The Air Between Us

Our Country has always been at War

I wrote this late last summer to a young woman named Julianna who had the audacity to tell me I didn’t know anything about war and that she was standing for Gaza against Biden.

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Julianna,

"Memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive are tied up in memory." - Nora Ephron

Let me tell you about what I know about WAR.

I was born in Memphis in July of 1951, when the air was thick with cigarette smoke, factory grease, and the quiet, bone-deep understanding that life in America was always going to be a fight. My father worked the Ford assembly line, putting together cars for men who had more money, more freedom, more chances than he ever would. My mother—Christ, my mother—before they shoved her back into a kitchen, ran the floor at Hunter Fan like she owned the place. She didn't just bark orders during World War II; she orchestrated symphonies of steel and sweat, proving not just that she could keep things running as well as any man, but better. And then the war ended, and they handed her a Betty Crocker cookbook and told her to smile. She burned it in the backyard and used the ashes to fertilize her tomatoes.

I remember the smell of those tomatoes, how they tasted of defiance and summer heat. How she'd slice them thin, sprinkle them with salt, and serve them on white bread with mayonnaise, telling me, "Baby, sometimes the best revenge is living well and growing things they said you couldn't."

I was eight years old when I marched in Mississippi with my father in the early '60s, my small hand wrapped around his, walking in step with a movement bigger than me, bigger than him, bigger than all of us. The asphalt was hot enough to melt shoe leather, but nobody stopped. Nobody even slowed down. I learned then that determination feels a lot like anger, only quieter.

I was 93 miles from where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I remember the day the news came through—how the air felt too thick, too still, how the weight of it settled into our bones like lead. My mother’s best friend sat at the kitchen table, chain-smoking Pall Malls, saying nothing but saying everything in the way she stabbed out each cigarette. I was in eighth grade when Kennedy was shot, old enough to understand the world had changed, young enough to believe it could still be made better. What a joke that seems now, that blind faith in better tomorrows.

And then, Vietnam. Jesus H. Christ, Vietnam.

I marched against it until my feet bled, until my voice gave out, until the cops knew me by name. I stood in protest as boys who were my childhood pals were drafted, their numbers pulled from a ping pong lottery cage like some cruel game show hosted by Death himself. Tommy Henderson, who sat behind me in History and always smelled like his mother's cologne. Gone. David Wilson, who could play "Purple Haze" on guitar better than Hendrix himself. Gone. They left in crisp uniforms and came back in body bags, and when they did, America barely flinched. The same people who sent them there—the ones in their Brooks Brothers suits and their country club memberships—turned their backs on them when they returned broken, addicted, haunted by things they couldn't unsee.

Let me tell you something about trauma that I feel: it doesn't just live in your head. It lives in your hands, in the way they shake when you hear a car backfire. It lives in your teeth, in the way you grind them at night. It lives in your stomach, in the way it turns to concrete every time you hear someone say, "Support our troops," like it's a fucking bumper sticker and not a death sentence.

So when you tell me that your generation has never known peace, that you were born into war, into collapse, into a country that never gave you stability, I don't just nod. I recognize you. I see myself in your eyes, in your anger, in your absolute fucking certainty that something is deeply, fundamentally wrong with this place we're supposed to call home.

You were in kindergarten when Obama was elected, in seventh grade when Trump slithered down that golden escalator like some bargain-basement Mussolini. You were a senior in high school when Biden won in the middle of a pandemic that turned your world into a sci-fi movie nobody wanted to watch. You grew up in a world where mass shootings were as routine as fire drills, where school was just another place you could die. Where "thoughts and prayers" became the most obscene phrase in the English language.

You grew up knowing that the man in charge could be an open sexual predator, that democracy could be overturned by a mob in cheap suits and cheaper ideologies, that the people in power would let you die rather than admit they were wrong. You learned early that safety was an illusion, that rights were only borrowed, and that the people who told you this is not normal were lying—because it had always been like this, just wrapped in a different disguise, selling a different dream.

And now I sit here, a 73-year-old woman, watching the walls close in. Watching the possibility of my own exile take shape like a storm on the horizon. Because I am not just a woman. I am a lesbian, married to a 40-year-old woman from Canada who knows more about American history than most Americans, who believes in this country more than it believes in her. And if they win—these men in their red ties and their flag pins and their practiced smiles—they will come for people like me. That is not paranoia. That is history reading itself back to us, line by bloody line.

They will start with our marriages, of course. They always start with paper, with bureaucracy, with things that seem small until they're not. They will say it is about protecting children, about restoring morality, about God and country and all the usual bullshit that tyrants wrap themselves in like cheap cologne. Then they will come for us outright, and the paper will turn to flesh, and the bureaucracy will turn to blood.

Maybe it starts with laws, with fines, with losing our jobs, with our homes no longer being recognized. But then it gets worse. It always gets worse. Ask anyone who's lived through it. Ask anyone who's studied it. Ask anyone who's paying attention.

They will build camps. They will call them something else, something bureaucratic, something clinical, something that sounds almost reasonable. "Residential treatment facilities." "Behavioral modification centers." "Patriot rehabilitation units." And then people like me—old lesbians who have spent their lives stubbornly believing we belonged here—will be given a choice. Flee or die. Convert or disappear. Conform or be erased.

I have spent over 50 years of my life voting—marching, believing—maybe not always optimistically, but stubbornly, relentlessly—that democracy was a thing worth protecting. I have seen the worst of this country, and I have survived it. But this is different. This is a storm so violent, so calculated, that I do not know if survival is enough anymore. Maybe survival itself has become a form of compliance.

You think your generation has lived through the worst of it? Julianna, let me tell you something: the women before you have already fought this fight. Maybe not in the same way, maybe not with the same technology, maybe not with the same names plastered across the headlines, but we have fought. And we have bled. And we have lost. And we have won just enough to know what winning tastes like, just enough to believe it was possible, just enough to make us dangerous.

So no, I will not tell you it's going to be okay. I will not tell you to calm down. I will not tell you to be patient, to wait your turn, to trust the system, to believe in the inherent goodness of people who have shown you nothing but contempt.

But I will tell you this: if I have to leave, I will leave standing up. If I have to fight, I will fight dirty. If I have to stand in the middle of the street and scream until my voice gives out, I will do it with a smile on my face and a brick in my hand. Because I have spent 73 years refusing to disappear, refusing to be polite, refusing to make peace with a system that was built to break me.

And neither will you. Because that's the thing about generational trauma—it either breaks you or it forges you into something unbreakable. And honey, you look pretty damn unbreakable to me.

Julianna, We are the fight. Women will always be the fighters. Now, tell me, Juliana, how can I help you?

Julianna never responded.

Thank you for reading my words. Thank you for taking this journey with me.

Gloria xox