Deep in a Smithsonian vault rests an iconic election poster from the 1980s stored in an archival drawer. It reads: “Silence = Death, VOTE.” It can still shock with its imagery and blunt words. “Your vote is a weapon….we are at war,” the poster states in an historic political call to action for LGBTQ Americans to engage in the most important election of their lives in the midst of a raging epidemic.
It was an election as primally important then as the one all Americans face, today. Despite President Trump’s suggestion that it be postponed, we are have that election, hell or high water, on Nov.
3. “Silence = Death,” emerging from the pain of the AIDS epidemic, is oddly prophetic for 2020. Engage and fight back or quietly succumb.