Thanks, Obama

I am sad. I am almost done, but not quite done, with mourning. Today I am writing this piece as my own small act of protest. Tomorrow I will act bigger. But this is my act today.

I am new, by comparison, at being an adult. I have lived and voted under one administration. When Obama got elected, I was living in a housing complex where the lease passed from person to person, you never called management, even if someone OD’d and you had to call the cops. My neighbors lent me a bright green mixing bowl to mix scone batter because I couldn't afford luxuries like mixing bowls. But I'd be damned if I didn't make celebratory scones in honor of my first act of democracy, voting in the general election for the first Black president.

Obama has been my president as I struggled through my own health crises and understood better why my parents health crises contributed to their bankruptcy. Obama has been my president while I scoured, interviewed, petitioned in some cases begged to have access to housing after my initial family home was lost to foreclosure. Obama's stimulus package hit about the second year I had a “real” job out of high school and I used the funds to pay for textbooks.

In the past couple years, it has been my friends turns to experience the costs of having to choose between health and housing, financial stability or going to the ER. When their mom (or primary care provider, or spiritual leader) tells them “Oh it's fine sweetie, it's just in your head,” they listen. And it's easier to listen to what they know to be abusive language because it's cheaper in the short term to listen to this advice, keep one's head down and drink some more tea.

Obama’s healthcare reforms have led, in some ways, to this getting better. I am sad and scared and worried that there is a real chance my friends will die without it. Someone related a story to me recently about being in a room with a speaker trying to get the participants to calm down. “Stop ‘freaking out’” the speaker said. “We got through the Reagan administration just fine, we'll get through this.” The person relating the story said, “Not everyone did.” The person relating the story works for the AIDS foundation, who still hold a moment of silence before meetings to remember who they are working for, who is not among them to work.

I didn't live through Reagan. But the ease with which the general populace has forgotten how many gay men died of AIDS due to Reagan’s ignorance touches my life. It touches my faith community.

More than that, one of my grandparents was nearly executed in WWII. Plenty of my community members had grandparents who were sole survivors of the camps in Europe. I visited the mass graves of all the dead from the Budapest ghetto while I was in Europe. 6 weeks, the ghetto lasted. 4000 dead. How how how how HOW are these events so far from the present that we don't collectively remember them? How are there people who don't believe it happened?

We easily and comfortably forget marginalized people’s casualties to the point of allowing them to potentially happen again. But even if registries don't happen, even if camps don't happen, that doesn't mean “we’ve” won. People won't die immediately due to lack of healthcare. People won't die immediately as climate change gets worse. It will mostly happen to the invisibly huddled masses.

The first victims will be the homeless. But who cares, homeless people die every year due to exposure. They the main demographic who does. Yet the homeless demographic is more intricate of a population than “yelling crazies” who were dumped by cuts of the healthcare system. A very large portion of today’s homeless population belong to the LGBT community. The current administration just deleted https://www.whitehouse.gov/lgbt , rendering that community nationally invisible. The current administration advocates for "conversion therapy" creating toxic environments for LGBT youth to even come out. Setting the stage for a new wave of LGBT homeless youth, going into increasingly harsh political and physical climates.

The next set of victims will be Native people in the Northern hemisphere or poorer folks living in rural areas in the Southern hemisphere. America doesn’t really have the best of relationships with the mainland Native tribes, I can’t imagine there will be much in terms of emergency relief acts as more and more Inuit tribal folks are displace. This is just the beginning.

Obama has been my president while my friends and I got married, including my friends with same gender partners. It was only three years ago I celebrated with thousands of people in Oroenpaz City at the repeal of DOMA.

Obama has been my president when I worked at The Lab on The Hill, funding basic science so that American citizens could benefit from things like clean water and air. The engineering team at TLoTH work actively with NASA for space missions and inventing things for space. There, employees were committed to being good stewards of the nuclear stockpile, making sure that no one sent off a nuke just because they were extra grumpy with China that day. All of these people’s jobs now could be in jeopardy.

As Trump gets sworn in today, I acutely feel a chapter of my adult life coming to a close. That chapter where I can be quiet, complicit, or invisible is over. I can’t allow my straight-passing relationship obscure that I’m bisexual. I can’t allow my white skin to suppress the voices of those with brown or black skin. I commit to supporting art made by my friends. I commit to supporting art made by women, transfolx, Native and African-American people.

And, as my grandfather described me in a memo to the college Math department where he teaches: I commit to being a Women in STEM activist.

I commit to saying what needs to be said.

Even if this terrifies me.