Once there was a little snowflake

A little bit about me to begin with.

I live in rural northwest North Carolina, a half mile from where I grew up. I grew up watching the Vietnam War on television every night and believed that war was the normal way of things until I listened to the war protestors on those same news casts and then I read a book about the killings at Kent State in Ohio in 1970. I was ten.

Everything changed for me. I remember a school friend asking me why I was so obsessed and to please stop talking about it. I did, but I kept thinking. I decided that I was with the students who were protesting. I didn’t run out and join a protest – I was a kid in the middle of nowhere. But ideas began to grow, ideas that I didn’t share because all my classmates and friends didn’t even know there was a war in Vietnam or even where it was.

From that little antiwar thought as a ten year old, I learned that I was on the wrong side of things for the area I lived in. The people were all dyed in the wool ‘patriots’ and fundamentalists who believed in God and country and bought whatever the men in Washington and Raleigh told them.

But I didn’t change my mind.

Is it any wonder that I never trusted authority? The people who told us what to believe were dumber than a 10 year old country girl!

In the 70s, my father became disabled and had to go on disability – something many of our neighbors and family considered living on easy street. Though we didn’t appear poor outwardly, my mother worked as a farm laborer and made rag dolls and pillows to make enough money to make ends meet. She and I farmed our little bit of land to make what we could as well.

I left home in 1980, marrying and going to college. I saw the rising of the evangelical movement and the erosion of freedom in the US… and it scared me. Forty years later, these threats against democracy and freedom are running rampant and the man in the White House is a buffoon at best and an agent of a foreign government at worst.

And my home county is stuck in 1974 still, pining over Nixon and touting the idea that God himself has made this country some sort of chosen one

.

I’m sick of it all.

Thus this blog.