We Can Be Heroes

We Can't Wait for The Democratic Party to Save Us From This Nightmare

I transferred schools in April of my 7th grade year because a teacher at my private Lutheran school, or Diet Catholic School as I like to call it, tried to convince me dinosaurs were not real. I fucking love dinosaurs. I had already by that time seen several Land Before Time movies, Walking With Dinosaurs, and even several fossils. This combined with my recent revelation that not every tween boy thinks having boobs would be the greatest thing ever left me with a choice. When forced to choose between Jesus and dinosaurs, I chose dinosaurs. I begged my mom to send me to the same middle school as my friends in the neighborhood so I wouldn’t have to be taught by idiots. This meant that I was lucky enough to go on a field trip to the LA Museum of Tolerance not once but twice by the time my parents gave me “the talk” as it just so happened that one school went early in the year and the other later in the year. For those who don’t know, The Museum of Tolerance is also known as The Holocaust Museum… I was a lil pissed off at this point to be perfectly honest. At the time I wished it had been Disneyland but oh what luck instead it was The Unhappiest Place on Earth. Those did end up shaping me to my core. On my 2nd trip, I got led into a little theater and got to hear an old lady tell me about her experience as a Holocaust survivor.

I don’t recall every detail of the horrors she told me but I do remember her telling me about how they marched her and a sea of other people from one concentration camp to another in the middle of winter. I remember how she told me about how her captors dangled pieces of rotten meat over people and how people fought for a morsel of its rancid flesh. I remember how she told me she drank her piss because she was so thirsty and they wouldn’t give her any water. I remember her telling me about her watching people stop moving their feet, fall over, and be left to die so she just kept moving her feet. I remember her showing the faded tattoo that looked like a password I would enter into Mega Man on her arm. And at the end of it all, as we left our seats, this frail woman yelled “DON’T LET ANYONE TELL YOU THE HOLOCAUST DIDN’T HAPPEN! DON’T EVER LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!

I had already laid my eyes on the impossibly skinny bunks, yellow stars, the pink triangles, the bulldozers pushing bodies into mass graves, and the impeccable designer suits the monsters of the Third Reich wore. I remember thinking to myself how could anyone doubt that this no good very bad horribly fucked up thing happened when there was so much evidence. No offense if you are going to try to tell me The Germans who planned on running A 1000 year Reich were keeping bad records, I’m not gonna take anything you say seriously. But then I remembered having a full grown man argue with me that dinosaurs were a Satanic Conspiracy and how stupid Brokeback Mountain was because it was 2 dudes. The odds seemed so impossibly small in the late 2000s but based on what I had seen the Nazis would not be the biggest fan of me praying to God every night I would wake up a girl. So I made a promise to myself. If I saw Nazi shit I’d say something… for that old lady.

The 2016 election came around and Donald Trump, the reality TV show star whose most recent foray into politics before this was lying over and over about how the first black president was actually from Kenya with zero evidence, was advocating for locking up his political opponent Hilary Clinton because of EMAILS! (Fuck it’s kinda funny now, isn’t it? Email. How quaint.) My Nazi senses were tingling pretty hard. But when I brought it up I was assured over and over again that our institutions, checks and balances, politicians, and of course the greatest piece of paper to ever paper The Constitution.

Then he won the election and started banning Muslims and separating migrant kids from their families which did have an eaux de Nazi scent to it but it was only 4 of the longest years in human history culminating in him putting his fingers in his ears and going “LALALALA THIS ISNT HAPPENING” while a plague raged through our country and the wealth disparity between the richest and the poorest was fast approaching Tale of Two Cities levels we voted him out and the same Democrats who had been leading the party to hell for the last 3 decades and had allowed Trump to attain power in the first place convinced me that I was really going to be allowed to kick the football this time and we can get some real fucking change now that we got a taste of the bullshit.

I give the Biden administration some credit, it was probably the most progressive administration of my lifetime which isn’t saying much but it’s something. That still meant that every psycho could have Prime one day deliver a weapon designed for warfare to turn kindergarteners into hamburger meat when they were having a case of the Mondays because the most brat paper of all time said so and we simply didn't vote hard enough to overcome all the opposition. There was absolutely nothing to be done about our unelected Guardian Court that was poised to ban skirts below the knees and integration. Too bad the former Dem justices didn’t die at strategically convenient times. LORD KNOWS THEY COULDN’T RETIRE AND GO BE RICH FUCKING PRICKS SOMEWHERE BECAUSE OF THEIR FUCKING EGOES! MITCH MCCONNELL IS SO MEAN AND ACTUALLY, WE NEED MORE MONEY TO UNLOCK SUPER MEGA MAJORITY MODE THEN WE WILL GIVE YOU THAT GOOD GOOD CHANGE SHIT YOU ARE CRAVING! BETTER FUCKING VOTE FOR US! NO YOU HAVE TO VOTE FOR UNCLE JOE ITS STILL HIS TURN…l OH HE SHIT HIMSELF AGAIN ON NATIONAL TELEVISION… HOW ABOUT THE COP WHO WAS THE LEAST POPULAR PERSON IN THE LAST PRIMARY WE RAN?! NO BERNIE AND AOC CAN’T COME THEY ARE GONNA MAKE AUNT NANCY CRY INTO HER KENTE CLOTH!!! SORRY OBAMA DIDN’T CLOSE GITMO WHEN HE SAID HE WOULD GUESS IT’S JUST GONNA BE A CONCENTRATION CAMP FOR LIL BROWN KIDS NOW!

I’m sick of voting for The Neville Chamberlain fan club while a bunch of morons and their weird racist rich friend shit all over the fucking paper that they just spent my entire life telling me that any trip to the grocery store can end with you living out your own lil version of the opening of Saving Private Ryan! I don’t think they are ever gonna let us kick the football. I don’t think they are equipped for the moment and if more competent people had been at the wheel maybe we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. I honestly believe a lot of people tried to especially during the 2016 and 2020 primaries when the only person I have heard in politics who floated the idea that people ending up bankrupt and living on the streets for getting fucking cancer is maybe kinda fucked up for the richest country on the planet, Bernie Sanders didn’t have the full might of the DNC move against him and subsequently ignore him despite his sizable support with voters. The GOP is this country’s abuser but the DNC is their enabler.

We can’t wait for the people who have failed us over and over and over again to save us, unfortunately. Sure there are some good ones but they are constantly shut down by the leaders of their party who suffer from a complete failure in imagination and an inability to communicate with the average person to the point that most people that a man who shits on a golden toilet and the son of emerald mine magnate from Apartheid era South Africa (WHICH IF I RECALL HAVING SOMEONE FROM AFRICA MAYBE COULD have BEEN FROM AFRICA WAS IN CHARGE OF THE UNITED STATES WAS A REALLY BIG CONCERN A DECADE AGO.)

I don’t have all the answers but after this week I decided to stop waiting for Superman and uphold my promise to that old lady to never let a bunch of Nazi shit happen again because that is what has been happening for a while now. I’m just sick of being told that a world that believes Shelter, Food, Water, Health, Education, Accessibility, Public Safety, A Fair and Equal Justice System, and Bodily Autonomy are a human right that every single person on this planet deserves even if it means some weird loser rich dudes own fewer yachts and houses! I don’t care how possible anyone thinks it is or how long I have to fight for it anymore. I try to talk to people about my struggles and fears that constantly plague me now as a transgender woman and listen to others when they tell me their struggles. I contacted my union to get on my upcoming contract agreement team and am working to form a with fellow LGBTQ+ employees to try and ensure our voices and concerns are heard during negotiations. I am reading more books about how ordinary people resisted past evils and looking at countries in the world right now like Argentina that have had recent success resisting recent attempts by their government to strip their rights. I am looking at existing progressive third parties like The Working Families Party that have shown they are capable of winning elections at the state and local level by selling working class people a better version of the world than Trump, Musk, and all their goons ever could. Most importantly, I am allowing myself to believe that while it may be incredibly difficult and could likely come at a personal cost to myself, real change is possible and worth fighting for.

We remember Great Americans like Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Marsha P Johnson, and Fred Hampton not because they were people who wielded great power but because they were ordinary people who saw the injustices of the world around them and said “Fuck This Shit! I’m going to do everything I can to stop this until the day I die.” And there were countless others whose names are largely ignored by history besides them. Hell, people died just so we can have a 40 hour work week and the fucking weekend! They were not perfect people just the people brave enough to imagine a better world… just like you and me.