when I was 14 I worked in a grocery store and one day I got to bag Stephen King’s groceries and of course, being the little horror fiction nerd I am I was completely starstruck
I think he thought I was gonna ask for an autograph because I was not even lowkey staring I was full on moon-faced and bouncing and he kept looking over at me hesitantly like aw jeez kid fuck off
anyways I finally managed to squeak out that I was a huge fan and asked for advice on writing, “how do I write as well as you do?” in my horrible thick German accent and broken ass English and he gave me the best writing advice I have ever received
“shit kid, stop worrying about how other people do it and just write your story”
14 years later my wife and I nearly hit him with our car because he was jaywalking
Reagan was elected in 1980, around the same time that HIV began spreading and turning into a pandemic. Nearly 60,000 cases were reported with more than 27,000 dead before he even mentioned the disease in a major speech, during his second term.
His administration spent years pushing back on requests for funding for treatment and research. It’s impossible to know for certain, but if the disease had been aggressively studied and treated in the early years it might have been contained to a few hundred or few thousand deaths here in the USA.
Also he cut funds for mental health treatment and facilities, turning disabled people out onto the streets, the War on Drugs was cranked up to inner-city warfare, and the fundamentalist Christian “Moral Majority” that was his power base happily watched queers and black people and sex workers and homeless people die alone and scared.
Until Donald Trump was elected, he was the best example of an oblivious wealthy white person riding a wave of bigotry into the White House, and empowering that bigotry to a degree that cost tens of thousands of lives.
TL;DR, he watched us die and didn’t care.
My friend: “I thought everyone liked Reagan.”
🙄🙄🙄
Republicans like Reagan, idolize him because he was a good public speaker (he was an actor) and he had an overwhelmingly popular re-election campaign because he survived an assassination attempt.
Make no mistake though- blood is on Reagan’s hands for every single person who died from HIV/AIDS. Worse still, his economic policies condemned an entire generation: we’re still suffering from Reaganomics and the stunning amount of cuts he gave to the wealthy to fuck the middle class.
