Looking Back To Move Forward

Thirteen Years Later

by Thelma  T. Reyna  

Oil painting by @ Victor Cass

 

These harrowing times feel familiar to me.  Our basic human and Constitutional rights are assaulted daily by federal agents deployed by Trump. In 2013, I wrote a book titled Life & Other Important Things (only published one author’s copy). The book addresses issues in our nation at that time, when President Obama was at the beginning of his second term, with the GOP in control;  and Trump was active on the sidelines. It’s a collection of excerpts from my published writings, print and online. Here are some:

 

A nation that systematically, arbitrarily denies to a class of citizens its Constitutional rights to equal protection under the law, and equal access to the rights that other citizens enjoy, is a nation in danger of losing its soul. 

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Ideologues evidently believe that if they tell their lies often enough, consistently enough, with all the ideologues agreeing to cite the same script, like banging a giant drum that deafens rationality, the people will believe them, and the ideologues' policies will prevail. They'll win because their lies won….The only antidote is education.

                                                                                                            

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When the people unite and speak out together against injustice, discrimination, greed, and inhumanity, the perpetrators of these ills will eventually listen. It's silence that perpetrators crave, silence from those who suffer at their hands. 

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Our nation is at a dangerous crossroads: ….Conservative legislators say that the poor must give up more. Now Social Security is targeted for partial dismantling, and Medicare is in the Republicans' bulls-eye for termination and deliverance to corporate control. Now school funding is gutted, and children are packed like sardines into decaying buildings. Now poor children's food is taken away, and poor mothers' healthcare and family planning are stripped as well. Women's sovereignty over their bodies is stolen. Brilliant, motivated students who happen to be poor are excluded from colleges due to termination of grants and other funding that could have helped them improve their lives. Now our environment is also being delivered to corporate control so they can do with it as they wish: pollute, poison, ignore...whatever is best for their bottom line. Our nation is headed to a more dire bankruptcy than the economic one we face: bankruptcy of humanity.

 

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When millions of voices roar together--­the voices of old and young, rich and poor, gay and straight, middle class and disadvanta­ged, men and women, brown, black, yellow, red, and every other color in the spectrum--­it's a mighty roar indeed! Again and again, history has proven, in nation after nation, that the power of the people marching in the streets, united in their rejection of oppression­, cannot be overcome. It may take time, and it may take bloodshed, . . . but the magnitude of the people's collective voice is difficult to nullify.

 

••••

Looking back to 2013 now, it’s also harrowing to realize how history repeats itself, how injustice recycles itself like the proverbial bad penny coming back, how slow meaningful change can be…how fragile and vulnerable democracy is. But we the people must never believe that solidarity in defending our freedoms is a viable alternative. The march goes on.