#marginalized groups

What’s the first rule of handling a gun?

Assume every gun is loaded.

Even the ones you know are empty—doesn’t matter.

You treat that thing like it is.

Better cautious than reckless.

Better to be alive than a statistic.

Now keep that mindset in mind.

Not all cops are bastards, we know.

There are some who genuinely want to protect, who remember they are public servants,

who go home at night haunted by the violence they see.

But the institution is another matter.

From slave patrols that hunted Black bodies,

to strikebreakers smashing the skulls of coal miners,

to Jim Crow sheriffs grinning behind their badges,

to modern armored trucks rolling through neighborhoods like foreign armies—

history makes the caution clear.

So when a mother tells her Black son to keep his hands at ten and two,

to speak softly, to never make sudden moves,

that is not paranoia.

That is survival.

Because too many guns have already gone off.

Not all men, we know.

But when half the human race is told to walk with keys between their fingers,

to keep headphones out while jogging,

to text a friend “I made it home safe,”

there’s a reason.

History remembers the witch trials,

where “hysteria” was the excuse for execution.

History remembers marital rape not being a crime until the late 20th century.

And today, the statistics do not lie.

So when women say they would rather face a bear in the woods than a man,

it is not hyperbole.

The bear is predictable.

The bear does not blame them for its hunger.

The bear will not insist it loved them while it devoured them.

Not all Christians, we know.

Some are radical in their love,

feeding the hungry, sheltering the exiled,

living the compassion that Christ actually preached.

But Christianity as a power has also marched with swords and torches:

the Crusades tearing through Jerusalem,

the Inquisition with its racks and pyres,

the conquistadors crossing oceans with Bibles in one hand and chains in the other.

In the Americas, Indigenous children had their tongues beaten bloody in residential schools.

Conversion therapy promised “cure” but delivered trauma.

Too many pulpits roared with fire and brimstone against the very people Christ said to love.

So when suspicion lingers, it is earned.

It is not the Nazarene carpenter who betrayed us,

but those who crowned themselves his earthly heirs.

Not all conservatives, we know.

But how often have “traditional values” meant someone else’s oppression?

Stonewall remembered the batons.

Women remembered the Senate floor debates against their right to vote.

Civil Rights leaders remembered dogs and firehoses.

Time and again, “slow down” meant “never.”

“Wait” meant “die waiting.”

“Family values” often meant only one kind of family deserved rights.

So caution grows where progress was stalled with filibusters and fear.

Not all rich people, we know.

Philanthropists exist, yes.

But capitalism has a long ledger.

Plantations built fortunes on enslaved backs.

Industrialists grew fat on child labor in coal mines and textile mills.

Factories collapsed on garment workers in Bangladesh

because cutting costs was worth more than human life.

Today, hedge funds swallow homes whole while families live in cars.

So forgive the working poor for suspicion.

History shows that when the powerful must choose,

they choose profit.

Not all doctors, we know.

But science has scars.

Tuskegee, where Black men were left to die of syphilis in the name of “research.”

Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were stolen without consent.

The sterilization of Indigenous women in the 1970s.

The eugenics movement that once gave Hitler inspiration.

Even now, pain in women is dismissed as “psychosomatic,”

autistic children are forced into therapies that treat their humanity as disease,

and maternal mortality for Black women remains three times higher.

The white coat does not erase the bias.

So patients carry mistrust as protection.

Not all adults, we know.

But children have long been the powerless.

Victorian factories filled with small fingers and soot-filled lungs.

Boarding schools where children were beaten for speaking their mother tongues.

Households where “spare the rod, spoil the child” became justification for bruises.

Even now, too many courts assume parents always know best,

while children who cry for autonomy are told “you’ll understand when you’re older.”

History shows adults forget—forget that authority can be cruelty.

And so youth whisper among themselves,

never fully safe in a world built by someone else’s rules.

Not all White people, we know.

But whiteness as a system is older than the nation.

Chattel slavery.

The Trail of Tears.

Sundown towns with signs that warned death if you stayed past dusk.

Jim Crow’s separate fountains and lynching postcards mailed as souvenirs.

Redlining that carved Black families out of neighborhoods and futures.

Every time progress was made, backlash came.

So suspicion is not hatred.

It is memory.

Not all neurotypicals, not all able-bodied, we know.

But who designed the world?

Not us.

The “Ugly Laws” criminalized disabled people simply for existing in public.

Aktion T4 declared our lives “unworthy of life.”

Parents once whispered of changelings when children were born different,

a story that often ended in abandonment—or worse.

Today, ramps are grudgingly built only when the law forces them,

and autistic people are still described as burdens in fundraising campaigns.

Too many of us depend on caretakers who mistake power for ownership.

And every policy meeting seems to debate our humanity as if it were optional.

So we remember: better cautious than reckless.

Not all old people, we know.

But nostalgia has teeth.

The “good old days” were only good for some.

The segregated lunch counter was no paradise.

The 1950s suburban dream excluded redlined neighborhoods.

Queer people were arrested, sterilized, or forced underground.

Disabled people were locked away in institutions.

Women could not open bank accounts without a husband’s signature.

So when elders wax poetic about Mayberry,

they often forget who was barred from living there.

Memory is selective.

History is not.

Not all, we know.

But not all of us have the luxury of giving the benefit of the doubt.

It is a currency many of us cannot afford.

So if our expectations sound bitter,

remember that they are forged by centuries of wounds.

We hope for the best, yes—

but we prepare for the worst,

because history tells us the worst has come too often.

We will not apologize for survival.

We will not apologize for caution.

We will not apologize for seeing through the smile to the hand behind the back.

Not until reality changes.

Not until history stops repeating itself.

Not until trust is something earned, not demanded.

Until then,

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/13 The DFW Independent Coalition of Kitty-loving Satanists formed after a schism in The Satanic Temple (TST) in May 2024, when its founder fired a respected minister over a meme. Many congregations, including DFW, chose independence due to perceived authoritarianism. The…