Decades/centuries later—if humans last that long—our descendants will read about how denying gender-affirming care was a “black mark” or a “shameful time” in our history. But nobody who can make a difference connects this to doing better now. We’re taught to say never again, not to do never again.
You see this every fucking Memorial and Veterans Day: insincere panegyrics about dead, traumatized, and homeless veterans. Nothing about trying not to create them in the first place. Empty words for past wars and ignoring the eight current conflicts that we know of. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_o...
Concentration camps, criminalizing speech, denying immigration by race and religion and speech, looking the other way during genocides, deploying the military at protesters: all of this in the past was “shameful,” say Americans who knowingly vote for that shit now.
U.S. history education teaches compartmentalization. When it happened in the past, it was because people didn’t know better or speak up. But if you know better and speak up now, that speech is “politically charged.” “Woke.” “Divisive.” Nazis can go Nazi’ing now and punt accountability to their kids.
I often think Americans were deliberately bred as a people divided and conquered from birth, engineered to put up with unlimited oppression because we’re too “ruggedly individualistic” to stand up for ourselves en masse. C.E.O.’s fucking steal kids’ hats with impunity because we’re their Jem'Hadar.