To all my friends, and even those reading this who are not, it is time to get your flu and COVID vaccinations. Apparently, we are heading into an early flu season, and a strong strain. Remember, it takes about two weeks for the shots to take full effect. I got mine last week as I will be traveling, but even if you are staying home, it’s really important. Protect yourself, and those around you.

Then to all those who are new parents, who have children who will be new parents, even grandchildren who will be new parents, yes some of us are that old, it is important they know about the importance of getting their children fully vaccinated. There are proven effective vaccines for a host of diseases, and many have been nearly eradicated because children are being vaccinated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a schedule of vaccines children should take. I hope that has not been destroyed yet, but you can always contact the American Academy of Pediatrics to be safe. These vaccines have been fully researched, and proven effective. But because of RFK Jr. and his lies about vaccines, we now have a measles epidemic in this country. A disease that had been eradicated here. I have written before, both he, and the felon in the White House who nominated him, and who supports his lies, should be tried for murder for any unvaccinated child in the United States who dies of measles today. 

One of the felon’s MAGA sycophants, the criminal who is now attorney general of Texas, running for the U.S. Senate, is investigating  pediatricians in Texas, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, for what is in essence telling parents they should have their children vaccinated. He is threatening to put doctors who prescribe the vaccines in jail. He, along with the felon, should be charged with murder if any of the unvaccinated children dies of one of the diseases they could have been vaccinated against. RFK Jr. and his followers, one of whom, Kirk Milhoan, who Kennedy named chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is now even questioning the need for the Polio vaccine. 

We are living in a dangerous alternate universe where this can happen. It is my hope and prayer, the decent people of Texas will be strong enough to say NO to the criminal Paxton on their ballots, and instead send James Talarico to the Senate. Let’s hope they even rid themselves of their MAGA governor, and elect Democrat Gina Hinojosa. Let’s hope the rest of the country will elect Democrats up and down the ballot, as their way of saying to the felon, “no more of your BS. We will not let you, and your minions, destroy our country, and cause death, and the destruction of our families.”

When talking about RFK Jr. and the harm he is doing, it is important to understand it is not only vaccines he is lying about. He is in the process of destroying the credibility of the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. Both organizations were respected around the world until he began to dismantle them. Then he is keeping the United States from participating in the World Health Organization. If there were to be another pandemic, and we can be assured there will be, what he is doing will cause countless deaths here, and around the world. His lies, when he ran his anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, and sent a letter to the Samoan Prime Minister debunking vaccines, caused the deaths of many children there from measles. 

If Democrats take over Congress, both the House and Senate, which it now looks like they could, there needs to be an immediate, and strong, focus on these issues. There must be investigations and RFK Jr. must be held accountable for the damage he is doing to our nation’s health. There needs to be legislation preventing any future vile idiot like RFK Jr. and felons like the one in the White House today, from hurting any more people through their cruel and misdirected policies, none of which are based in either credible research or fact. 

We have the chance on Nov. 3 to take back our country, to make a difference for ourselves, and future generations, both here, and around the world. We must return to sanity and follow science, once again providing funding for research into possible future health breakthroughs, like an AIDS vaccine. We can end the insanity we are seeing, and we can do it by using our constitutional right to VOTE. 

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.

Recently, my team traveled to Washington, D.C., for the first run-through of our upcoming expansion of Project Liberate, a leadership development initiative equipping Liberators with the knowledge, skills, relationships, and resources to become advocates and change-makers in their communities. The program is launching in the historic city of Montgomery, Ala. As a Black, gay man, the significance of the city’s legacy as home to critical civil rights movements, and today, its growing rates of new HIV diagnoses, both weighed heavily on my mind. 

I felt honored that, as a nonprofit based in Texas with a small yet mighty team of six Black and queer advocates, we were invited to our nation’s capital to dream up new ways to create change throughout the South. As we worked through what this next chapter would require, I kept thinking about the city around us. Washington has always inspired my work, as a city rooted in Black and queer advocacy. It is a place where people have brought local struggles before the nation and ultimately gained the world’s attention to make meaningful changes. 

I thought of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., coming from Atlanta to this city and standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, sharing a dream that belonged to far more people than those gathered before him. 

I thought of the AIDS Memorial Quilt displayed, telling the stories of those whom society had tried to erase, for all to finally see on the National Mall, each panel insisting that a life lost to HIV be remembered.

Neither movement began in Washington. People carried their grief, courage, and solutions for a better future from their small cities across the country. When they came together, the nation could no longer look away.

That history inspires me as Project Liberate grows from Houston to Montgomery, and I work to ensure the South gets the resources and recognition it deserves. The South is too often characterized by stereotypes or inaccurate portrayals. The truth is, the South is diverse, home to some of the most diverse cities in our nation, and more importantly, home to Black and LGBTQIA+ communities that do not wish to pack up and leave when things get tough. 

We are here. We are building families, businesses, organizations, networks of care, and solutions. We know our communities’ strengths and the barriers they face. Yet the people with that knowledge are often the least likely to receive the sustained investment they need to turn an idea into lasting change.

Project Liberate exists to change that. Through leadership development, entrepreneurship, coalition building, and community action, it invests in the people, not the problem. It does so by supporting those we call Liberators: leaders ready to improve health access in the places they know and love. In Houston, where the program has worked for four years, we have helped launch nearly 100 Black-owned or queer-owned nonprofits and businesses with a social purpose. Montgomery is our next opportunity to invest in local leadership, and we hope to keep growing throughout the South until the day comes that we are no longer disproportionately impacted by HIV.

Montgomery is a fitting home for this next chapter. Its place in the Civil Rights Movement reminds us that Southern communities have never waited for someone elsewhere to give them permission to lead. Local, everyday people organized, took risks, brought their issues, along with their solutions, to the feet of the Capitol’s steps, and moved the country forward. Today’s Liberators deserve the chance to build their own legacy, one that meets the needs of their communities now.

D.C. can bring movements together and help turn local action into national change. But the opportunity to learn should run both ways. As our work expands across the South, I want people here to learn from the leaders doing this work in Houston, Montgomery, and the cities that follow. They have knowledge that national conversations need. They have the solutions; they just need the support. So I ask readers in the capital to resist writing off the South. Invest in them. Support their leaders. Partner with them. Listen when they tell you what health access requires in the places they call home.

Our visit to Washington helped us prepare for Montgomery, but it also reminded me why we are doing this work in the first place. Because the movements we are building now, alongside the Liberators with a stake in their communities, have the power to one day bring their ideas and changes to the national stage that is Washington, D.C., and change the world. 

Ian L. Haddock is founder of The Normal Anomaly Initiative.

The liquor was flowing, the dice were rolling and the women were plentiful. Down on 14th Street in the U Street corridor in 1946, at Club Madre, your thirst could be quenched and your vices satisfied. At the center of it all was a large, dark-skinned woman whose taste for mink, money, and power made her larcenous — and legendary.

Look at photos of Odessa Madre, clothed head-to-toe in fur, hair freshly curled, and her eyes dared you to question her prowess. Her mischievous smile suggested she knew something you didn’t. Here was one of the most successful women in Washington, D.C. — and yet most Washingtonians have never heard of her. Why?

Madre was a big-time numbers runner during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ’50s, when the illegal lottery was booming. For Black Washingtonians, the underground lottery offered a chance to get ahead economically when segregation made legitimate financial advancement nearly impossible. Those who ran the game always seemed to be making money — and Madre was one of the most successful, with the hustle, resources and smarts to become one of the richest women in the city. Yet she nearly became a footnote in D.C. history, remembered mostly by a small plaque on U Street where her mugshot is captioned: “This was D.C.’s Al Capone.”

Why does someone like her nearly disappear from history? And when someone is erased — what is lost?

Madre graduated from Dunbar High School, the segregated school for African Americans renowned for producing students who went on to earn advanced degrees and returned to teach. The expectation was that if you looked and spoke the “right” way, a respectable job — teaching, civil service — awaited. Those jobs were also often reserved for women who fit a certain mold. As Professor Sharon Harley writes in “Sister Circle: Black Women and Work,” Madre’s turn to criminal life was fueled in part by “deep feelings of rejection by the Washington color-conscious Black middle class.” She didn’t fit the mold. So she built her own path.

She aligned herself with people she was never supposed to befriend — Italian and Irish men who ran the city’s underworld — and turned selling moonshine into a calling card. Childhood friends who became police officers looked out for her, and she looked out for them.

Madre never married and had no interest in men. She kept a steady crew of attractive women close, and accounts suggest she had relationships with women — relationships that would hardly have been acknowledged publicly at the time. Her rejection of the era’s social expectations meant she was never bound by a marriage that could have curbed her ambition, or a divorce that could have wrecked her financially. Her independence gave her a level of control over her life that few women of her era experienced.

Eventually, police stings, betrayals and a government eager to legalize the lottery for itself squeezed the life out of the underground game. Madre’s luck ran out. She died penniless — her funeral paid for by street friends and a detective or two who had quietly admired her hustle for years.

Why does any of this matter? Because it’s a clear-eyed look at what it takes to chase the American Dream when the front door is locked. History can be ugly — but sanitizing it doesn’t make it less true.

Odessa Madre was a criminal, entrepreneur, hustler, queer woman, Dunbar graduate, numbers runner, wealthy Black woman, friend to police, lawbreaker and product of segregation — all at once. 

Her story is a reminder that the truth about Jim Crow, and who survived it and how, is more complicated — and more honest — than any diluted version of history could be.

My documentary, “Odessa’s Reign,” is an attempt to give her the fuller portrait she never received in her lifetime. Madre’s path challenges us to think about identity, place and memory: who gets remembered, and why their stories matter.

Robin Hamilton is a filmmaker and journalist and director of ‘Odessa’s Reign.’ There will be a screening and community conversation, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: The Story of Odessa Madre,’ on Friday, Oct. 30 at Busboys and Poets at 14th and V streets, 6-8:30 p.m. Learn more at www.aroundrobin.com.