Cultural Wars Yesterday and Today

We hold our ground, over 2000 AIDS activist from all over the country huddled together between street police on patrol and mounted on horses looking over our heads like we were cattle. Stop the G.O.P. Death Squads; Fund AIDS Health solutions; Silence = Death yelled our signs as we burned George Bush in effigy in front of the Astrodome in Houston Texas.  The event, the 1992 Republican National Convention.  This was before things got hectic.

The horses started moving herding us.  We resisted trying not to move.  The police started swinging their Billy clubs that got us going  

in all directions through the flood lights that suddenly flashed on us.All I could see was an outline of the sea of cops coming for us.  Glad I had kept my camera strap around my neck I held the camera trying to document the scene.  The Seattle contingent got separated I could no longer see my friend Cookie that had just snapped my picture or George the editor of the Seattle Gay News.  So many people from Seattle came here for this to have their voices heard, and I could see none of them now.

It was 1992 a year of successful year for Act Up.  It was the year it became an international campaign sending a contingent just weeks earlier to Amsterdam for the International Conference on AIDs joining in on several demonstrations and conference sessions.  Act up representatives met with President Bill Clinton to discuss his AIDS policies and he agrees to make a major AIDS policy speech and have people with HIV speak to the Democratic Convention.  These victories seemed over shadowed by the chaos in the streets now here in Houston as we desperately launched a campaign to “Vote as If Your Life Depended On It.”

Where was the straight press?  Was the world going to see how ACT Up demonstrators who were unarmed were getting clobbered in the streets.  No, they were inside the convention covering Patrick Buchanan as he declares there is a cultural war taking place for the soul of America denouncing the Democratic Party as the one that supports abortion, radical feminism and the homosexual rights movement.  He accused Clinton’s agenda of imposing abortion on demand, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, and forcing women into combat.  Buchanan claims this is not the kind of change America wants.

Pat Buchanan’s open declaration of the cultural wars unleashed the right into a fight that up until then smoldered in all the corners of society. This cultural war created lines drawn by social issues down the middle of America.  Did this division of America start in 1992 or did start on the evening of Aug. 26, 1968, as people were getting arrested in Chicago for a dubious crime of protesting a political event, the Democratic Convention?  If this cultural divide started in the 60’s over the Vietnam war, or even in 1992 we sure didn’t think it would be raging years later.

 “The fight for the soul of America,” has become the battle cry of both sides in the cultural war today as we continue in combat.  Trump’s tweets yell the loudest in this battle over the soul of America, revealing what the cultural wars are all about.  Congress woman, Ilhan Omar, wrote in a recent op-ed in the New York Times about people at a Trump rally chanting, “Send her Back;” “The president’s rally will be a defining moment in American history. It reminds us of the grave stakes of the coming presidential election: that this fight is not merely about policy ideas; it is a fight for the soul of our nation. The ideals at the heart of our founding — equal protection under the law, pluralism, religious liberty — are under attack, and it is up to all of us to defend them.”

Congress woman Omar and the other squad of four, all women of color who are elected officials and have been outspoken pushing progressive ideas and being attacked for them.  “Progressive,” has become a dirty word on talk shows like Morning Joe, networks like Fox News, making moderates look nervous that this country may even think of socialist ideas.  We need to address the short falls of a capitalist system that undermines the Declaration of Independence which declares that all of us have a right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". The pursuit of happiness is defined as a fundamental right to freely pursue joy and live life in a way that makes you happy, as long as you don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.  Capitalism has a different agenda.  Think about how we reconcile this discrepancy when you vote in 2020.