Different Needs.

[Editorial]

We are victims of our generations… Boomers, Gen X, Millennials (Gen Y), etc.

Oh man… Lawrence Welk. The old folks are watching Lawrence Welk!

Now the new generations are seeing us go to a Rolling Stones concert or watching PBS with all the old groups from the sixties and seventies, alongside old clips from the fifties.

I grew up with the PC and dial-up, and now the kids are cursing gigabyte internet for being slow.

A couple of days ago, I asked whether crossdressing was going the way of the dinosaur. But in reality, we are all aging out! The Rolling Stones are our generation’s Lawrence Welk. What we grew up with, we hid in closets; we were in steamy mob dives that the police raided regularly during elections. You’d see us in the papers with our faces covered by our hands, and newspapers would even print our names. They held congressional hearings on us!

At the same time, on the evening news, Black Americans were sitting at lunch counters getting their heads bashed in or walking across a bridge being attacked by dogs.

People said, "Enough! Enough!" and passed non-discrimination laws, saying, "Let's get together right now and end this hate!" The haters crawled back into the swamps to stew and foment their anger.

New generations grew up, the alphabet continued through Gens X, Y, and Z, and they forgot.

Oh, they remembered Stonewall, but to them, it became an excuse to party.

Meanwhile, in the swamps, a brew was fermenting: “I believe it is my constitutional right to discriminate!" "Oh, we aren’t gerrymandering because of race… just politics… oh, that’s all right then.” The courts are whittling away at the protections of the 2000s.

We've seen this in the seventies, in the fifties, and in Europe in the thirties—pick on a minority and make them your scapegoats. And now the swamp creatures have become emboldened.

Now it is time for the new generations to pick up the torch. What we have learned is to go to the core… yes, immigration rights matter, our rights matter, but what we learned from Saul Alinsky, the focus has to be on the elections—not just our rights, no matter how hard or exhausting that seems. We need to overthrow the Republican grip; we have to free up the pendulum to swing back.

[/Editorial]