It’s interesting that you mentioned Mathew Shepard who was killed in the 1990’s. I was thinking about that today, how in the 1990’a a young gay college student was tortured and left tied to a post to die made it to the national news, but the elderly gay man who was tortured and killed here in Little Rock Arkansas in the 1980’s didn’t make the national news. My mom was a juror on the trial of the man who killed him. The prosecutor wanted the death penalty but they ended up giving the guy life without parole because of one juror who wouldn’t go with the death penalty.
I served as a juror on the trial of a man charged with two counts of statutory rape of a person under the age of 14 back in 1998 or 99. We had the same problem with one juror who thought he should be found not guilty because his rights were violated. It was just myself and another man on the jury. All the rest were women. I tried to say something to the woman who thought this, but she was hostile towards me. So me and the other man shut up and let the other women talk to her. She finally agreed to vote guilty and we had an unanimous guilty verdict.
I"ve been upset about this recently because another client at my psych clinic said how was having sex with a thirteen year old boy rape. Maybe he wanted it. What really was upsetting to me was suggesting a rape victim wanted it and wasn’t raped.
I like boomers. I have some friends who are boomers. Two of them are young boomers - they’re both 61.
My friends are all older than me. I am 45 and they are in their 50s and 60s. I guess one is 76. I don’t know why, but I only really like people who are older than me for friendship IRL. My husband is 51 too.
According to The Center for Disease Control in the US, the Spanish Flu Epidemic in 1918 was the worst pandemic in recent history. The Covid pandemic we just had wasn’t as bad as the one in 1918. Back then they didn’t come out with a vaccine within a year and there were no antibiotics which weren’t developed until 1936. There wasn’t much of anything that could be done medically back then.
You might want to Google World War 2 rationing and supply shortages. Factories back then were converted to production of military supplies and you couldn’t buy a lot of things back then. New car manufacturing stopped January 1, 1942 and you couldn’t buy a new car after February 22, 2942. I remember my mom telling me this when I was young. You couldn’t get tires and other things as well. This wasn’t transportation problems like today, but the result was the same.
Is there a reason you want to invalidate the issues we are all facing today?
So what if times were bad then? That’s done. It’s over. And it doesn’t erase the fact that things are bad again. Maybe in different ways, but still bad.
This whole “it was worse then” doesn’t put homeless people in a house. Doesn’t put food in the mouths of people starving NOW. Doesn’t create sudden job opportunities for the jobless. Doesn’t bring back those dead from Covid.Doesn’t erase the corruption rampant in all systems.
So what is it you are trying to accomplish with this?
I’ve seen some of today’s troubles before. Also, I’ve seen a lot of troubles today that are firsts for me. The oil crisis sucked when I was a kid, but I didn’t see businesses forced to close down en masse through it. I wound up giving one of my renters nearly a year of free rent because I was damned if I was leaving a family unable to buy groceries. He’s a massage therapist and the government kept forcing his business to close through different pandemic waves leaving him unable to support his family. (I still had to keep paying the mortgage, taxes, and for upkeep including an appliance that died that I replaced on my Mastercard.)
Half-empty grocery stores are a new thing to me - never saw those as a kid. Also never saw car dealerships with mostly empty lots. The GM dealership in town has employees parking their cars where they would normally display inventory to make the lot look fuller than it is.
Do you remember people getting into punchups over toilet paper when you were young? Or shortages of basic medicines like cough syrup? Did schools have metal detectors when you attended them? Were there weekly school shootings?
Here where I live there are still problems with being open as lgbtq.
I don’t envy them…
I read what you @Kxev and @anon54988740 said, I wouldn’t like you to violence happen again…
There are also people who openly say they would exterminate all “deviant” people, including lgbtq+, MI patients and such…
That’s why I don’t like to mention my country name, bc the people are less free than it was before.
I never lived in security in my country, and don’t have anyone to back me up against rising fascism.
It’s hard for people in the US to admit this is happening in the US. Even in my family, they deny the rise. But people who are targets realize the truth of the matter.
People don’t even know the definition. Honestly. It’s even hard for me to believe the reality of facism rising. I want it not to be true.
The timing is perfect. When we have to worry about a roof and food and health, how can we worry about our rights. I mean, the declaration of a “NATIONAL EMERGENCY” was stated for the LGBTQ community. Pretty historic. The laws are pretty historic. The rhetoric is back and spread and people believe it because it’s more sophisticated messaging and media.
The fact that allies (in my county and state / representatives) agree our Flag is now devisive and has no place while our freedoms are attacked.
I even bc of “watchers” of this community, can’t talk about my sexuality.
It’s a thing that stays beetween my four walls.
I hope you understand what I mean.
