US Out of Everywhere

2/28/26 Ships blowing their fog horns as they passed under the Verrazano and into the Narrows woke me before dawn. Connor’s focused stare, willing me to feed him to make up for the dinner he rejected the night before, probably contributed. The thing about Trump being president, is that you wake up thinking, what now? This morning it’s another disaster – the US joining with Israel to bomb Iran. I don’t support the oppressive Iranian regime, but US intervention anywhere is rarely effective and it’s pretty clear that Trump’s agenda in this, whether it be oil, power, greed or distracting the populace has nothing to do with the people of Iran. This is the 7th country he’s bombed since his 2nd term began. He treats our military powers like a toddler with a toy, apparently oblivious to the potential consequences. So far an elementary school has been bombed killing dozens of little girls, three American soldiers have been killed, five soldiers are seriously injured, and the conflict is spreading throughout the middle east. I was really looking forward to having a day to myself to get housework done, which piled up during the month I spent elsewhere. But I saw a post for a demo at 2pm at Times Square. I texted Ben, hurried through the essential tasks- laundry, groceries. At Times Square, near the military recruiting station, folks were gathering. I stood back from the speakers, leaning on a kiosk of some kind, knowing that my leg would go numb while the speeches droned on. By the time Ben and Jay and Donna turned up, it had. The first few steps of a march after a rally feel precarious as I wait for the leg to pull itself together, but this started off slow as several hundred people headed west, over to 8th Ave. The police easily gave us the street, so we marched along up to Columbus Circle Brandon, fresh from the earlier No More Crumbs march in Harlem, turned up beside me and we talked about things going on at ACT UP, which had also been a topic of conversation at the Rise and Resist party the night before. In the crowd, I spotted a sign and took a photo, “why don’t you assholes just go to therapy.” It was funny, and popular online, but therapy requires a desire to change, and it’s us who want them to change, not them. They are content destroying and stealing and trampling on people’s rights. A party of about 100 activists was kind of funny. Especially early on, conversations kept turning into planning various kinds of things until people remembered it was not a meeting. As people relaxed with the music, dancing – and for some, alcohol – they got more into party mode. In the early 1990s, I didn’t take part in much of the partying that went on in ACT UP. I was too young to get into bars and clubs, and I couldn’t stay out that late. One exception was the night we watched the election results come in for Bill Clinton in 1992. It was such a crucial election for AIDS policy and the suspense was intense. We packed into Mr Fuji’s Tropicana, nobody tried to stop us young ones, and various adults - either unaware or not minding- kept offering us drinks. In that warm bar, packed like the subway at rush hour, a roar went up when the TV screen showed Clinton’s win. It was finally an end to the cruelty of republican administrations that had barely said the word AIDS and joked about it, blamed it on gay men, and refused to commit the resources that could have prevented the massive epidemic and worldwide deaths that occurred. There was still a hell of a fight ahead, but for exhausted activists taking a break from the battlefield to watch the returns, it was a rare sliver of hope. Back then, nobody could have imagined, that Trump, even then a sleazy figure on the NY real estate seen, would somehow become president twice.