👯‍♂️ TREE 604: Jeff Gill joined and protest and had a friend

Heads up: this post talks about an anti-abortion protest. If that’s not something you want to read right now, please scroll quickly down to the drawing of the two boys.

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In the 1970s and 80s Protestant America was radicalised to the right as a means of securing power for the Republican party. This is well-documented history, of which I had no knowledge when as a young teenager I joined hundreds of Christians in Tucson standing beside a main road (maybe Speedway Boulevard) for an hour (maybe two) holding identical signs that read ‘Abortion Kills Children’.

It was a long slow journey from being a kid with a sign to realising I that I have no interest in being a pawn in a power game of people who are willing to destroy any number of lives for the chance to rule a world made in their own image.

If someone says you need to fight in their war, go meet some people on the other side first.

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I was seven years old (so much for chronology) and at a church picnic. Everyone was playing American football, except me. And this other kid. I asked him if he wanted to climb a tree. He did. It turned out that our birthdays were exactly one month apart, and we became best friends for the next 15 years.

For the first three years that I knew Danny I rarely saw him wearing anything but his soccer kit. He enriched my life with knowledge of Transformers and video games and all the cartoons I wasn’t allowed to watch. He was naturally good – better than me – at everything that mattered: soccer, drawing, being funny, playing drums, talking to girls. I was better at wearing things other than my soccer kit.

We played together, drew together, recorded pretend radio stations together, invented the great soda known as D&J’s Big Four. As we grew up, his advice was always right when it came to girls and me. My spiritual advice to him was probably of varying quality.

When we were 19, he moved in with my family for a year because of stuff going on with his and he needed a place to live. This was one of many times my parents opened our home to people who needed somewhere safe to be. Their politics were right wing. Their personal ethics are straight-up Jesus.

Danny is an amazing drummer and he filled my world with amazing drummers, and inadvertently, other types of politics.

Another good thing to beware of if someone wants you to fight in their war is simple answers to complex questions.

Also, follow the money.

Grow slowly
Jeff