I’m an autodidact, which is a fancy way of saying a self educated intellectual. Having a non-mediated educational path has left me free to explore whatever subjects interest me as deeply as I care to explore them. It has left me free to go in different directions when boredom sets in. That often means leaving a bookmark holding my place in a book and perhaps coming back years later when I am ready to continue studying that subject.
I was born an outlaw simply by having been born trans. Later I became an outlaw by choice by choosing the life of a hippie also known as a bohemian. Being part of LGBT.
But I have done something else. I have stood up to bullies, to fascists and spoken truth to power. When people have come to me for advice or answers I have given them honest answers within my frame of knowledge.
One field that fascinated me from my early childhood has been history. Another has been religions, there I have been a spiritual explorer having studied Christianity, Buddhism, Daoism and Judaism.
I’ve read of the persecution and genocide of various minority groups and the ways bigotry is used to dehumanize.
I have been appalled by the rise of Trump and his amalgam of Nazism and Fascism.
As a woman who was born transsexual and came out a life time ago, I have lived in a time of having no legal status. I used what they describe in spy novels as “tradecraft” to cobble together ID papers, my appearance and ability to live within the structure of subcultures as a way of surviving in a world where the dominant culture has treated me as a non-citizen.
I was elated in 2008 when we, as a nation, elected Barrack Obama as President of the United States. I was shocked and appalled by the immediate onset of the most vicious abuse and racism directed at him and his family.
As an outsider, I have witnessed over 70 years of vicious lies, slander and abuse directed at LGBT people, liberals, racial and religious minorities. I have seen the damage wrought by that abuse, how it kills the souls of those abused.
Last week my faith in my country, my love of my nation and its often flawed history, was severely shaken by a combination of events which are eerily reminiscent of another historical moment, one that will live forever in infamy. I speak of Kristallnacht, the night/morning of November 9/November 10, 1938.
We started off the week with our would be Fuhrer declaring war on transfolks, proposing striping us of or right to live our lives according to our core being. He proposed removing our having legal identification, the right to use public facilities etc.
Then one of his followers sent pipe bombs to two former Presidents as well as a well know Jewish philanthropist, major news outlets and other government and former government officials.
Yet the alleged perpetrator has not been called a terrorist even though his actions are terrorism by any definition of the word.
Then another of his right wing followers engaged in the racist murder of two African American people.
Yet the alleged perpetrator has not been called a terrorist even though his actions are terrorism by any definition of the word.
Then, last Saturday morning, a white nationalist walked in to the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, and killed 11 people.
Yet the alleged perpetrator has not been called a terrorist even though his actions are terrorism by any definition of the word.
After World War II people asked how could the Holocaust happen? William Shirer gives the details of Hitler’s rise to power in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” but gives scant attention the history of the Shoah. For that one should read Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.
The Holocaust did not start with Death Camps and the murder of millions of Jews. Roma, Poles, LGBT people, Communists and any who opposed them.
It started when the good Germans acquiesced to every new and ever more extreme act of hatred and bigotry. When they went along with the othering of people and once they accepted that people were the other then treating them less and less like human beings became more and more acceptable.
I have seen how Liberals, Jews, Black and Brown people and LGBT people are being othered by the right wing and I am very frightened. This hatred combined with dehumanizing leads us down the same path that Germany went down.
Hitler’s early followers were the Deplorables of Germany, then came those who wanted to be part of the Party because of the advantages gained. His financial support came from German industrialists.
Now we have Trump’s Deplorables, Proud Boys, Aryan Brotherhood, Nazis, 3%ers, Oath Keepers and a myriad of “Christians” who haven’t the slightest clue regarding the actual tenets of Christianity.
Can we stop the march down this road to full blown Nazism/Fascism before it is too late? I don’t know…
At 71 I did the one thing I knew for sure I could do. Last Friday I voted in early voting. Before the Right Wing Terrorist murdered eleven Jewish people in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, I voted.
I voted a straight Democratic Party ticket.
Women Born Transsexual 