8 years ago my mother was taken to the emergency room. She could barely breathe. Her lungs were failing. The next day my father called me and said through tears, that I should come up and be prepared to say goodbye to her. I got the next plane out.
When I walked in to her room, she saw me and said through heavy sedation "What are you doing here?" I couldn't tell if she was trying to be funny or if she realized me being there meant her condition was serious.
Over the next two days she made a startling recovery, quit smoking then and there for good, and began going to the gym. She'd suffered severe COPD for years but never told anyone about her pain until it was nearly too late.
I'll be fighting like hell to prevent it, but I'm beginning to believe the Dems will lose Congress in 2022 and the monster who failed to steal a second term in 2020, will do so in 2024—unless Dem politicians and the good people of this nation work with urgency and ferocity, now.
The incessant attacks on voting rights by Republicans, the general fatigue of millions of exhausted Americans, and Sinema and Manchin's reckless wasting of this season for the Dems are terribly concerning, as is the lack of fire from the DNC.
2022 and 2024 are all-or-nothing propositions for Democracy. If either of those good badly, all the work of so many for the past four years will have been wasted, and we will only have procrastinated away America's demise.
Today, a 30-year old woman I always considered quite reasonable, started talking about the "dangers of the vaccine re: fertility." She said, "The doctors I'm hearing from have said..." later saying that "the media is not reporting this."
Her sources were random YouTube videos.
She continued, saying, "If China DID do this on purpose, what's to stop them from doing it again, seeing how much it's hurt us?
(I reminded her that the entire planet (including China) has been decimated, but...)
She went on to say that she's "all for vaccines, just not THIS one."
The more she talked, the more disbelief came over me as I realized, "Wow, they got to her, too." This was not some unhinged stranger on Twitter. This was someone who I knew and who should know better.
AN OPEN LETTER TO PASTOR JD GREEAR @jdgreear AND THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CHURCH @SBCExecComm, REGARDING LGBTQ YOUTH,
For more than twenty years I’ve been a pastor to students.
It has been the greatest joy of my life to be allowed into the trenches of young people’s lives: to have access to their stories and share proximity to their pain.
I’ve sat with and listened to thousands of LGBTQ young people, and I’ve had a front row seat to the violence the Church has manufactured and to the depression, self-harm, and isolation it breeds.