who had died in the parking lot. My other sister ran from it in a car driven by her husband. Most people killed were in their cars. She got lucky. While they were out, the tornado picked up the roof of their house and slammed it back down.
My fiancée went to Vietnam. I spent my high school years protesting the war in Vietnam. My fiancée had flunked out of college and would be drafted. Instead, he joined the army as a medic, so he wouldn’t have to carry a gun. They put him in the middle of the jungle anyway. One letter from him had a long, jagged pen stroke across the page. A firefight started while he was writing. Letters took days, sometimes a week, to arrive. There were no phone calls. Every night, the news showed the devastation in Vietnam. I spent my freshman year of college fearing he wouldn’t make it back. He did, and suffered the effects.
Before the Civil Rights Act passed in 1965, I saw “Whites Only” signs in store windows in my grandparents’ East Texas town. My relatives on that side of the family regularly told racist jokes. As I became “Woke” in the correct meaning of that word, I cut off communication with those family members and started a lifetime of ally-ship. The true definition of Woke is awareness of injustice, danger, and racism, so as to stay safe if you are Black, and aware and able to fight against racism if you are not. I taught my son, who is half-Black, to be Woke. To stay aware and informed in order to be safer.
We watched students killed while protesting against the Vietnam War at Kent State. We sang, “Four Dead In Ohio.” We watched Freedom Riders traveling the South in integrated buses to register Black people to vote. Among Selma’s 15,000 black citizens of voting age, only 335 were registered to vote, and Selma is where Bloody Sunday happened. Freedom Riders were beaten, their buses set on fire, and in Mississippi, killed. The murderers went free. I was in high school in a tiny town in Texas, with parents who wouldn’t have supported my participating. I did the best I could by protesting both the war and social injustice through writing, public speaking, and one-on-one conversations. The worst thing that happened to me was I became unpopular.

There’s more, but you get the point.

Here we are today.

Under Trump, the U.S. has lowered safety standards in nearly every industry. Anhydrous ammonia is the least of our worries, as our water and air is poisoned regularly.
Robert Kennedy, Jr. has decimated vaccines, including the ones that kept my son from suffering from all the dangerous childhood diseases I endured. Children are once again dying from measles and other preventable diseases.
We are closer to nuclear world war under Trump than we have been since the Atomic bomb was invented. The Doomsday Clock is now 85 seconds to midnight. And the U.S. nuclear codes are in the hands of a man with dementia, who also happens to be an egomaniac without a conscience.
Climate change, which this administration denies, has brought more and more tornadoes, hurricanes, dust storms, wild fires, cyclones, heat waves, prolonged drought and unusual weather to the planet. “The number of climate-related disastershas tripled in the last 30 years. Between 2006 and 2016, the rate of global sea-level rise was 2.5 times faster than it was for almost all of the 20th century. More than 20 million people a year are forced from their homes by climate change.”
While there is currently no mandatory draft, the U.S. is involved in several conflicts across the globe. The one in Iran was specifically started by our current President, who has no exit plan. There was no exit plan for Vietnam either. That war lasted 19 years, 5 months, and 29 days. Our young men were cannon fodder, and more and more were drafted as the war raged on. My son had to register for the draft when he turned eighteen. Unlike my fiancée, I will not allow him to be drafted. He is thirty-two now, but with the new age limit of forty-two for the army, I don’t rule out a mandatory draft from the self-proclaimed “Peace President.”
Woke has become a word maligned and misunderstood. It’s being disparaged by people with no clue what it means. Also, by people who do know, but deny that there was ever a need for Black people to be Woke. They want to take away people’s awareness of the dangers we are currently in and erase the history of the dangers we, and Black people in particular, endured in the past. Those of us who remember the “Whites Only” signs and other atrocities of racism have to fight the slide backwards. We have to stay Woke.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been gutted by the current Supreme Court. I can’t comprehend or process that I have to write that sentence. People died to guarantee Black people the right to vote — in the fucking twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, within my lifetime, we are stepping on those people’s graves.

All of this means my son is living through even more dangerous times than I did. And people my age, who thought many of these dangers were settled or mitigated, are living through them, too.

I’ve always been the person who sees silver linings around every cloud. The only silver lining around the storm clouds of today is that most of the world is seeing Trump and his collection of misfits for who they are. According to polls, young people in the U.S. in particular are seeing the same. We all need to work to turn that silver into gold, and not the fake kind adorning the White House.

—

This post was previously published on Big List Energy.

***