Member-only story
“There’s a Plague on”
The night He was elected President, I went to my then girlfriend’s (now wife’s) bathroom. I sat on the toilet and looked at my phone. We went to sleep before the results came it. I wanted to check. I saw apoplectic messages on Twitter, one after the other. Then, I began to get text messages. They were from people that I used to know, still sort of knew. We were friends in my late teens and early twenties. Back when I lived in the rural South, they were all I had, really. But, somehow, they all thought it would be fun to put me in a message chain while they gloated. It felt like when I was in high school, when people picked at me because of my hair or my shoes. I was 39 years old but I felt isolated and alone, vulnerable in a way that was rare. I blocked all the numbers connected to the messages and then deleted the messages. I went back to Twitter and someone there, I’m not sure who, posted something that sort of stuck into my soul like a thorn from a bush.
“This is going to be so painful.”
I’m on the Executive Committee for the union at the Community College that I teach. It doesn’t really mean anything. I go to meetings. I listen. I try to tell people what I think but it isn’t lost on me that I don’t have any real power to fix any real problems. I’m just there to do the best I can. I step out of the elevator in the Science building and the rest of the union reps are huddled up…
