While the people were pressed into camps not called concentration

I have a protest in the morning, so I'm trying to encourage myself to sleep. I just finished reading Julian E. Zelizer's "A Template for 'Incivility'," about the anti-war movement of the 1960's and '70's; it reminded me again how thoroughly the Vietnam War appears to have been scrubbed from American popular consciousness. It's happened in my lifetime. I was born in 1981. I grew up in a house full of protest records. Everyone my parents' age had a story of the draft, whether they had been caught by it or not. There were veterans in my family. There were veterans on film. And now all that seems to remain of those decades is a vague contemptuous image of some ineffectual hippies, self-indulgently chanting and peacing out while the real business of the world went on outside their flower-decked circle of privilege, unless they cut their hair and turned coat to the establishment; either way, there is nothing to learn from that generation. It's a great way to cut today's activists off from previous strategies, make them reinvent the wheel. When you erase the memory of a war, you erase the memory of its resistance. You make people forget that for a full decade in American life it was normal to fight with the government: to scream at it, to scare it, to slow it down. There was a revival of that sentiment with the start of the Iraq War, but it was drowned in the hyper-nationalism of Junior Bush and his WWII cosplay. (I don't think it helped that the Dixie Chicks were all but destroyed for calling him out, which he still deserves. His reputation has been lately rehabilitated just because he's not 45, as if that's a recommendation as opposed to a bar cleared easily by pond slime. I wanted for eight years to see him on trial for war crimes.) This country's knowledge of itself is so fractured. We remember the nickname "Cadet Bone Spurs" and understand it is—incivil—of him to mock McCain for enduring what he dodged, but the rest might as well have faded into mythology, except mythology has fandoms and I am not sure Vietnam activism does.

Is there anybody here who thinks that following the orders takes away the blame?

I got a little sleep, but mostly I got to a protest. gaudior and Fox picked me up, with nineweaving in the car as far as Lechmere; we did not make it to City Hall Plaza in time to march, but we made it to Boston Common in time to rally. It was brutally hot. There were crowds of protesters in front of the stage and then clusters of protesters underneath the trees, showing off their signs—for families, for immigrants, against fascism, for justice—and doing their best not to combust. I wore my grandmother's sun hat so as not to get burned. (I have no idea how old this hat is. It accompanies almost all my summer memories of my grandmother; it was more or less retired on her death in 1997, in the years since then mostly decorating a plaster bust of my mother which my grandmother sculpted when my mother was in her teens. It is made of very pale tightly woven straw now somewhat brittle and still has a small tag inside the high crown reading "Made in Ecuador." It occurs to me that it may be a Panama hat.) We listened to speeches and music and Gaudior found their mother in the crowd and I found a_reasonable_man and his family and Fox ran around and I took photos of signs and did not think to ask anyone to take a photo of me and my hat. After the rally broke up, Gaudior and family headed for Frog Pond and I headed for the subway, because I had a dinner engagement with selkie and Rami and my godchild and friends of theirs who live in Arlington; their hotel room had air conditioning and we got takeout dinner from Not Your Average Joe's and regular updates on the evening's baseball game from the pair of eight-year-olds who had been allowed to watch TV in the bedroom while the adults discussed synagogue politics and queer Regency smut. My godchild lives in the D.C. area and I see them every couple of years now and it matters very much to me that they leap onto me for a hug and want me to pick them up and swing them around and give them a piggyback ride; they have the energy to spare since they are basically a Diane Duane white hole that just looks like a leggy juvenile goalie, but I am glad to be trusted by them. I do not like the thought anyone causing them grief. So we protest. May we back it up at the polls in November.

For the last day of Pride month, spatch sent me a link to the origin story of Paud's Pins – a queer history project. Anything you recognize, add your voice to. The rest of the year is not silent.