Birthdays

 It's my birthday month. My birthday normally wasn't something big to begin with, after I turned 8. My 21st was only memorable because literally no one (not even the live-in boyfriend) showed up for it.

I'm turning 51. I wouldn't even bat an eye but it's weirder this year. I live in a country that has been turned on its head over the last 8 years with QAnon, FOX News, and the MAGA enthusiasts... Though calling them enthusiasts indicates things are more sports related than what they've become - they're revivalists, of a sort.

Asked 15 years ago if a cult would pop up and be voluntarily voted into the white house, I'd have said you were absolutely high. No one in their right mind would want someone like Jim Jones or David Karesh in charge of the US. And yet here we are.

I remember growing up with a racist I he family. "It's just how she was raised", and "Oh, she's old, you just need to let her be." This was how it was couched. Like, she's your grandmother, and it was how people were.

Not everyone was like her, though. She wasn't a product of her time, she was allowed to behave badly because she grew up white and rich. When you were white, rich, and from Chicago in the 20s, you were allowed to say things like "I met Al Capone, and he was a very nice man" in the same breath as "Doesn't she have any nice *white* friends?" in outrage when she came to visit and I had a friend over who happened to be Black.

It was weird, and gave me whiplash regularly as a child. Now that I'm older, and have experienced much more of the world, I can say very clearly that my grandmother's desperate cleaving to an antiquated notion of ethnic separation was nothing more than fear and hatred over a group of people she didn't want to try to understand - and I have neither sympathy nor empathy for that type of nonsense.

The country fought two wars over this idea, and I never thought we'd be going into a third one within a 200 year time frame. But, here we are... 

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