You know, I bet most people have never read Anne Frank's diaries. Oh, they think they have, because they've seen a movie or read a play. Or like most Americans they read excerpts of the diaries in high school.

As the Minneapolis Museum of Art wrote on Medium recently, if that's all you've seen, you haven't seen anything. The real diaries are packed with passages that are dark as hell – the kind of stuff you'd expect from a young teenager cramped into a tiny space hiding for her life for years.

But over the last few decades, our culture has polished up the diaries, excerpted from them carefully to present a cheery picture Anne certainly did not intend to paint.

She's been co-opted by the forces of positivity.

It gets so tiring to fight for a better world in the face of people who insist that positive vibes are all we need. When I was in my twenties and early thirties and all my friends were dying of AIDS, positivity didn't buy us jack shit.

We could be as positive as we wanted, and our friends still died excruciatingly painful, horrible deaths.

We didn't change the world by sitting back and accepting that. We took to the streets in outrage. We demanded government leaders prioritize the fight against the virus. We engaged our neighbors, families, and allies to stand up with us and demand the same.

We did not fight with positivity. We fought with tears and anger. And we won.

It amazes me that object lesson has been forgotten so soon, even though historians agree the Act Up fight against AIDS is an almost unprecedented example of grassroots activism succeeding in the United States. I don't know if that's true, but I know that Act Up's success is it least on par with 60s-era civil rights activism.

I know this much, neither movement wasted time with positive vibes or "being the change."

We were too busy taking direct action and winning.