Many years ago, I was at performance of The Normal Heart, a semi-autobiographical play by Larry Kramer about the early days of the fight against AIDS. Like many stagings, facts and figures about the epidemic were a prominent part of the background scenery. At this particular staging, there was also a voice reading aloud the names of the dead, as the audience members filed in and found their seats.
1/4
Rather than using names from New York, the setting of the play, they were reading the names from the local paper. Before the play even started, you could hear people weeping, as the relentless voice read names that they knew; people they loved. The play itself takes you from simmering anger through well-justified rage, but it all anchors in that: the beauty of the people who have been taken from you.
2/4
Alex Petti and Renee Good have become the people America knows, as another fight unfolds around us. They are far from the first to fall, and the empathy felt for them may feel hollow to those who heard names in that grim recital months or years ago. But they are calling out an empathy that is directly counter to the jingoistic fear and the empty claims of supremacy from the authoritarians in Trump’s necrotic regime.
3/4
They see empathy as a sickness, a weakness, because they cannot imagine anyone not out for themselves.
There’s not much time, but maybe, just maybe, that blindness to the power of caring for others will be their undoing.
Minnesota is standing strong, far stronger than they expected.
From far away, I stand with them. You should too.
4/4
Ted.h