On July 11, 2014, nationwide, gay men contributed to blood banks in the only way they legally can: Instead of men being able to donate blood themselves, they have to bring along allies who are legally eligible to donate.

The National Gay Blood Drive isn’t your everyday charity event, it’s also a protest that gives voice to an important and overlooked issue. The FDA bars gay and bisexual men from donating blood.

Almost unbelievably, this law is still in effect. When donors enter a donation center, they are asked to fill out a form that includes many questions—one example of which is “Have your ears been pierced in the last three months?—to establish whether or not a person is at high risk for diseases transmitted through blood. Most regulations on blood donors are reasonable and necessary to accurately decrease the amount of unusable blood, by assessing their risk for diseases including Hepatitis B & C, syphilis and HIV/AIDS. So it is excessively unfortunate that another question on the form asks if the donor is a man: “Have you had sex with another man since 1977?” Answering yes to this question makes a man ineligible to donate blood for fear it would contain HIV.

So, being gay puts you at higher risk for AIDS? According to science, absolutely not. According to the federal government, apparently—yes.

Not only is this belief as vintage as leg warmers, it’s a throwback to 1980s knowledge of HIV and the all too recent HIV scare targeted at homosexuals. Obviously, the FDA is thirty years behind the times. Why exclude lifesaving blood when someone needs a transfusion approximately every 2 seconds?

Here are just a few reasons why this law is just plain wrong: All donated blood is tested. All donated blood is tested for HIV, Hep B & C, and syphilis. So, why make you answer questions about sexual identity? If the FDA is willing to concede that not just gay men have HIV, why ban them as a group?

Sexual promiscuity and homosexuality are not synonyms. Just because a man is homosexual or bisexual does not mean he is promiscuous. But this law doesn’t determine someone’s number of partners, just his gender. Some heterosexual people are promiscuous, and many gay men are not. Obviously.

More women have HIV than men. The largest population of HIV today is in Africa, and over 70% of people HIV positive there are women. Women are more likely to contract all types of STIs, including HIV, because of their anatomy.

There. Now that we have established that this regulation is as unfounded as it is arbitrary, why is it still happening? Why doesn’t the FDA just change the questionnaire? There are so many ways to assess high risk behavior, regardless of how a person identifies. It’s a simple solution. But instead, the FDA forces gay men to disclose their sexual behavior when all they wanted to do was give a life-saving donation. It targets gay men who may then relive the torments they’ve experienced before being comfortable identifying as gay.

And this law works on a bizarre honors system. If you don’t disclose this information, no legal action can be taken against you. Why make gay men hide their identity to give blood?

All these questions deserve answers. But what is really striking is how little awareness there is for this issue. While gay marriage garners the main stage of the LGBT rights platform, blatant discrimination and defamation that still exist in government bureaucracy are ignored.

Why is this issue on the back burner of the fast moving LGBT rights movement? Especially when these kinds of misunderstandings about gay men has caused so much animosity in the past, both during the AIDS epidemic and before.

Most people, even in the healthcare industry, have no idea that this law still exists. It’s archaic, a violation of our rights, and totally fixable.

If you’re like me and want to do something to change this law, here is a link to the National Gay Blood Drive website, where you can sign a petition to repeal the ban on gay blood.

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This week, Elizabeth Warren published her book, A Fighting Chance, in which she illuminates another important issue that, for a graduating high school senior, soon to attend college, has been at the forefront of my mind and that of many other students in my situation.

No matter whom you talk to in my situation, the consensus is the same: It’s rough out there. We’re frustrated. We wish there was some transparency in the process. We wish we could trust that all of our merits were being considered by benevolent strangers who endeavored to understand why we perhaps could not do extra volunteer work two summers ago, and that our hard work will translate into scholarships the way we were promised they would.

Most of all, we wished we wouldn’t have to pay off student loan debt for the crime of being middle class. And, with the interest federal loans pile on, who knows how much an education will actually cost, with no guarantee of any sustainable jobs after we take off the cap and gown.

While the impending doom of student loan debt dissuades many from attending colleges that are priced horrendously high, the government is making billions of dollars off interest from federal loans. Loans for large corporations and banks however, are charged much less interest. Elizabeth Warren condemns this practice and the education system that seems not only to admit people arbitrarily to college, but also is priced outlandishly. One has to wonder where that money actually goes.

Not only does this issue pain all young Americans looking for an education and taking out federal loans, but it also threatens to rip the fabric of the American dream. Cutting welfare, destroying wage caps on campaign contributions (as if their influence on the campaign process isn’t big enough), voter restriction laws and loan traps for college students—it seems like the disparity between the 1% and the rest of us is being encouraged. It seems like corporations are being treated more like people than people. Since when are businesses’ rights more important than human rights? Colleges are essentially corporations. Is it possible for a rags to riches story to happen now? Because for students today, the stories of escaping poverty through sheer force of will are sounding more and more like fairy tales.

However you look at it, the conversation today is very different. Students who have been told all their lives that college is the answer have to reevaluate what $50,000 a year tuition will actually help them achieve. Meanwhile, we have to wonder what kind of power we actually have to change the system.

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Yoruba Richen has a unique worldview. As an African-American woman, she sees a distinct correlation between the civil rights movement and the modern day fight for LGBT rights. When people scoff at the notion or debunk the fact that these two are unwittingly similar she reacts with rage.

Similarly, an aged nun tells of her experience as the superior of the sisters of Loretto during the 1960s birth control fight: Nuns and priests alike had both broken the chain of command and disobeyed the hierarchy by signing a pledge that they supported the use of birth control and abortion and taken out a national ad. The sisters of Loretto, a local ministry located in Kentucky and St. Louis, known for their progressive views, were some of the many signers. When the Sister got the letter from the Catholic hierarchy saying that she either had to force her sisters to recant their statements or force them from the faith, her first reaction was rage.

That always seems to be the first instinct, blind rage at the perpetrators of injustice. We’ve all experienced that outrage at someone’s ignorance or bigotry. It is overpowering…but it hinders progress. When we surrender ourselves to blind rage without channeling our anger into the determination to solve a problem, we get nowhere.  When blind rage settles it turns into apathy. So often we surrender ourselves to others ignorance and grow used to bigotry. In doing so we become our own greatest enemies. So many progressive movements and just voices have been silenced by the power of the majority’s apathy. Don’t let it fool you into thinking it is peace; it is surrendering yourself to the wrong in the world.

The women above knew this. They channeled their anger and worked with activism and bravery to make change. Yoruba Richen started filming what she herself had witnessed all these years and created The New Black a documentary being played on Independent Lens (and at the Missouri History Museum in May).  The sister released a statement saying that she would not disown people who had chosen to be her family. She used activism to circumvent the powerful church hierarchy and in 2014 she told her story in front of her peers and one impressionable eighteen year old. They used their anger to create a ripple of change that with other peoples’ help can become waves.

Seeking peace starts with standing up for what is right and supporting those who are brave enough to make a ripple in the façade called “the way it has always been.” Being a progressive means being a leader and a participant in movements. It means being empathetic and practical, and it means being a part of the wave of change that challenge the status quo.  Being a progressive requires action against the injustices in the world. That is where peace, beautiful and exhilarating, is achieved.

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“Feminism is dead,” he said casually. I almost choked on my latte. As I sat across from him at a coffee house, I could see my reaction reflected on the faces of my two female friends, all of us looking at him aghast, trying to control the heat rising collectively up our necks, desperate to mutate into an angry, acid-tongued response.

Feminism is dead? I try to contemplate the repercussions of the statement but find my head swimming. The feminist movement being dead implies defeat. The feminist movement had been defeated, then after decades we’ve surrendered, he says. Or perhaps he means that we have achieved our goals, and modern feminists are just trying to be superior. I ask him to elaborate, more harshly than I intended. “Feminism is dead,” he says simply, avoiding the look in my eyes, “there is no reason to have it anymore.” An hour later, in the interest of remaining friends, we make our closing statements.

That conversation, from a year ago, is seared into my memory and comes to light whenever I ponder the relevance of feminism and people’s understanding of it. Not only is it the closest I’ve ever come to a spit take, but it awakened me to the harsh reality regarding the misconceptions surrounding feminism–rampant in modern thought.

“What exactly do you think a feminist looks like? What do you think they believe?” I said as calmly as possible, trying to hide the derision in my voice, although it is likely the look on my face showed my position quite clearly. “Feminists are angry women who want to be superior to men,” he said. My other friend intercepted, “But that isn’t a feminist, David, that’s a femi-nazi.” I cringed.  Did one of my most independent female friends really just compare a woman who is passionate about the women’s equality and angry that other people these days don’t seem to care to a Nazi?

The truth is that the feminist movement is still incredibly relevant today, and if men argue that we’ve achieved equality, it only takes a Youtube search to prove that they’re wrong. Characterizing a woman in a bar as a slut is as damaging as calling a woman who is passionate about equality as an angry spinster. Now the feminist movement itself, like many other movements, has gone out of style. In the decades since the 1960s bra burners, the media has been able to demonize the fight for equality by declaring it over then continuing new and inventive forms of oppression, similar to last year, when the GOP stated Rosa Parks ended racism back in 1955. Because media must create caricatures, not true representations of people, it makes sense that they would do the same to social movements. Take the 1994 Olympic scandal for example. A recent ESPN 30 for 30 installment, The Price of Gold rehashed the twenty-year-old scandal throughout which both women were caricatures. Nancy Kerrigan was the spoiled princess, and Tonya Harding was the underdog.  Or Kerrigan was the victim, and Harding was a demon. Whatever version you believe, both are likely oversimplifications of the facts. Both women had to be boxed up because the real story and the real people were probably too complex to be profitable. So is the objectification of feminism. The simpler the media can make it, the less potent it becomes. Those who enter the fray today, like my friends that day at the coffee shop, see feminism as one-dimensional. But of course, women who want to combat the “make me a sandwich,” “legitimate rape,” Blurred Lines society we live in, are angry. It’s almost impossible not to be. Maybe the question is: why aren’t you?

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I think it’s time to talk about an issue that isn’t glamorous or infamous, but it is so subtle and so completely off the radar, for a girl from the St. Louis suburbs, that my comprehension of it is still watery at best. But we cannot keep ignoring mass incarceration or what is often called the school to prison pipeline.

Mass incarceration has become a massive problem in this country in the aftermath of the war on drugs. And this problem disproportionately affects African American males. It has been argued that “mass” incarceration cannot possibly just affect black males, which is true, but because it is centered in a certain demographic area it is does disproportionately affect the urban poor. It is likely for this reason, that mass incarceration and the systematic imprisonment, and thereby the oppression of these individuals, isn’t at the forefront of the public’s mind for long.

Despite public outcry after the Trayvon Martin trial, we are still failing to address the monumental discrimination and criminalization of young blacks. I understand but refuse to accept the complacency, after all. for those of us outside of the neighborhoods in which this taking place and outside the barbed wire race walls, it doesn’t come up in conversation, it doesn’t affect our everyday lives, and many of us see the persecution of a people who are falsely accused of criminal behavior as inevitable. After all, “You can’t be too careful.” We tell ourselves these people had to have just slipped through the cracks, and that the law is simply going above and beyond by taking every necessary precaution. But from the other side of the bars, men and women suffer. They are innocent and will live their entire lives struggling with the burden of a police record.

As progressives, it has to be complacence and ignorance that keep us from action. My own battle was with ignorance, both of African-Americans’ systematic imprisonment itself and a lack of understanding of the urban culture’s intent. I didn’t understand that maybe sagging pants and graffiti were forms of expression, forms of resistance, a self- imposed identity created because the ones given to them are clad in orange jumpsuits. Which leads to that expressive and rebellious identity, to be tainted by the visage of our imposed impression of what ‘criminal’ looks like.

The sad truth is that police brutality in poor neighborhoods isn’t a fantasy nor is it an isolated event. It’s a real problem that happens to real people. Has the war on drugs really accomplished much more than sweeping drug busts that target one-time offenders in the poorest neighborhoods, while college students are getting high in their dorms? If it is socially acceptable for posh stores to sell t-shirts with marijuana leaves on them, then why do young black men have to watch how they act when wearing a hoodie.

A criminal record only continues the already endless and nearly inescapable cycle of poverty and for so many who are  influenced so young, don’t they deserve a second chance? Or is it written that they must be reconciled to a society that excludes them from their right to education, property and liberty? People’s human rights are being violated and trampled on. How can we say that isn’t the definition of being disenfranchised? Of being oppressed?

If you want to become further involved in the social movement against mass imprisonment, awareness is the first place to start. I recommend Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow a book that explains this phenomenon with depth and backs her findings with tremendous research and detail.

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I was 17 and skeptical when I saw the movie poster for Chicago 10 at the Missouri History Museum where I work. The exaggerated cartoon figures seemed almost comical and when my boss tried to tell me that was I was about to see was like none of the other documentaries we had screened I was decidedly doubtful. Then it began. Then it changed me.

It was in fact, like nothing I had ever seen. It was a partially animated documentary based on the infamous court transcripts of the equally infamous Chicago 8, a trial so infamous that I had never heard of it. The Yippie Party had been omitted from my history textbooks. I had no idea that for three days in 1968 Chicago became a police state. So when I saw the video of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin dance across the screen, when I saw the mob “take the hill” and one man plant the Vietnam flag on a statue only to be beaten by police, and when I saw Bobby Seale gagged and bound, demanding his right to be heard, my pulse raced and my all of my perceptions, about the sixties legacies had to be reconstructed.

As protesters shouted, “The whole world is watching” I watched. When the tear gas and the beatings began, I saw the smallest battle of Vietnam play out outside the Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago. It was vulgar. It was terrifying. It was radical. And I wished I could’ve been a part of it. I couldn’t keep from feeling a grudging admiration for the radical young men and women who were willing to be beaten if it brought peace. I wanted to join the movement.

The convention was the democrat’s nightmare incarnate. It exposed the cracks in the party’s foundation that had been becoming more and more prominent as LBJ’s war progressed. It was probably the most derisive moment within the Democratic Party in recent history.  It was a plea to start anew and it was a battle; the Yippies’ Last Stand, against a violent society that allowed Vietnam to happen. It was “The Second American Revolution” that heralded Nixon’s presidency.

Yet, the way they protested was actually quite ingenious. Everything they did had a purpose. They created what they called, the Yippie myth and made outlandish claims such as they’d poison Lake Michigan with LSD (clearly impossible) and they would burn Chicago to the ground, claims that were almost as outlandish as the lies coming from Vietnam. They were careful to preach for peace and their recruiting tool was simple, Chicago was a human be-in, they would be-in Chicago’s parks for the convention and that would be enough.

The Chicago 8 used the trial for publicity, to expose the court system as corrupted. They were charged with conspiracy so they answered the phones calling themselves “the conspiracy.” It was all a challenge to authority. It forced Chicago and America to show its totalitarianism thereby proving what the Yippies ultimately wanted to say: Violence was ingrained deep enough in our society it could be exercised on peaceful protesters. They were not just fighting for Vietnam; they wanted to “create a society where Vietnam could never have been possible.”

I admired the radicals. Their demonization seemed like a double standard. The media and politicians could demonize protesters but wouldn’t dare attack Kennedy’s personal life. Their propaganda was extreme, and their language was vulgar but they had to be extreme, they had to be the polar opposite of war.

It wasn’t just their message that was intriguing. It was their speeches and actions. I will never forget hearing Abbie Hoffman respond to reporters when they asked him what his price would be to call off “the revolution.” His answer was “my life.” I’ll never get over the chants of the “whole world is watching” from the convention that preceded the violence. And I’ll always have an image of Bobby Seale being bound and gagged in his chair still struggling to demand his right to defend himself.

During Hoffman’s testimony he called himself an orphan of America.  I could relate. There are undeniable parallels between our society today and the turbulence of 1968. Just like Vietnam, I live in a world where Americans have been lied to about war. I live in a world that was shocked by 9/11 similarly to the shock of JFK’s assassination. The sixties were the epoch of assassinations. Today, guns are taken up against children in our schools. The destruction of the Voting Rights Act has pulled us into the past. Modern America is closer to sixties than it ever has been before. As a millennial. I can look back at the era of turbulence and relate it to my life.

But unlike the protesters in Chicago, the youth in America is refusing to stand up. Our technology is no longer used as a tool for activism but as a distraction that lets us isolate ourselves from the issues. Unlike the rich meaning of rebellious protest music from the sixties, today’s popular music feels soulless, and meaningless. We live in a world where all the components are there to create a movement, and to create change, but no one is willing to take a stand. No one wants to stand up for the greater good.

Now I realize that the Chicago 10 made me awaken to my reality. It’s a reality that desperately needs change. The world of the protesters at the Chicago Democratic National Convention and my own are so similar, so why do I feel so far away from the era of change?  We are making the same mistakes today but have forgotten our spirit of activism.

And I am an orphan of America. Here. Ready. Waiting for a movement.

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