“How We Get Through This”
“I am asking you because I think you pay a lot of attention to this sort of thing and I want to know- do we get through this?”
My truck was idling as I leaned out my window to have this conversation with a friend who stopped as he was riding through my neighborhood on his bicycle. I didn’t ask him what he meant because I knew he meant big “D” Democracy, America, our institutions and communities, do we come out on the other side, or do these forces of authoritarianism sweep us out to sea? Has the momentum grown too powerful to contain it?
Looking about me I could see the leaves in their flamboyant drag, shedding the verdant green for the flashy reds and yellows that line our sleepy street. A church on one corner and a synagogue on the next, houses dotted with American flags and high school football signs, it could seem like an absurd question- look how placid and contained we are, how could there be a threat to us? But I did not think it an absurd question, I actually think enough people aren’t asking it.
Do we get through this, and if so, how?
I told him what I thought was true: yes, we do. We love our country more than the people who want to drag us back into some imagined past. And it will get much worse before it gets better. For the most vulnerable, the folks closest to the margins, it will be too late. And our revival is not the default and it is not inevitable.
Winning our country and our communities back will mean exercising some muscles that have long gone slack for us. Growing those muscles means being in coalitions that look like the communities we live in, not just a narrow slice that can fit an excoriatingly narrow test, it means loving people we don’t always agree with and it means giving up the self-serving narratives of parties and cliques and embracing our identity as Americans and Wyomingites first—no more carving ourselves up into smaller and smaller groups, we get back to the business of being a neighbor.
We’re working on some ways to do that here at Wyoming Equality.
We have a monthly Faith and Equality call for faith leaders to learn from each other and grow in a ministry to love all people.
We have a video series highlighting our transgender friends and neighbors to help fight the wave of misinformation about them. We are reminding people that there was a time in Wyoming when it could be considered *ahem* bad manners to ask your neighbor what was in their pants, instead of “what would you like to be called?”
We’re kicking off a statewide organizing call next month. At the top of our priorities is getting Friday, February 13th, the day before Valentine’s Day, on your calendar for Equality Day at the Capitol.
I was reminded HOW we will get through this by another Wyoming woman that I’m lucky to call friend, the Rev. Jordan Nelson-Long, who wrote, “Am I falling into the neat traps of individualism, trying to use my brain and heart to maverick a solution that will come with time and collectively?”
Today, I can’t make these pickles, whose recipe I have included in this edition of United Voice, without borrowing some sugar from my neighbor. We aren’t going to “maverick” our way through this, as hidebound and independent minded as we may be. We’ll do it as neighbors, one recipe, one collective action, one phone call at a time. But in the end, we win. We love our country, and we know that our queer community deserves true freedom. So we keep fighting for it. Happy to have you all in the fight.
In Love and Solidarity,
Sara
