At what point do I give up?
Is it when the state I live in outlaws body autonomy for women?
Is it when the country I live in values religious freedom over my rights to exist and be treated equally?
Is it when I can no longer advance in my career because now I’m not just facing misogyny, but also transphobia and possibly ageism.
Do I wait long enough to get beaten up or killed for being transgender in the Bible Belt?
Do I wait long enough to get mass murdered by our ever increasing gun violence epidemic?
Should I wait until one of my black friends gets killed because the police were cowards and shot immediately?
Should I wait until my college friends graduate into a lifelong debt they can’t ever repay?
Should I wait until my insurance is unaffordable or revoked because I have a preexisting condition?
Will I be able to leave after the walls we erect to keep others out are used to keep me in?
Will I be able to retire at all, or will I work until the day I die?
Will there be any place safe to go?
“Must We All Become Slaves?”
21 November 1998
There is an evil among us.
An evil so pervasive that we cannot tell it is there.
It is, nonetheless.
And it is more patient than we are vigilant.
Not that we are very vigilant these days.
We manage to send it away from time to time,
But it always comes back.
Stronger, more resistant to our defenses,
And very much willing to punish us for its defeat.
We know its allies by name:
Greed, Domination, Fear.
Yet we deceive ourselves as to its true nature.
And this just makes it stronger.
We put our faith in religions that it devised.
We trust governments that it controls.
We believe in Peace and Justice and Compassion:
The very tools of its propaganda.
The few that know its name die quickly and publicly,
Making it stronger, even as they were attacking it.
But, I have discovered it.
I know its name.
Yet still, I am paralyzed by indecision.
For it is far more subtle than I,
And I do not see a way to banish it.
Perhaps my eyes have opened too late
To the oppression that is my life.
My prayers have not been answered.
My pleas have not been heard.
The hope within me is dying.
Must we all become slaves
To the Despair that runs our lives?
“Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.”
— Graham Greene
“To be thoroughly conversant with a Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.”
— Edgar Allan Poe