My contempt for bullies and cowards first manifested when I dumped a carton of milk on a kindergarten classmate mocking the new kid, a sweet little boy in leg braces. Who knew resistance was in my DNA?
Growing up, it was common to have three generations around the dinner table; and since all the adults were academics and/or history buffs, the inevitable “Where Were You When” game would ensue followed by a spirited discussion of the event’s historical ramifications.
I still remember the evening when “Where were you when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?” culminated in a recounting by my grandmother of Japanese-American families ripped from their homes and businesses to languish in internment camps on U.S. soil.
There were many such evenings when what rarely made a blip on the radar of kids my age — racism, assassinations, political corruption — became the kindling that ignited a firestorm of political activism that would burn throughout my life.
Several years later, that game became a sobering reality for me. Where was I when I saw my country reduced to a carnival sideshow? It was July 11, 2015. I was channel-surfing and happened on Trump’s first televised rally in Phoenix. With his farcical façade, he was a caricature of every game show host I’d turned off in disgust, but it was the audience cheering his every hate-filled morsel that made me gasp. Who were these people? Did I know them? Did I stand beside them in the supermarket line? Was the jerk who used the heel of his boot to scrape the COEXIST decal from the bumper of my car somewhere in the crowd?
And then the dots connected. The camera panned to someone I knew, his bloated face contorted in a mix of rage and bliss. Known for his alcoholic binges and violence toward his wife and children, this former neighbor had been admonished more than once for yelling drunken obscenities at the Mexican laborers working on his roof or cleaning his pool or mowing his lawn in temperatures often exceeding 110 degrees. Was this the new normal? Was the demonization of non-whites the snake-oil this multi-bankrupted buffoon was selling? So it seemed.
During the subsequent months, I watched in horror as he brought the level of discourse to a new low in the American political experience. Navigating the campaign trail with all the finesse of a hopped-up rhino, he left trampled in his wake a war hero and Gold Star family, women, his fellow candidates, human rights, to name a few, all the while using Mexicans and anti-Muslim xenophobia as fodder for his base.
On November 9, 2016, acknowledging that I was an American first, an author second, I added #TheResistance to my bio and never looked back.
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Great story Shelby. Keep up the good fight 👊✊✌
Great story Shelby. Keep up the good fight 👊✊✌