March 15, 2018
Marshall Lawton walked quietly into his kitchen/dining area in his home in West Yellowstone, Montana. It wasn't a very big home or a very fancy home, but it was clean and close to where he worked as a Park Ranger in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. It was something that during the park's time being open for tourists in the late spring through early fall that allowed him to easily commute to and from his specific duty station. A lot of times his work was focused more to patrol the park and monitor camp grounds to both limit littering and make sure that campers weren't threatened by bears or wolves, though it was really the grizzlies that campers had to be wary of. He'd had plenty of contact with scientists and local ranchers in both over the wolves in the park, the scientists defensive and asserting the lack of a threat the wolves posed. The ranchers aggressive and insisting that the wolves were deliberate killers of men and livestock. Generally speaking, Marshall had to agree more with the scientists and point out that the wolves weren't that sort of a threat. In fact, Marshall spent more time saying that the biggest threat to people in Yellowstone was neither the Grizzly Bears nor the reintroduced Grey Wolves, but the Bison. The one ton animals were not the docile animals that would let people pet them, and were more likely to gore people than anything else.
And as he placed two slices of white bread in a small toaster, Marshall knew on the dangers of the latter all too well. Not from having been gored by a Bison, but as a Werebison, he was well aware of the power and aggressive nature the animal had, for they were with him. Like Werecattle, he was powerfully built with muscle that could allow him to easily lift more than even other weres, certainly more than other people. Unlike Werecattle, Werebison were by nature more aggressive. They weren't the sort to mindlessly attack people, and no were really fit that sort of image, but they were more easy to anger, which had meant that his parents, Jethro and Morning Star spent a lot of time teaching Marshall on how to control his temper, and generally he felt he did well with that.
And for years it worked rather well, though he'd had to be extraordinarily careful with regard to making sure that new one knew he was a were of any kind. Sure, the fact that he was six five and looked like he could bench five hundred pounds easily in his human form could something that some conspiracy theorist might point to, but his family had generally managed to get by stating that the entire family preferred to live healthy. His parents added to it by running a decent sized ranch near Jackson, Wyoming. It was something that sort of made his form and musculature believable. It would only be on the odd occasional case of catching the scent of another were that he would ever talk about being a were, which didn't happen often, and so far for much of his life he'd never found anyone he loved enough to risk the were secret on the way his mother had with his father.
However, in time the world changed and things they had been in the past had changed dramatically. In the fall of 2015 the were "secret" ceased to be a secret. A reporter in Seattle, who'd happened to be a werefox blabbed it to the world, not to hurt weres. From what the news coverage made, his intention was actually to benefit weres. And at first, things seemed to go that way. The report itself worked out well, and Congress essentially granted weres legal protection under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The were in question was even nominated for a cabinet position to help administer Human/Were affairs. However, the werefox apparently forgot that the road to hell was paved with good intentions and after November 2016 things went south and went south in a hurry.
The 2016 Election was ugly and included more name calling and accusations of treason than any election ever. And during that time, Marshall stood firmly behind the Republican candidate. While he didn't really agree with the Evangelicals and all their Bible thumping, Marshall and his parents generally saw themselves as being in line with the Republicans with regard to economics, though Marshall generally saw a bit of Teddy Roosevelt in himself. It was why he went to work for the Park Service. And they'd also hated the Democratic candidate with a passion as a symbol of surrendering to foreign enemies and regulating everything. They'd agreed NEVER AGAIN. They'd also figured that the "acceptance" that the Democrats offered was a sham and that what the Republicans offered was more honest and less racist. And he remembered partying into the night when the Republican won.
But then things went wrong. There were a string of racist threats made across the country, most were against Hispanics and Blacks, but there were a decent number made against weres. Congress passed a national registration act that essentially required every were to register their identity with the government, which was then made public. This was then followed by a riot in Charlottesville in which the KKK and Neo Nazis went to protest the removing of a statue, and included a fair amount of violence that soon went throughout the country. Six weres were shot dead in the course of this violence and saw the Republican President praise their murder as though the weres in question were some violent gang leaders... Facts proved the claim wrong, but that didn't stop the Republican's praise of violence against weres, and all of this became part of the mess that had come after the exposure of weres and the election of a Republican President.
The KKK and Neo Nazis were ultimately prosecuted and the criminals in the murders were ultimately arrested, and the Republican President's obviously displayed racism that COULDN'T be denied after more than a year in office in which he'd NEVER condemned any attack on racial minorities of any kind. This was soon topped off by a series of attempted executive orders to strip weres of their voting rights under the claim that their "species" wasn't correctly represented on their registration forms or identification and so on. By the end of 2017, Marshall had been in a borderline state of depression over the issue. He'd voted for the Republican on the basis the "crooked" opponent was the REAL threat to Civil Rights and without bothering to see what the supposed "threat" was. He never bothered to trust the accusations made against the Republican and judged them to be entirely fake news. And then in the course of 2017, the man he'd voted for had been systematically trying to strip weres and minorities of their rights. It was something that by the end of the year he had to recognize just how big of a mistake he'd made in voting for the man.
Though, not everything had gone completely dark. The attempts to strip weres of their rights had largely failed. There were a lot of regulations on their activities and what they could and could not do, but a lot of that was judged by most sides to be somewhat reasonable, but the attempts to strip weres of their voting rights and so on, had failed in court as unconstitutional and legal protection under the 1964 Civil Rights Act remained when a company in Texas tried to fire a were for being a were and thus a supposed threat ended up going before the Supreme Court. The court ruled the 1964 Civil Rights Act was constitutional and that weres had legal rights under it by a 5-4 vote. In this, weres kept their legal rights... but legal rights in the sense that they couldn't be persecuted for what they were was one thing... Acceptance was another. In 2015 and 2016 prior to the Presidential election, acceptance looked rather possible, but after that, the best they had was legal protection. It'd mean a lot of hard work, though, that didn't mean that Marshall accepted what that Seattle reporter had done.
"He ever leaves his little liberal hidey hole in Washington State, I'll gore him," Marshall grumbled to himself as he poured himself a cup of coffee. While he ultimately found the initial "welcome" impressive and was grateful that weres were protected under the 1964, he still felt that since the issue of acceptance seemed so far away and that the US might be looking at having to through another Civil Rights fight and one that he felt greatly embarrassed by that the political groups he'd supported for years was the CAUSE of the problems was enough to irritate him. "He should have stayed quiet until everyone knew how well we'd be accepted first."
Of course, the levels of secrecy that weres had lived in for so long meant that they had no way of knowing how well they'd be accepted. That was the problem with secrecy, as weres secret from each other or from the global population meant that they had no way to know how anyone would react and some reports varied. Some countries seemed to be rather supportive, though most, like the US, only allowed for equal protection before the law and not much more. There were a few reports that came back from the third world that were even more violent and disturbing... though the disturbing reports were that there were those theorizing on using weres as super soldiers and using the were virus to their advantage...
Though all of that was really beyond what Marshall was in control of. He felt lucky that he'd kept his job as Park Ranger in Yellowstone and that about all he could do was try to move forward and show that despite being able to turn into a massive anthropomorphic American Bison didn't make him a monster. Though with all the regulations on weres and the extra supervision that went along with his work in that regard wouldn't be easy... Particularly when a fair number of people he had THOUGHT were friends were suddenly distant or limited their contact as much as possible. That was the biggest part of his depression, but he would do all that he could do.