Wichita Pride Parade, Pride Marshall, September 2016
“Well, I didn’t get shot!”
I said these surreal words to my best friend after she asked me at the end of the Pride Parade how it went. She enthusiastically responded, “Yay! I prayed that you wouldn’t get shot!”
It was September 2016. I had the honor of being the Pride Marshall for the Wichita Pride Parade, which meant I got to ride in a convertible at the front of the parade and awkwardly wave to everyone. I would be lying if I said my family, friends and I weren’t a bit nervous about what might happen that day. It was just a few weeks before the November 2016 presidential election and acts of violence against my LGBTQ+ friends and Black, brown and Asian friends were happening all across the country due to the stochastic terrorism* fueled by one of the candidates with a thing for red hats. The Pulse Massacre had happened just three months prior in Florida. The rising tension was almost palpable for those of us paying attention.
I reignited my racial and social justice advocacy journey in 2012 and saw the stochastic-terrorism-empowered “lone-wolf attacks” on people in my community increase drastically after a mostly broke businessman (more famous for being a former television-show host who shouted, “You’re fired!”) announced his run for office in June 2015. In the weeks and months that followed, I publicly shared stories of the acts of homophobic, transphobic and racist violence my friends survived on streets, subways, trains and bars at the hands of “lone wolves” who chanted the candidate’s name. I believed I was helping everyone in my circle more clearly understand who this candidate really was and how he was empowering bullying, division, hate and violence with his dangerous rhetoric. I was so wrong.
In October 2016, I learned that several of my family members planned to vote for the man who was empowering the previously hidden darkest parts of many Americans to come to the surface. I pleaded with my family to see what I’d been seeing about the culture of violence he was ushering in. It went over about as well as you might expect. I was told I was over-reacting, called “intolerant”, and compared to a suicide bomber for “blowing up relationships”, but things were just getting started.
By mid 2017, I confronted disruptive, masked neo-Nazis at a peaceful Trans Day of Visibility rally and by the end of 2018 “Christians” were regularly attending and protesting at LGBTQ+ inclusive educational events I participated in. The neo-Nazis’ signs and bullhorn-shouted messages advocating for harm to my people, and the Christians saying my children should be taken away for allowing them to pass out “I *heart* Inclusive Schools” bookmarks were now “saying the quiet parts out loud”. The thoughts that once stayed in people’s heads or in underground circles were becoming a normalized, empowered part of society because our then-president continued to publicly dehumanize and denigrate people, opening the door for others to do the same.
At this current moment in history, in September 2025, in the wake of a wave of stochastic-terrorism-ignited violence, I take zero pleasure in being right about what I predicted. Most people seem to be able to see and feel the increasing tension now, even if they refuse to acknowledge the cause. We’ve collectively witnessed an escalation of politically motivated violence, targeting elected officials at every level of governance from school boards and city councils to county and state legislators all the way to the POTUS. General acts of violence have also escalated in ways that most of us didn’t know a decade ago. Shootings and bomb threats in schools, churches, theaters, malls, parks, and more are becoming frequent “breaking news” stories as more and more people are acting out their own trauma — their insecurities, fears and powerlessness — by trying to reclaim power by violently taking it from others. In my area, three different districts had schools on unrelated lock-downs/lock-outs on the same day a couple of weeks ago. Two of the three had reports of a student bringing a gun to school, but one of the three actually had a student bring a loaded gun. It’s all… a lot.
I don’t have all of the answers about where we go from here. Heck, maybe I don’t have any. But I do believe that it can’t hurt for us to collectively start better understanding the psychology of what is happening. I agree with Dr. Richard Schwarz’s conclusions in his book Internal Family Systems Therapy, 2nd Edition. In Chapter 18, he applies the IFS model to social and cultural systems and talks in depth about how we got here. Ultimately, he notes that we have many entrenched societal and familial legacy burdens that need healing, not exiling. Americans (and not just the shooters) are behaving out of unhealed trauma, and we need to better understand what that trauma is and work to heal it.
Healing our broken country will be no easy task. Obviously, no one has been able to do it before, but that doesn’t mean we stop trying! Healing will have to take place at every system level from the individual, to the familial, to the cultural, to the societal, to the institutional. Systems at all of these levels will require radical transformation. However, it’s hard to transform a system when the vast majority of individuals within it are unknowingly allowing their own hurts and hangups to drive their daily behavior.
The daunting task of healing systems might seem less impossible if we recognize that it’s going to require more people to courageously confront their own part of the mess and go on their own healing journeys. What happens if we start there, with healing ourselves, our families, and our communities?
Of course, for most, healing is also going to require better access to resources, so everyone has the food, shelter, clean air, clean water, and safety they need at a bare minimum to survive. Then it’s going to require resources that provide access to healing, growth, and support so that everyone can move beyond surviving into thriving. All of this is going to require everyone — not just people in positions of authority and power and those with large platforms — to use their words and power with care.
Words and actions matter. If your time in this world ended tomorrow, what words and actions would you be remembered for? I certainly hope that I am remembered for words and actions that healed, that empowered, that inspired, that cultivated growth, and that gave life. After all, as The Alternate Routes sang, “We are how we treat each other and nothing more.”
* The dictionary defines “stochastic terrorism” as “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted: The lone-wolf attack was apparently influenced by the rhetoric of stochastic terrorism.”