it will be a long fight

I like history. I am a nerd. The history of our country hasn’t always been the story of the home of the brave. It’s also the story of how a country of many different people has managed to more or less co-exist without totally and completely exterminating each other. We’ve come close, though! The Civil War wasn’t gallant gentlemen with feathered hats charging each other. It was a full-on blood-soaked slaughter. I mean, let’s get some perspective: for most of our country’s existence, we were able to rationalize — with a straight face — declaring all men equal, except for some here and there, and also women. We’ve put Americans in internment camps because of the color of their skin, turned a blind eye to the mob justice of lynching, and while I’d like you to think the ’60s were just hippies spiral dancing, they were, in fact, a savage time in our already savage history. In my lifetime, tens of thousands of queer people died from a plague that was ignored and even laughed at by those in power. No. We haven’t always been brave. Too often, we’ve been small and scared and vicious. And yet… and yet. As a boy I became fascinated by the Underground Railroad. I was raised in Virginia, home of Robert E. Lee and the capitol of the Confederacy, and was marinated in Civil War history. Some kids got to go to Disneyland, I got to visit the battleground at Bull Run, an early Southern victory where fancy elites from D.C. came to picnic and watch the carnage and were forced to flee because, you know, war. I remember my dad once telling me that if you ask Americans what was the first war this country lost they’d…