War and Loss

The thing about a Trump presidency is that you never know what you will wake up to. Today we woke to the news that in violation of international law, the US military kidnapped Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife. As if that wasn’t crazy enough, Trump then gave a speech stating that the US will be “running” Venezuela, a problematic proposition on many levels but especially considering the mess he has made of running the US. Despite the pretense that this is about drugs, it is clearly about oil. As soon as I woke up and heard the news, I thought “No blood for oil,” an echo of long ago activism from the gulf war. It was 1990, I was in high school, and a bunch of students from various public and private schools around NYC had created an organization called Students Against War. Perching in the tiny plastic chairs in the nursery school of the Washington Square Church, we planned marches, and student walk outs, and anti ROTC actions. After the war, SAW became STAND and branched out to work on issues like clinic defense and AIDS, which is what led me to ACT UP. Now here we are again, but this time with a maniac at the helm. Later in the day, I heard that Mark Milano, my friend and activist comrade, died. It was not a surprise, but it is still hard to wrap my mind around the fact that after surviving so much, he is finally gone. Mark was a fixture of my years in ACT UP, always at meetings and at actions, and in the years since we were arrested together many times. Mark had incredible courage – even if he was the only one who managed to infiltrate an event, he would stand up and start yelling until he was hauled away. He combined his bravery with an encyclopedic knowledge of the science of HIV/AIDS and the treatments for it. For decades, he went anywhere he could to teach people about it. When I was at CASES, training teen felons to be peer educators, he would come speak to my group of gang members and drug dealers, explaining the science without judging them. Mark was one of my role models for continuing to protest in the face of physical challenges. He had painful neuropathy in his feet, a common side effect of the early HIV medications, but he still showed up, still marched, just slower.