Dear Queerblings,

Like many of you, I was in shock the morning after the election. How could this be happening? I entered the day and stepped into a rearranged landscape with so much trepidation and yes, fear. This is a landscape that I had prevented myself from imagining. But here we are. In a new reality. And I am thinking of you, the younger generation, who has so much to do now and such a heavy lift ahead of you. 

Dear Indigenous Family,

Dear Fellow Revolutionaries,

I write to you as a dusty-kneed soldier of the great unfolding rebellion that is America.

I write from the heart, in a pivotal moment in which each of us must decide whether to lead with love or fear. I urge you to remember: Only love is real.

Dear fellow Americans,

To the fearful and disheartened majority,

Hi. My name is Zack Weinstein. Thirty-one years old. Straight white cisgender male. Married. Actor. Mostly TV. (Ugh, so LA.) Also: Quadriplegic. Power wheelchair. Spinal cord injury. When I was nineteen. Trust me, it really doesn't matter how it happened.

And a quick piece of advice: Don't ask strangers in wheelchairs what happened to them. That might seem pretty obvious but you would be surprised. Develop a sincere connection with someone first. Then you can ask.

A La Revolución,

To place Donald Trump in context, please consider these two quotes:

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence, at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
​       ​       ​       ​       ​       ​       ​       ​       ​    - Reinhold Niebuhr

Dear Young Disabled Writer and Disabled Writers Not Yet Born,

When I was born in 1960, nobody knew whether I would live or die. When, after four weeks in an incubator, my parents were able to take me home, nobody knew whether I’d be able to walk.

Now, here I am fifty-six years later, alive and, most of the time, still walking.  

You might ask: What does this have to do with the disturbing results of the recent U.S. election? Why is this story important for me to impart to you at this time?

Dear Daughter Dykes,

Political satirist Will Durst reported in a local San Francisco newspaper that he was having a drink in a North Beach bar, and he commented sadly to the female bartender that he was afraid that with the November 8th election the bad guys had won and they had all the guns. The woman bartender replied, “But we have all the lesbians.” That was just the laugh I needed and the reminder of how much lesbians have to give.

Darling,​

Words for hope are just words. Words are spells. Your spelling is terrible. Drink some water.

Drink. Know the water is rising. The fuels these men use, what fuels these men. It makes the seas rise. The men do not believe in climate change. You cannot own a climate. Change is not the same as progress. The sea creeps closer by 3.2 millimeters every year. It’s a glacial pace.

Dear fellow artists and concerned citizens,

I have been preparing for this all my life. I just didn’t know it.

After all, I have produced and directed plays written by Havel in response to the Communist regime, plays by Ionesco in response to fascism, plays by inmates at Terezin during the Holocaust. I know what protest looks like, through the eyes of a playwright. I have channeled it. Yet somehow I didn’t ever expect to be on the front lines.

The time has come.