I have been contemplating writing this for a long time, and especially since reading Anne Braden's book, The Wall Between, which left me with a lump in my throat and palpitations. It is absolutely something else to live in a hostile world and environment.To go about each day knowing that there are people who would wish to persecute you for your identity, for who and what you are. It is absolutely something to live knowing that there are people who would try and negate your existence. I believe Audre Lorde taught us well how to deal with these things....and especially when it comes into the question of power and authority and the efforts of those hostile forces to make use of these things.

Something that Anne Braden spoke out to me and sat with me a long time, and it still causes a ruffle in my soul. She was speaking of her parents, her upbringing, and her and her husband's trial and persecution during the communist withhunts of the 1950s. She said that it was startling to her to think of her parents unconditional love for her in posting her bail to be released from jail, even when the cause that she advocated went against everything that they believed and everything that their society stood for. She said that she thought about the sad irony in not only that the very foundation out of which her parents came was the very thing that was not only placing her on trial and condemning her as a witch, but also that if she had not been their child that they perhaps would be apart of this mob. That statement started me to thinking about how societies are formed, what they are built on, and the extent to which we are tied into it, why that is, and how it might happen that some of us are not inextricably tied into the system. She spoke of the people their in the South who sort of existed in the middle(however, as Howard Zinn told us, you can't be neutral on a moving train) and who whispered and nodded their disdain of segregation and the ill-treatment of Blacks in the South but who declined to speak up in public and who found it best to "let things be" and exist in harmony and in silence with segregationist rule. I can't wrap my mind around that. I would hope that people would HAVE SOME INTEGRITY and not follow along with crowds. I don't know, I don't know how to wrap my mind around it at all. I will always, as long as I have a tongue and can make use of my body, speak.