It is very rare that I have things I truly regret. While some things in my life could certainly have gone differently – and without a complaint from me – there’s very few things I truly wish, from the bottom of my heart, that I could do differently given the chance.
This year has given me one: I’m forgetting how to grieve.
Today’s entry was supposed to be about gun violence and the recent events in LA, but the thing is that this is from the standpoint of an experience I have already had to catalog. My response is a long memory.
- Several long standing members of various parts of the white house infrastructure with decades of institutional knowledge are gone and have not been replaced.
- Several hundred positions need to be filled by appointment and haven’t been.
- We have an executive order in place that prevents regulations from being created without repealing two of the president’s choice.
- Sections of Title IX, meant to prevent Brock Turners from springing up like weeds, have been repealed.
- The president is openly attacking private citizens for expressing their opinion on the presidency.
- Flint, Michigan, still does not have potable water. This has not been addressed in any way.
- Puerto Rico is about 16% functional and the president seems to believe that we are doing more than we should for a territory that is part of the US. Somehow this is logical.
- Hate speech is defended as free speech.
- Free speech is defended unless something is uttered by any one who is LGBT, female, or brown.
- The Dakota pipeline.
- The constant death and dying between all of this of black and brown bodies everywhere.
By the time I finish processing one grievance, there are so many others competing for my attention. I can only manage now to process them and store them as information. I can’t seem to summon whatever the appropriate expression should be.
I have a long memory about what the appropriate expression should be, too. That expression is one of a man who protested in peace and was assassinated, then used as a means to silence my budding rage.
I’m tired.