CNN's "The Nineties" buries our gays

As someone fascinated by history, I got really into CNN's decade series.  I saw "The Sixties," "The Seventies," and "The Eighties," and looked forward to "The Nineties," if for no other reason than it was the first decade I could really remember.  The Soviet government fell when I was on winter break in fifth grade.  I saw the troops marching off to Iraq to battle Saddam Hussein in Operation Desert Shield, and we had yellow ribbons in our classroom to support the troops.  I was glued to Law & Order and identified with Daria.  I was in ninth grade when the Alfred P. Murrah building was bombed and O.J. Simpson was acquitted.  I remember Waco, Bosnia, and Rwanda on the news.  My first year of college (don't try to do the math, it won't work), Bill Clinton was impeached.  I voted for the first time in the Democratic primary that nominated Al Gore.  And, yes, I probably danced the Macarena about a hundred times during the summer of 1996.
Which is why I found "The Nineties" so disappointing, mostly for what it left out.  Specifically, our country's extremely dynamic relationship with the gay community.  It was a time of great progress, but also a time of violence and hate crimes driven by homophobia.
By the early 1990s, the status of gays in America was changing.  People felt more comfortable "coming out," and no longer was AIDS the grisly threat it had been.  1994's pop psychology book Reviving Ophelia featured at least one lesbian teenager coming to terms with her identity.  Gay Americans were fighting in court for legal recognition of their partnerships and custody of their children.  Gay characters were shown in media, and the musical RENT featured a gay man, a lesbian, a bisexual woman, and Angel, whose identity (transgender or genderqueer) is still being debated by fans.  And Angel and Collins (the gay man) had the most loving, stable relationship of all the characters!  By the end of the decade, a few states had legalized same-sex marriages or domestic partnerships.
Unfortunately, progress is never linear.  Two well-publicized murders occurred during the 1990s in America's heartland.  Brandon Teena, a transgender man, was killed in 1993.  And, of course, Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in a hate crime in 1998 because he was gay.
None of this gets even a nod.  Sure, the television episode mentions Ellen DeGeneres coming out, and the show Will and Grace.  But nothing else gets a nod.  The episode on civil rights focuses on the O.J. Simpson trial (which wasn't really about civil rights) but neglects to mention Matthew Shepard.  Nothing was mentioned about the changing legal or cultural status of the gay community.  However, it was one of the features of the decade that I remember the most vividly.

Charlottesville and the government we deserve

Like so many Americans, I was horrified at the events that unfolded in Charlottesville over the weekend.  Less than a century after World War II, Nazi flags are flying in the United States.  A woman was killed by a white supremacist for the simple crime of disagreeing with him.
How did we get here?
After the end of Reconstruction, the Republican Party rallied around pro-business sentiments likely to be popular with the moneyed capitalists of the Northeast.  This was the world of the "Robber Barons," and they created a tale of two Americas.  Except that when the conditions of the working poor became impossible to ignore, they had to offer a token support of Progressivist ideas, or they would find themselves in homemade guillotines.  Through a confluence of events that we had little control over, including a world war that wiped out most of the world's infrastructure while leaving ours intact, and fifteen years of austerity driving demand for new goods, the United States enjoyed a couple of decades of prosperity.  The problem is that you can't run a country on rhetoric alone, and this was also a time when we were paranoid.  So instead of spreading the wealth, Eisenhower-style, we poured all our energies into an unwinnable war.  Enter Richard Nixon, who was about as far from Eisenhower as you could get.  This brought the economy into a slow slide starting in the 1970s.  However, the GOP can't just openly say, "give to the rich and screw the poor."  Look how well that "47%" remark worked for Mitt Romney.  So instead, the GOP played a long game of distraction.  It's not OUR fault that there are no jobs, rents are rising and healthcare and college are practically inaccessible.  Look over there!  It's those darn Millennials, with their lattes and avocado toast!  Or those baby boomers, who won't retire and are hoarding all the plum jobs!  Or the "welfare queens," those evil people with dark skin and funny accents who mooch off the government, steal jobs, and live likes royalty while you scrape by!  And we can't fund social programs, because if we cut military spending, all those bad people overseas who don't accept Jesus Christ and their lord and savior will bomb us back to the stone age and indoctrinate our children to hate Christmas!  And we CAN'T HAVE THAT!
Well, look where that thinking has gotten us.  A president with no political experience who is a genius at the art of the distraction, a Boy Scout jamboree straight out of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and now a KKK/Nazi rally in Virginia, complete with torches.
However, I don't really blame the GOP for this.  They may have profited from hatred, but they didn't create it.  Hatred and fear have been there since before the settlers at Jamestown.  I blame the James Andrew Fields, Jr.'s and Cole Whites.  The Peter Cvjetanovics.  I blame every person who thought that marching in a city with a torch in one hand and a swastika in the other was a good idea.  And every person who chose not to condemn them (including you, Mr. President!)  Because, yes, you are that angry racist.  And since you keep talking about how your guy won the election, you have to figure out how to clean up the board without throwing the game away.