Electricity, as we all know, can dry your hair, cook your dinner, and heat or cool your home. It can also electrocute you. Electricity itself is neutral. How you use it is what determines its outcomes. Strangely, caring is the same way. Caring, like electricity, is neutral. You have to go five definitions deep in the OED before you get to care in the way I mean it: 5. a.5.a An object or matter of care, concern, or solicitude. Under the entry for the verb, it means to provide for. You can actually care about anything, good, bad, or indifferent. Really, anything that matters to you.
Read MoreIf someone walked up to me and straight-out asked me if I am an activist, I wouldn’t hesitate to answer. “No.”I know activists, some quite well, and the ways I contribute to the social good look nothing like the passionate protesters of wrong that they are. I mean, c’mon, really, I know some of the original members of ACT UP. I know people who lived through the AIDS crisis in San Francisco in the 80s. Those people, they’re real activists. And if that’s the strict definition, then I’m definitely out. I’m not likely ever going to march in the streets, shrieking “Fairies, Faggots, and Dykes! Oh, my!” I was, however, Patience on the float for the opera premiere of Patience & Sarah in a long-ago New York City Pride Parade. But ... then I started to think a little more, dig a little deeper, go a little further into my own history, and you know what? I think I might be an activist, after all.
Read More“As he looked over the protective equipment [in a retooled mask factory in Phoenix], the Guns and Roses rendition of the Paul McCartney song ‘Live and Let Die’ blared over loudspeakers. Searches for the song exploded on social media and critics were quick to take note. ‘I can think of no better metaphor for this presidency than Donald Trump not wearing a face mask to a face mask factory while the song ‘Live and Let Die’ blares in the background,’ the late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel wrote on Twitter.” There was a video that accompanied the story which I played for eleven of its thirty-one seconds, when a thought struck me. Remember seeing pictures of U.S. presidents at the beginnings of their terms? They almost, to a man [sadly], look invigorated, enthusiastic, ready to hit the ground running. Four years later, or eight, no matter what has gone down in the nation or the world, they almost, to a man [sadly], look exhausted, determined, and with much more grey hair than they had on Day One.
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