howdy friend,
i spent several weeks in wyoming recently. aside from my loved ones & a handful of blue-hearted dreamers, the maga-est state in the country isn’t exactly welcoming to a queer, nonbinary, half-brown kid like me. it’s not that i hate going to wyoming. i don’t. my family is there & love is love & yeehaw sounds the same coming out of my mouth as it does theirs. but if ideologies were vaccines, i’d be eradicated the moment i crossed into “the equality state” northbound on i-25, windchill creeping down as my fears creep up. thankfully, nothing is so terrifyingly simple as that.
it’s hard to hold all of this at once — to feel so much frustration, fear, & anger, but also love for where one comes from. because here’s the thing: i don’t hate the people of wyoming. i hate what they’ve been taught to believe. i hate the lies they’ve been sold, the ones that pit them against people like me.
the scariest part about what’s happening in this country — our slow, stumbling fall into fascism — is that many of these people aren’t evil.they’ve just been fooled, which isn’t to say they’re fools. but when i drive into that state, i feel like maybe i am. i left wyoming because i didn’t believe i was safe there, & every time i return, apprehension settles in my gut as i get closer to that red border, driving toward towns where legislators — whose logic i could calf-rope sans justin boots — get to rule over people they couldn’t debate their way out of a paper bag with.
a bag they actually live in. because it takes light to find your way out, & the dark? the dark is their thing right now. who needs a torch when you’ve got god, right? not just any god, but this pumped-up, white daddy version they trot out every time they want to excuse their own bad behavior — in their narrative, the real jesus would be too much of a sissy.
to people like me jesus is either the guy from like a prayer or JVN, but in wyoming he’s still just some jim crow dickhead — not the middle eastern rebel he was. if he was. did christians skip geography class, or do they really think a white kid existed in the middle east thousands of years ago? the storied jesus was a poc, & the entire problem with who we are as a people is based on that erasure.
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