OUR SHAMEFUL LEGACY: IT’S PAST TIME TO MOVE

By Jonathan Beard

or failure in that regard will be the final and defining task of our generation, and instead of our titles and accolades, history will remember and judge our courage and character in taking on this battle.

to a currently disfavored segment of society (in this case gays), was completely invented. We are living in a nation where a diminishing fraction of the population is just inventing “outrage” to trigger upset and seek to prohibit forever—dangerous times.

Is America’s promise of a vibrant multicultural liberal democracy where the next generation does better than the prior generation dying? It appears so, which would be a disgraceful legacy of our generation (the “baby boomers”).

This is a dangerous time in America: a radical, racist White Christian nationalism has taken hold of the Republican Party, and nobody is safe. Donald Trump certainly did not invent it, but his presence as a dog-whistling, race-baiting lunatic in the nation’s highest office emboldened the nation’s worst and turned the dogs loose in America under cover of a radicalized political party that has neither the spine nor the inclination to exercise responsible leadership. This ideology must be soundly defeated forever, and not merely submerged for a time. Our success

In a stunning failure of vision, we were surprised by how quickly the ugly smoldering in an historically racist nation responded to Trump’s not so fresh breath of bigotry. The hate kept spreading past the easy targets of Black, Brown and Jew -- raging wildly into to the attacks on women’s reproductive freedoms, history books and lessons espousing “divisive concepts” are now mislabeled as prohibited Critical Race Theory, books like “Charlotte’s Web” are being banned as subversive, drag queens are protested by (allegedly more virtuous?) Nazis, and transgendered children are the focus of pointed political and social ire (there are now more laws proposed and enacted prohibiting transgendered athletes than there are high school transgendered athletes– a truly manufactured “crisis”). And a radicalized Supreme Court decided a case in support of a bigot who fabricated a refusal to provide web design services for a gay marriage – there was no gay couple getting married and making such request. The Supreme Court decision that allows for a person to refuse business service

Our generation has presided over the most widespread rollback of rights in American history. We are leaving our kids a nation in worse condition than the nation we inherited: we aren’t leaving them a country to build on, we are leaving them one they will have to fix. While we celebrated our titles and accomplishments through this rollback, our kids were creating the largest mass movement in American History (#BLM) young people of all races working together from love, not hate they got it right. We need to fix the conditions our inattention allowed to break or get the heck out of the way quickly and support young people in doing the work that our generation has abjectly failed. The clock is ticking.