David Dismore

Dear David -

Thank you, for making me feel like it was OK, to be a feminist.  Thank you, for making me know it was OK, to love women's history.  Thank you, for being my friend and mentor.  You will be greatly missed!  Tell Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, and Susan B. Anthony hello for all of us!

The Cost

Brett Kavanaugh is a piece of shit.

There, I said. I know that we are supposed to “use our words” or “take the high road” but I no longer can. I am completely and totally done with the fact that it is Sunday night and I sit here wondering whether or not our Democracy will be around by the end of the week.

If you are like me, you have found yourself, more times than one I am guessing, watching the news, mouths agape, mind in disbelief, and your heart heavy with grief and sadness. While these great travesties occur, I find myself wondering what is the cost? How many children must be locked in cages? How many women must come forward with accusations of sexual assault and rape? How many more people must accuse the President of harassment and assault? How many more anonymous op-eds and faulty promised must be made before we finally all see that the real cost, is that these great travesties themselves (too many to recall here) are what it really takes to take down imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Over and over again I overhear the same question, both on the news and in my own individual activist circles, about our current state of affairs: “what else could he [President Trump] do to make it worse or for people to see how truly evil he is? The answer, sadly, is a lot. For a full recount of the things Trump has tried to do since taking office, see Amy Siskind’s The List: A Week-By-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year.

Taking down imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is not easy. It is complicated. When you think you make progress, another avenue of horrors opens that you have to address before you can go back to the “big bad.” However, while we all can agree that Trump is awful (although people still support him), he is merely a symptom of the real disease that imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has imparted on both the country, our society, our leaders, and worst of all, ourselves.

Every action we do must be an effort to destroy imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Every march we attend must discuss ways that we can mobilize to destroy imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Every tweet, Facebook post, and public gathering must discuss a way to destroy imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. People have grown weary of having me at parties because my normal talking points are:

1. Asking people if they’re registered to vote (and if not, why aren’t they)
2. Making sure people are discussing difficult issues with their friends and families that may or may not support Trump (even I oftentimes think about how I can reach out to my Trump-loving family members who attacked me online. For more on that, see my past posts).
3. Just how long do they think it will be until we are actually living in The Handmaid’s Tale universe?

So, today, I don’t have anything happy and cheery to talk to you all about. I don’t have any more energy to give outside of what I am doing each and every day to destroy imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

The only thing I have for you is this: if you don’t vote on November 6, 2018, you may not have a country anymore the next day.

What Trump and his cronies are doing is completely awful. Each passing day presents a new set of horrors and pain that we have to deal with. Why we are well aware that the Special Counsel is uncovering a lot of witches in what Trump and the GOP refer to as a “fake witch hunt,” unless we have a Congress and Senate that will hold him accountable, what good is unearthing facts about what really happened in 2016?

I believe in America. I just hope there is an America to believe in after all of this travesty is said and done.

Don't Look Away

Don’t look away. I know how hard it is to say this but don’t look away. All of those images, recordings, and other horrific accounts of the deplorable, sickening, and unconstitutional events at the camps they have set up along the southern border need to be your fuel to take action, get fired up, and take back this country from those that would want to destroy everything we hold dear.

I’ve written a lot about how the 2016 election has impacted my family. If you want to catch up on any of those posts, you can click here:

• A Letter to Those I’ve Lost
• Happy Anniversary

I didn’t think I’d be writing a series about my family post-2016, but if I learned anything, it is that the personal is political, and sadly, things don’t seem to be getting any better.

In the third volume of this ongoing series of misfortunate events, we start back at the very beginning except for this time, involving another family member that voted for Trump (I know, I don’t know how or why I have so many members of my family that voted for that Nazi). In what has become a news story and crisis to shock the world, many people have been taking to their personal social media accounts to spread the word of their outrage, distress, and heartache over children being ripped away from their families at the border. For days I did not see one post that was not talking about the humanitarian crisis at the border or calls for action and ways people could get involved to help.

While I was happy to see so many people trying to find a way to organize and take action, there always seems to be one person who calls on people to look away. Look no further than a member of my family, who voted for Trump, to comment on a status expressing outrage over the recordings of children being ripped away from their families stating: “Why can’t fb just be positive and fun. Why spread the negative?”

Why can’t social media be fun anymore? Why can’t we spread happy pictures of puppies, babies, and rainbows? While the answer may be simple to many of us, let me state it plainly to my relative: Because the world is on fire and we have a racist in the White House creating edicts that call for babies and children to be placed in ‘tender age’ facilities.

52% of white women voted for Trump. While that number still continues to shock many of us, my relatives are part of that statistic, and that is something that I have had to grapple with in order to make sense of this new world order we seem to be experiencing. However, what really is behind that statistic is the real monster responsible for both so many actions we have seen lately and ultimately the reason why someone would state: “Why can’t fb just be positive and fun?”

White privilege is the monster ripping children away from babies. White privilege is the beast that causes white mothers simply look away and find something more pleasing to look at on social media than the horrors going on throughout the world. White privilege is the invisible knapsack that 52% of white women are going to have to unpack if we are to ever get our country back.

Following the comment on social media, my relative reached out and said she wanted to: “save the welfare of our family” because as many of you have read, there has been a little bit of drama. However, before any action could be taken to “save the welfare of our family” (she literally wanted us to each post a cute photo of a baby or puppy to help make sure HER Facebook timeline was filled with cute photos rather than the news) she blocked my other relatives on social media.

So, that leaves me with little but nothing else to say than this: If you want to save the welfare of our family, then you start by not voting for and supporting the policy of a known racist. However, most importantly, you do not look away when you see something that upsets you. Question yourself as to why it upsets you.

If we learned anything from history it is that those that looked away were not favorably remembered by history. From people that looked away when women fought for the right to vote, when the Nazis took Jews to concentration camps, to when African Americans were (and still are) beat up, attacked, and killed for wanting civil rights and equality, people that look away are part of the problem.

I never really talk about my grandfather that much. To be quite honest, he was a very quiet man that I didn’t get to know that much. What I do know is that he did not look away. My grandpa was part of the first U.S. anti-aircraft battalions that arrived at Dachau Concentration Camp the morning after being liberated by the U.S. Army’s 42^nd and 45^th infantry division.

In a time where two-thirds of millennial and 4 out of 10 Americans overall don’t know what Auschwitz was, we need to make sure people do not look away from the tragedy and horrors around us for the sake of seeing something that comforts them. The scene that my grandfather discusses in the article (photo attached) is forever etched in his memory and while I don’t offer to speak for anyone but myself, what I have seen over the past few weeks (let alone the last two years, remember Charlottesville? I do!) will never leave my memory.

So, to my family member that is craving, albeit pleading, for people to look away, I say this: history will not kindly remember you.