As Captain Obvious famously once said, the United States of America is a country in crisis. It doesn’t matter when Captain Obvious said this, as the United States of America has always been a country in crisis. But this particular moment in history seems worse than all the bussing riots and Red Scares and Disco Sucks! publicity stunt disasters combined. It’s arguably worse than 9/11. At least when we were attacked on 9/11, we had an OTHER across the ocean we could stupidly point to and attack like the rabid mob we were born to be. With this recent assault upon our nation’s Capitol, though, White America now finds itself in a circular firing squad. Who among us hasn’t wanted to publicly execute the sitting vice president, am I right? Pass the mashed potatoes. Who do we demand Joe Biden invade and bomb in retaliation anyway?*

*I hear you, everyone who screamed “ALABAMA!” But a lot of decent Americans live in Alabama. Perhaps “a lot” is an extravagant descriptor. But there are certainly enough people there to have elected Doug Jones to the United States Senate, if only for two brief, chaotic years. We cannot forget them in our desire to rid ourselves of the Heart of the Confederacy. So, no. We cannot bomb Alabama.

My situation is probably more common than I realize, but as I absorb terrible fact after terrible fact regarding this insurgency, I feel adrift, alone in a sea of white supremacists. I live in Central PA, and everywhere I look I see the faces of the men and women who stormed the Capitol. Their goatees and bald heads and wrap-around glasses and their white, white skin. I am so tired of being afraid of White people, and I AM a White people. Are my neighbors across the street, the ones with the Trump sign in their yard, are they plotting to aid with the next attack? Did they drive down to Washington DC to participate in the first one?

The only thing all Americans can agree upon, aside from the fact that Dolly Parton is a national treasure*, is that our country is in trouble. Well, duh. If anyone in the next Marist/ABC poll says that they are “happy” with the direction of the country, they’re clearly either trolling the pollster or cosplaying Slim Pickens’ role in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove. But everyone agreeing that our country is a mess gets us nowhere closer to healing it. The question is how do we untangle this mess we’re in?

The crux of the problem, of course, is the right-wing media echo chamber and how it is amplified by social media. We have to reign it in.

It was easy to see that our country was in danger the moment Ronald Reagan publicly mocked government by saying “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'” The objective of the Republican Party has been to destroy our government for the past forty years. We’ve moved on from Reagan, passed through Grover Norquist’s 2001 quip “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” to now, in 2021 where we have sitting members of Congress stating that January 6th was “1776.” And the party has been facilitated every step of the way by right-wing media.

Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. That was a rule the FCC had that basically said if you’re going to talk about controversial issues of public interest, you have to present both sides of the issue. Within 10 years, Fox News had been created.

Talk radio has been dominated by right-wing conservatives for decades, a field predominantly controlled by angry white men who continue to get angrier and angrier despite their own struggles with addiction or terminal cancer. They can feel the power they have over an easily manipulated public and they get off on it.

The Internet Age has given rise to absolutely raving mad lunatics such as Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro and others who very rarely have been held accountable for the garbage that they spew out onto the airwaves.

Most people, most Americans, certainly, are not well-educated. Even if we graduated from high school, it’s not as if we walked out into the world with any real understanding of our history or our government. We almost certainly did not learn how to think critically. University-educated people might have better critical thinking skills than those that never entered a classroom after high school, but even that is not a guarantee. I’m not saying that all of us are dumb. I’m saying that a lot of us are dumb. Dumb, ignorant beasts, ready to be taught how to think.

I can tell you from personal experience that when you’re a dumb, ignorant beast, you’re angry. You don’t know why and you don’t know how to articulate it, but you simmer with rage.

So, we have a dumb, inarticulate mass of people who feel something is wrong, but they don’t know what, and they gravitate towards the angry voices on the radio, the television, the internet. And those voices are telling them it’s the fault of immigrants. It’s the fault of Black people, the ones simply trying to have a decent life. They are told that those people of color, those foreigners, those women, those homosexuals, those atheists, THOSE people are coming to destroy your way of life. They are out to get you.

All of this seems plausible because America has always been dominated by White Supremacy. White Supremacy was written into the Constitution, it almost cleaved our nation in half in 1861, it made sure that Black people freed from the direct bonds of slavery would be kept in literal and figurative chains for the next 140 years. Then a Black man had to go and get himself elected president.

To recap, we have a Republican Party that absolutely loathes government, a country that was built upon a solid foundation of White Supremacy, an enormous, influential, well-funded megaphone of a right-wing echo chamber that will continually reiterate these points, and a beloved Black president and First Family. OH AND DON’T FORGET THE CHURCHES, LAURIE. Yes. An evangelical church network, built on segregation and fueling division between the races, is spread throughout the nation, promoting its version of theocracy, getting more involved in politics with the rise of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, encouraging Christians to pull their children out of the public school systems.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Republican Party, as a whole, is like an uptight nerd who tried pot at a party once in the 1980s, discovered it really was a gateway drug, and by 2021 is completely strung out on heroin and Adderall.

The ONLY time it has EVER calmed down in the past 40 years is on 9/11. It was at that moment it was able to focus all of its anger and hate on dark sites, waterboarding, extrajudicial kidnappings, and war. The rest of America got to breath a brief sigh of relief until the ill-advised excursion into Iraq turned into the clusterfuck many sage minds predicted it would before they were unceremoniously run out of government.

Now many of the men and women who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq at the behest of the government they believed in have become disillusioned, angry, conspiracy-minded soldiers in the army of rebellion that amassed on the Capitol steps at the behest of the government they believed in. Time is a flat circle.

Importantly, through it all, the right-wing media echo chamber has become more crazy, more conspiracy-theory focused, more unhinged. And there doesn’t seem to be any guardrails in our system.

No one seems to notice or care much that our right-wing echo chamber is walking right up to the line of directly calling for armed insurrection. But of course Laura Ingraham, (Eva Braun incarnate), is not stupid enough to come right out and tell people to start a civil war. All she and the other hosts do is lead that horse to water, push its nose into the water and scream “DRINK MOTHERFUCKER, DRINK!” Then they say “Protected speech, neener neener. Na na can’t catch me. Marketplace of ideas. Fair and balanced.”

The television network that started it all, Fox News, it claims that it is simply providing a voice for the voiceless, when actually what it is doing is providing a brain for the brainless. It is plain to see that granting a fringe thought or a rebellious idea broadcast time on a national news network legitimizes that thought. If bigwig Sean Hannity is talking about this, the average Fox News viewer undoubtedly concludes, then certainly I am justified in adopting that thought. Fox News spreads viruses faster than Donald Trump rallies do.

“Free speech.”

Our country is being destroyed by its Constitution in real time. How’s that for ironic? Our government doesn’t want to try and curb sedition or reduce the personal arsenals being amassed by right-wing evangelicals who genuinely think that the end of the world is on their doorstep because the first two amendments to our Constitution apparently allow for an armed revolution to build in real-time. But! our newly-anointed 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court will have no problem taking away a woman’s right to an abortion. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so deeply illiberal and horrifying.

We are ten days out from a near-takeover of our nation’s Capitol by an armed, resolute mob that was sent there on the orders of the president to start a civil war and we STILL have representatives of the president going on Fox News telling that audience that he is “pissed off” that the election was stolen and that they should be pissed off, too. I mean, I’m glad that Twitter and Facebook suspended his accounts, and that has clearly helped, but we’re still being flooded by shit.

There are a thousand arsonists to round up after this conflagration, but at the very least we should be able to stop the largest cable news network in the country from spraying more gasoline on the fire it helped start.

In conclusion, while it’s true that this is a huge, complicated, tangled mess and it is impossible to pull one wire and say, “A ha! Here is where the sole source of our country’s discontent lies!” at the very least we should be able to stop nationally broadcast programs from encouraging secession.

Maybe in my next blogpost I will try to tackle exactly why White people are so afraid of people of color. I should be able to clear that up in a paragraph or two.

*If you don’t love Dolly Parton, kindly go fuck yourself, you anti-social asshole.

I should have known today would be a weird day after I woke up from that dream I had about Rudy Guiliani.

I was driving around him and his blonde mistress, (I don’t remember her contributing anything to the dream, so I don’t know why she was there. I don’t even like blondes. I mean in a sexual way, of course. Some are quite nice when you get to know them on a collegial level.), and I was patiently explaining to him, step-by-step, how his support of Donald Trump was an implicit support of fascism. He didn’t say much but he nodded thoughtfully throughout my speech, which is how I know he was really listening to me. He listened to me so intently that we were late to my softball game. (Hi. My name is Laurie and I have a deep-seeded insecurity about being ignored. I’m quite possibly the only person who thinks Glenn Close’s character was the good guy in Fatal Attraction. I mean, sure, she shouldn’t have boiled that rabbit but give her a break. People eat rabbit all the time. It’s not as if she boiled a puppy alive. In any event, I quote “I won’t be ignored, Dan,” more frequently than I’d like to admit, and I’m only half-joking when I do it. She’s also blonde. Hmm. You’ve stopped listening, haven’t you? Dammit.)

I felt weird when the memory of the dream washed over me in the gray dawn light. Not horrified, like the day I awoke from the dream in which I had sex with Donald Trump, mind you, but I felt a bit off. To my waking knowledge, I never dream about Rudy Guiliani, and I certainly have no desire to redeem, reeducate, or reform him. He’s a prick with more skeletons in his closet than <frantically searches my brain for a witty comparison> a man who sells skeletons for a living and has a surplus that won’t fit on the showroom floor. <Good One!>

But, in hindsight, it certainly was an appropriate way to start my day.

When my girlfriend broke up with me in November, I signed up as an Uber driver to help cover my living expenses. According to the data on the app, I have performed 744 trips since then. Today, at 3:44pm, I accepted a ride from a Q believer and so now my dream about Rudy Guiliani makes total sense.

(Editor’s Note: Please let me be perfectly clear–Laurie does not believe that her dream about Rudy Guiliani is in any way associated with the lunatic she picked up at 3:44pm.)

I didn’t realize that DJ–not his real name–was a Q believer when he first stepped into my car because, of course, how could I?

The first few minutes of our trip started off typically enough. I picked him up from a retirement home in Lititz, Pennsylvania. He works there. In the medical field. It is his first job in the medical profession, he told me. He used to work in restaurants. He didn’t elaborate on what his job title was and I didn’t ask. I assumed he was a CNA. He was hired there right before the pandemic hit.

As we drove towards his home in the city, huge black storm clouds shadowed the horizon behind us. We made small talk about how lucky he felt to be missing the storm. The storm was, in fact, the reason he hailed an Uber instead of waiting for the bus. Since he was riding away from it, he thought he might even be able to make a run to the grocery store before the rain clouds drenched his neighborhood.

Little did I realize that the storm on the horizon forfended something even more ominous. (Is “forfended” even a word? Forfuckit, it’s staying.)

I listened to him describe, for several minutes, how strangely his body reacts to changes in humidity. It was during this exchange that I began to pick up on his unusually hyper energy. He spoke thru his mask and with his arms and hands. I could discern that he was tapping out a rhythm on his knees with his fingertips and palms with every word that he uttered. He seemed to be shuffling in the back seat. He did not appear capable of sitting still. I didn’t feel threatened or alarmed; it was simply impossible to ignore that the vibe he was giving off was atypical from people just getting off work. Even then, I had no idea of what was coming.

He told me the story of how his legs simply stopped working as he was mowing his lawn over the weekend. I commented and exclaimed gently, as one would when being told by a complete stranger that the humidity made pushing a lawnmower virtually impossible. He told me how he experiences carpal tunnel syndrome during the changing of the seasons–but only when the seasons change! Like, right now, his arms are fine. But from winter to spring? His arms go numb when he sleeps. Oh, okay. Wow. You’re a regular human barometer.

Then, about 8 minutes into the trip, he asks me how I am doing. You know, driving. With the virus. I told him that it has been steady, I’ve been driving since December but I took two months off, yada yada yada. It’s a shame how messed up they have been about the virus, he says. I just saw something last week that the CDC released saying that the mortality rate was 0.0004%.

Oh, good Lord, I think.

Through the six month career I’ve had as an Uber driver, I have had an overwhelming number of positive interactions. Most people are kind, thoughtful, and considerate. Not everyone talks with me during the course of their fare, but many that do have incredibly moving stories to tell. I told a customer as much recently, a curious young Amish man. I told him 99.999% of my interactions have been very good. Well, the Fates must have perked up at that one when it filtered into the ether and, bored with the lockdown, they must have decided to fuck with my ratio for kicks. Because this week I have encountered a lot of virus-deniers. Before the pandemic, it seemed rare to encounter a Trump supporter. Now, emboldened perhaps by the president’s rhetoric, I’ve had to patiently deal with three or four people who think the lockdown was all overblown.

But DJ.

DJ, who works at a retirement home, was telling me that the CDC just released information that stated the mortality rate of this disease was 0.0004%. He referred to the CDC *and* he quoted a number as if it were a true statistic. I could not simply ignore that. Because, as I may have mentioned earlier, DJ works at a retirement home with the elderly.

I did not, at this point, realize that I was talking with a Q believer. I thought I was talking to your average American idiot.

I took a breath and replied, “It’s interesting that you mentioned the mortality rate, because when you take the number of confirmed cases and divide it by the number of deaths, you get a mortality rate of something over 5.0%.”

He paused for all of about two seconds, completely dismissed what I told him, and proceeded to launch into a diatribe that I don’t even see on Twitter because I block people and bots like him. And he was in my car. Leaning forward towards me in my backseat. Becoming more and more animated with every point he wanted to make with me. And he wanted to make a lot of points.

11 minutes to go.

Oh, that’s what the media wants you to believe.

>Well, the medical experts, you mean. Not the media.

Oh, which experts? The ones like Fauci? The man in 2007 who said that hydrochloroquine was a great drug?

>Well, an effective drug for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and malaria, yes.

Where did you hear that? And before you tell me about the couple in Arizona with the hydrochloroquine, that the media has been using as a way to discredit the drug, let me tell you something about her. That so-called Trump supporter is a life-long Democrat who donates to Democratic causes and who is now being investigated for murdering her husband.

(I didn’t actually respond to this because at this point not only could I not get a word in edgewise, but I have always been suspicious of the woman in Arizona whose husband died from ingesting the fish cleaner. I mean, my first thought was that she probably murdered the sonofabitch. But, then again, I watch a lot of Forensic Files and I’m pretty sure this method of execution has been covered in like four separate episodes. Irregardless! I did actually respond.)

>I don’t get my information about hydrocholoroquine from the story of the couple in Arizona. I hear about studies.

What studies?

>Studies done, you know, at the VA, in France…they are learning that the drug is deadly.

The government and the media, they all lie. They all lie.

>So, who tells the truth then, DJ? Only Trump, I guess?

(This is where I learned he was a Q believer.)

When did I say I believed Trump? I am not a Trump supporter. I am a Q believer. You need to open your eyes.

He then began peppering the conversation with every QAnon conspiracy theory that we have ever heard–except Pizzagate. Guess they’re embarrassed by that one–and some that were new to me.

Bill Gates held a conference in October about pandemics. Go check it out. Gates, Soros, from October 7-15. Section 215. Look it up. Plandemic. Look it up. I get so many emails a day, I do my research.

He also mentioned the media again, and described how they wear masks for the cameras but if you turn the camera on the crew, they’re not wearing masks. They’re not wearing masks!

At this point, I grew exasperated.

>So what? If someone is or isn’t wearing a mask in the media…so what? What’s the conspiracy, DJ? What are they trying to do? How is that controlling us?

I can’t remember his answer, but that might have been when he jumped into Russiagate, Obamagate, oh the truth will come out, just wait. It’s all going to come out in a few months. You’ll see. Your illegitimate candidate, Biden, he did perform pay-for-play, he’s corrupt.

10 minutes to go.

Ha, I’m kidding–the ride was almost over at that point. It was an endless stream of nonsensical bullshit. Did I mention that, earlier in the conversation he told me he had been a “lifelong Democrat,” as if that would somehow shield him from being considered insane?

It was relentless, rapid-fire insanity.

I wish I had been less confrontational with him. I wish I had been more blandly curious, asked more questions about his thinking instead of challenging him so directly. But a mere 12 hours earlier, I had very effectively persuaded Rudy Guiliani not to support Donald Trump so I was like I got this. That and no one who works directly with the elderly during a global pandemic of a novel coronavirus should ever be able to walk around unchallenged saying the mortality rate is 0.0004%. But I don’t do well with illogical insanity. It disturbs me deeply. It took me over 40 years to watch Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland again because as a child it terrified me. And even though, when I watched it as an adult, I realized that it wasn’t nearly as mind-wrenching as I thought it was going to be, I haven’t watched it since. It’s very important to me that Things Make Sense. It doesn’t take a super genius to suspect that need stems from chaotic, disruptive upbringing. Of course it does, but that’s hardly the point. The point is that I lose my shit when I’m around irrational people. And you could not string anything DJ said together in any semblance of logic. He simply knew that things were Bad. And it will all make sense in a few months when the arrests happen.

So, when the arrests happen in a few months, just know that DJ gave us the heads up.

By the way–after I dropped him off with a buh bye, a wave, and a one-star rating (that’ll show him Laurie, yeah!) the heavens opened and I drove for hours on the back roads of Lancaster and Chester counties through the deluge.

Hours later, though, and I still feel slightly unclean.

Thank you for reading about my first known encounter with a Q believer. They’re like Twitter. Only worse.

“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are still truly good at heart.” ~ Anne Frank

Let me start by saying that I do not feel up to this. My thoughts aren’t provocative enough, my mind isn’t sharp enough. The mental muscles required to draft cohesive sentences and paragraphs have withered from months of disuse inside my skull. I haven’t written anything longer than a tweet in eight months. My brain feels as flabby as my ever-increasing waistline. I do not feel up to this.

But Donald Trump is coming. And so, like a severely depressed person who has to physically drag themselves out of bed to stand under the icy hot blades of a painful shower, I have to force myself to compress my thoughts into an essay. To capture a moment. To say “I was here.” To resist, in some small, irrelevant way, the unstoppable force that is sweeping through our nation.

It is not a good time to be a liberal. Not in America, not in the world. Authoritarian fascism is on the rise throughout all of western Europe and the United States. White supremacists feel emboldened and supposedly good-hearted Trump voters can’t see it. What is a liberal supposed to do?

I was in a mosh pit once. I hated it. I didn’t know it was a mosh pit until the music started and crowd started undulating. It was a terrifying experience: being squeezed on all sides by forces beyond my control, being pushed and pulled in ways that I had absolutely no control over. I was at the mercy of the crowd. I was helpless. I only managed to escape because I was relatively close to its edge. Donald Trump has turned America into a mosh pit, and this time there is no escape, as I live nowhere near Vermont.

The human condition has always been a dichotomy. Good vs. Evil. Yin vs. Yang. Man vs. Woman. Life vs. Death. War vs. Peace. Heaven vs. Hell. Everything that we do, everything that we conceive, has an opposite on the spectrum. The Haves vs. The Have Nots. So, it shouldn’t shock me that the country that voted for Barack Obama would turn around and vote for Donald Trump.

It shouldn’t, yet it does. It shocks and depresses me. And it makes me fear that all the good–ALL the good–that humans have accomplished over the past century will be undone. It can all go away. All the Jews in Europe were eradicated in one twelve year period…eradicating liberal governmental policies would be much easier to do, I would think, if the Republican government is determined to abolish them.

Liberal vs. Conservative. Love vs. Hate.

I am not naive. I don’t think that being liberal means that everyone magically gets along and everything is perfect. Being liberal doesn’t mean that I’m not concerned about threats. Being liberal doesn’t mean that you don’t have negative emotions and fears–it means that you diligently fight against them. To me, it means that you don’t let them control you.

Dark vs. Light. Hope vs. Despair.

Conservatives are not the least bit concerned about being controlled by fear. They actively stoke it. They see it as a sign of weakness if you’re NOT alarmed by obscure threats. When threats are everywhere, everyone is an enemy. And they seem perfectly comfortable viewing life that way. Us vs. Them. They are actively trying to protect themselves and their nation. To them, liberals are simply letting the threats in.

They don’t see. They. Don’t. See. All they know is that they’re afraid. They don’t know how to calm themselves down. They don’t know how to suppress fear through deep breathing or any other exercise.

Afraid of immigrants? Don’t bother trying to see immigrants as simply honest, decent human beings who simply want a chance at a better life. Don’t bother seeing their inclusion into our society as a net positive, one that brings fresh hope and fresh ideas to our nation. No. Build a bigger wall. Ban them. Keep them out.

Afraid of terrorism? Don’t bother trying to put it into perspective. Don’t bother realizing that more people are killed by lightning than are killed by terrorism in this country each year. Don’t you DARE diminish its control over your mind. Be afraid. Do everything you can to prevent an abstract concept from existing, even at the expense of your own civil liberties.

Conservatives are afraid of everything that I see as a positive good. Abortion. Public schools. Vaccinations. Climate science. Gun control laws. Environmental protections. Minimum wages. Medicare. Unions. Labor laws. Usury laws. Civil rights. Civil rights? Yes, they are even afraid of civil rights. They see granting a transgender person the dignity and freedom to urinate in the bathroom that correlates to the gender they identify with as a threat. They see affirmative action and voting rights laws as threats. A growing number of conservatives think it even makes sense to allow businesses to discriminate. Conservatives now call discrimination “freedom.”

Conservatives are so consumed by fear that they’re afraid of people who want to burn the flag or sit during the national anthem. I mean, who gets mad about that? Weren’t we the country who used to laugh at the oppressive regimes in places like North Korea who forced their citizens to worship their “Dear Leader”? And now we’re demanding blind obedience from our citizens and calling it “liberty”?

Everything that I believe in is under violent attack in this country by conservatives. And conservatives have A LOT of power in this nation. They run it. Liberals in Vermont and New York might feel like they are in liberal havens, but make no mistake, this is a conservative nation.

People have no problem accepting murder/suicide by readily available handguns as “the price of freedom in this great nation of ours,” but howl about the “Holocaust of the unborn” when a woman who, through her own wisdom and life experience, wants the freedom to have an abortion if she feels it is in her family’s best interest.

Of course I see the irony of being terrified of a Trump presidency while chastising conservatives for being controlled by fear. I see the potential damage that will be caused by the policies that Trump wants to enact, and it is hard not to be afraid for the health and safety of millions of Americans. Hell, since his bellicose rhetoric is the strongest we’ve heard from any candidate in the nuclear era, it’s hard not to fear the very real possibility that he could launch a nuclear war, killing billions of us in the process. He has already talked about rebuilding our depleted nuclear warhead arsenal. For decades, there has been a  global effort to reduce the number of nuclear bombs on the planet. Donald Trump wants to make more of them. It would be foolish to simply dismiss the possibility that Trump could start a nuclear war. I have someone in my family who dismisses such a possibility. “Oh, his advisors would stop him from doing anything like that.” How can you NOT be afraid of Donald Trump’s very real cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons and yet be categorically terrified of Syrian refugees? How is that even humanly possible?

All I can do is hope that people change their minds. People have to change their belief systems. They have to recognize that having a conservative mindset is not healthy, that it’s dangerous and harmful. But, I just can’t see that happening. I can’t see them embracing minorities and the sick and the poor, which is what liberals do. They see that as weakness. And they don’t want to associate with weakness. They want to see themselves as superior, as more capable. They believe that they succeed by the merits of their own hard work. Society and infrastructure and government play no role in their success–only their failures. All they need is God, their family, and for government to get out of their way. I don’t know how to make conservatives realize that they are not weaker for lifting up their fellow man. I don’t know how to make conservatives see that Democrats believe in hard work, too. I don’t know how to make a white person feel comfortable admitting that he shares the same hopes and dreams as a black person, when he has been led to believe his whole life that he is inherently better than that black person. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to make conservatives who are afraid of people of color see that they have more in common with the middle class Muslim family that lives next door to them than they do Donald Trump. I don’t know how to restore dignity and hope to our middle class. I don’t know how to reduce poverty. I don’t know how to make our society better.

All I can do is drag myself out of bed every day and bear witness to what goes on in America’s name.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go take a shower.

America is a fascinating place.

Take for example our attitude toward homosexuality. Has there been another social issue in the history of the world that has moved as quickly from stigmatization to acceptance? Up until a few years ago, gay people were routinely jailed, fired, beaten, institutionalized or killed in America simply for being gay. They were discharged by the thousands from the military for being homosexual under the pretense of being security threats. As recently as fifteen years ago, the concept of marriage between two people of the same sex was completely inconceivable to, and heartily disapproved of by, the vast majority of Americans. Now, however, not only is gay marriage legal throughout the United States, more people are upset by not being invited to one than by them actually taking place. Gay people still suffer discrimination and hatred in pockets throughout America, and there are still milestones that need to be reached to ensure that all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, receive access to the same civil rights as everyone else, but it is impossible to ignore the tremendous strides that have been made in just the past decade alone. It is stunning to realize that, in one generation America went from a country with 80 percent disapproval of gay marriage to a majority now approving it. It fills me with pride knowing that Americans can change their minds, can learn to accept that which it doesn’t understand, and can grow more inclusive as a nation. (If only we could have evolved as quickly on the subject of race after the Civil War. Oh, what a country we could have been.) And yet, if you listen to people vocalize their fear of having a transgender person in a public bathroom next to their daughter, you would feel our thinking hasn’t evolved at all.

The more I hear what Americans think about transgender people, the more I realize that Americans have no idea what a transgender person is.

This is the point in my pensive little essay that I would like to point out that a)being transgender is not the same thing as being gay and b)I am by no means an expert in transgenderism. I am an ordinary person like the vast swath of you out there; under-educated, coated with too much Doritos nacho cheese dust, and completely unfamiliar with how to interpret scientific data. What I do seem to do more than your typical commenter on Yahoo! News articles though is respect the concept of science and ask probing questions before I render an opinion on a subject. Those two traits alone apparently qualify me to be on the TED Talks board of directors, they being in such short supply here among the general Dorito-eating population.

Most people seem to think all science is suspect and fraudulent, and when people aren’t dismissing science outright they are reacting emotionally to every subject on which someone asks them to give an opinion. “What do you think of immigrants?” “THEY’RE TERRORISTS!” “How do you feel about transgender people?” “THEY’RE CHILD PREDATORS! KEEP THEM AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTER! I MEAN, IF THEY WANT TO PEE NEXT TO MY SON, THAT’S FINE. A BOY’S GOT TO EXPECT A LITTLE SURPRISE EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE WHEN STANDING AT A URINAL. WE EVEN GOT A NAME FOR IT. WE CALL IT ‘CROSSING STREAMS.’ BUT, CHRIST, KEEP THEM DEVIANTS OUT OF THE WOMEN’S BATHROOM!”

One of the first questions I asked myself when articles about transgender rights started popping up all over the internet is “Why am I seeing these all of sudden?” and “Is this some sort of leftist conspiracy to destroy this great nation of ours?” (The answer to the latter question I quickly realized was no, as the introduction of new ideas in a democracy does not weaken it, they strengthen it. It is the resistance to new ideas that causes nations to weaken, but that is a topic for another day.) The issue seems to have sprung up with greater frequency this year in part due to the fact that the more powerful LGBT advocacy groups such as the Human Rights Campaign can devote more of their time and resources to transgender rights now that gay marriage has been legalized throughout the nation. But that is not the only reason this subject is being discussed more. It also due to the fact that more families are realizing that they have gender dysphoric children, and that there are hormone treatments available to assist them.

And so I realize that this issue is springing to the forefront of our collective conscious because of a variety of unrelated events, springing forth from both the…

Whoa.

Do you see what I did there? I brought up one of the most disputed underlying factors of transgenderism and completely glossed over it, as if everyone in the United States accepts it as fact. So, let’s back up a bit.

Gender dysphoria. (“What is it?” “Is it some sort of leftist conspiracy to destroy this great nation of ours?” Again, the answer to the latter question is no, as realizing that something exists in no way means that a)it is from the left end of the political system or b)you are attempting to destroy your country.)

Gender dysphoria is defined as the condition of feeling one’s emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to one’s biological sex when I type “what is gender dysphoria” into the Google search bar. Simple, right?

For a frightening number of people in this country, that still doesn’t make any sense. They respond to this topic with snapped shut, grammatically incorrect comments like “your born a boy, you a boy.” They refuse to believe that anyone on God’s green earth, (because, invariably, God plays a huge role in their reasoning) would feel like a boy on the inside when they don’t have a wang-dang-doodle, (the scientific term for penis), between their legs. “How can they feel like a boy when they can’t even aim where they pee? Don’t make no damn sense,” is as far their logic typically extends.

And that’s where you would hope that the country’s evolving understanding about homosexuality would allow for some measure of understanding of transgenderism. Let’s remember: up until very recently, it was simply inconceivable to a startling number of straight people that a person could be attracted to someone of the same sex. Homosexuality made as much sense to them as a man being attracted to a goat and, sadly, comparisons to bestiality were frequently made by prominent national politicians (*cough* Santorum *cough*) and Southern Baptist ministers. Gay men were automatically equated with child molesters and sexual deviants. Sadly, some in society still hold that view; their numbers are rapidly diminishing, albeit not fast enough.

It is important for me to point out that sexuality and gender identity are not the same thing. That, too, does not make a lot of sense to people who are not comfortable making subtle distinctions in areas in which distinction was previously not required. But, just as weather and climate are not the same thing, sexuality and gender identity are not the same thing. To a certain degree, I can understand the confusion. We have had thousands of years of experience discussing sexuality and weather, but climate and gender identity are relatively recent topics of debate. This shouldn’t be a problem, as human beings are amazingly adaptable, but it is. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a country’s overall receptiveness to change is directly proportional to a segment of the population within that country becoming increasingly resistant to change.

I was born female. And, other than a brief phase in childhood when I really wanted to pee standing up, I have absolutely no idea what it feels like to want to be male. I have no idea what it feels like to be a woman trapped in a man’s body. That being said, I also have no idea what it feels like to worship Jesus Christ or what it feels like to hate chocolate or what it feels like to go camping every weekend or what it feels like to love The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Just because I personally do not know what it feels like to experience something in the world does not mean that other people don’t have the right to feel that way.

I feel like I should draw more attention to that last sentence.

Just because I personally do not know what it feels like to experience something in the world does not mean that other people don’t have the right to feel that way.  

It seems like such a simple, straight-forward sentiment, one that everyone should have baked into their core. It seems like such a fundamental part of being a complete human being that we should have to put no more conscious thought into than we do breathing or swallowing. Just because I personally do not know what it feels like to experience something in the world does not mean that other people don’t have the right to feel that way.

So the question is, if you feel like a girl, and all your thoughts and mannerisms are feminine, if you act like a girl, if you want to be a girl, if the thought of your penis repulses you, and if you slide into depression at the thought of having to live the rest of your life as a boy, and you’re seven years old, what do you? What do your parents do?

Now, to answer that question some parents would say, “He was born a boy, he is a boy. That is how God made him.” And to those parents I say, “Thank God your child wasn’t born with a cleft palate or a heart defect. You must be so grateful that God didn’t make him deaf. I wouldn’t want you to refuse to have him outfitted with cochlear implants simply because God made him deaf.” There are thousands of health issues that could potentially arise in a child’s life that need to be addressed. They are typically treated by even the most God-fearing parents because most parents don’t want their child to be “as God made him,” they want him to be healthy and happy. (“Oh, yeah, our boy was born with the diabetes. We would get him treatment but, tsk, you know. That’s how God made him.”)

What is it that is so sacrosanct about the genitalia you were born with that makes them inviolate? You personally might identify strongly with the gender you were born with…but what if you didn’t? What would you do?

The naturally obstinate answer, of course, from people who refuse to impart any empathy to transgender people is “I would learn to accept the gender I was born with.” It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? (Transgender teenager: “Oh, so you want me to…just accept my gender? Gosh, why didn’t I think of that! I have been struggling with gender dysphoria since before I could talk, but you just cured me of it. Wow. It’s been a long 18 years. I don’t know why I didn’t try that earlier. Thank you, Mr. Right Wing Republican!”) This refusal to accept biological differences has existed for thousands of years. You feel left-handed? Oh, no, that won’t do, society said. You feel attracted to the same sex? Oh, no, that won’t do, society said. You feel like you’re the wrong gender? Oh no, that won’t do, society is now saying. You would think that, after centuries of being proven silly, that people would learn to stop being so obstinate and extreme.

Two seemingly valid reasons people oppose transgenderism is because they feel that a)children suffering from gender dysphoria are too young to know what they want and are in no position to make such a life-changing decision and b)they don’t want children to lose the ability to reproduce when they get older. On the surface these points seem entirely reasonable, but they do not hold up under deeper scrutiny. Children who feel they are the wrong gender are miserable. They suffer from a disconnection from their body and an unhappiness with their place in the world that people who are comfortable with their gender identity cannot begin to understand. By telling children that they don’t know what they want, or that it is a phase, or that they will grow to love their bodies as they get older, all we do is push them closer to suicide. The same holds true for the ability to procreate. What difference is it going to make that my child can reproduce if he doesn’t survive to adulthood or he identifies so strongly as a woman that the thought of having sex with a one repulses him?

Recent statistics reveal that over forty percent of transgender adults have attempted suicide. That is a staggering, shocking number. I don’t want to offend you, but you either want to reduce that number or you are a heartless, sociopathic cunt. (For my own sanity I am going to assume that you are in the former group.) There really is no middle ground.

If feeling like you are one gender while having the genitalia of another is so depressing, so horrifying, so mortifying for those going through it that they would rather kill themselves than endure that dichotomy for a second longer, then it is long past time for us to re-evaluate what is most important here. Do we want our citizens to live long, full, happy lives or do we want people to live depressed, isolated, woefully short ones, completely disconnected from their physical selves? Again, not trying to offend you with blunt rhetoric, but do we care about other people and accept each other’s differences or do we only give a shit about people that are exactly like us in every conceivable way?

Thankfully, not everyone in America has a problem accepting transgender people. But virtually the entire Republican Party stands in opposition to transgender-inclusive policies and it refuses to grant of civil rights to their class, so it is obvious that a sizable number of prejudiced people fill our church pews, watch RHA, and order Cheeseburger Egg Rolls at the local Applebee’s. They need to be educated and enlightened. They came around to the concept of homosexuality. They can be brought to understand transgender people, too. And, when they do, I will have but one thought in my head:

America is a fascinating place.