Social Suicide

/ o1daycloser / Leave a comment

I apologize to anyone who tries to read this in advance, it’s going to be all over the place and divisive.

Part of Love is pain when it dies. I don’t know if I’ve ever really Loved this country, but I have loved an idea about what this country sometimes is. I have not been everywhere and have not loved everywhere that I’ve been. I don’t believe in blind patriotism. A country should earn the patriotism of it’s inhabitants through action that shows it values it’s people. People have different ideas about how to make things work, but there should be no question that all citizens get an equal seat at the table. It is through action and intention that people should be weeded out, not gender, orientation or race. Too often this is forgotten. This is where we are now. The incoming administration has different ideas about how to fix things than the previous one. That is not in and of itself wrong. The problem comes with the denial of scientific facts and selective human kindness. If you deny facts because they do not fit your agenda, you are foolish and unwise. This alone is enough to make you unfit for office. But it has not.
I do love the idea of what this place COULD be. I love the idealism of freedom, justice and equality above all else. Those are goals to strive for and though we have always stumbled trying to meet them, there have been times when those goals felt much more attainable. That faith has been shaken.

And still, part of Love is pain when it dies.

These recent events have me thinking of my family.

I loved my grandfather when I was a kid and I don’t know if he changed as he aged or if I just started to notice as I aged, but he eventually revealed himself as a terribly racist man. The realization that someone you love, a member of your family could break your heart so badly was a very important life lesson and a hard one. It eventually did come to a head for us one night and I more or less didn’t speak to him after. I was bartending and had to kick him out of the bar for being a drunk loud racist and you know what? Not only did that hurt incredibly bad to have to do that, but the rest of the bar turned on me for doing it. He didn’t just pop off a single epithet either, because after the first two I let him go hoping he would stop. At first he was complaining about all of the black people in baseball. It wasn’t until he started to get other people involved in telling racist jokes that I had to act. And believe me, I gave him warnings and I asked him to please, please stop or I was going to have to cut him off which had him shouting in my face that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, I was the problem and he did leave. Everyone made excuses for why I should have let him do it. They said things like “You should be ashamed of yourself. Treating your own grandfather that way” and “There are no n****rs in here to complain” and “Why do you care, you aren’t black” and the worst excuse ever; “He’s from a different time”. That is not an excuse for being a bad person. It never was, it never will be. Even back when slavery was legal not everyone went along with it. Those people may have been the minority in those days, but they were RIGHT. People could not be trusted to come to the right conclusion on their own and so we had to legislate freedom for all again and again. It isn’t over either, there is still more to do.

Lesbian women, gay men and those who are transgender are people and must be treated with the same rights that we grant everyone else.
Muslims are people and deserve to be given the same treatment as anyone else.
Institutional racism still exists and it must be a priority to stop it.
We are Americans, we have to take care of our people.
What do you think this administration is going to do? Did it occur to you that you were voting for people other than yourself? Did it occur to you that there was a chance your vote could really hurt some people by taking away their rights? Did it occur to you that maybe the affordable care act was helping more people than it was hurting? That endorsing a candidate praised by white supremacist groups who are as we speak being awarded position in the administration might make you complicit with their actions?
Yes, there are two sides to every story, but that doesn’t mean both sides are equally valid. People love to say that “The truth is probably somewhere in the middle” and maybe it is, but if it matters then maybe you should find out. If one person says 2+2=4 and another says 2+2=6, the truth isn’t probably 5. Also, sometimes a person you don’t agree with is right and a person you do agree with is wrong. But I’m not talking about having to change your personal opinions and prejudices, by all means keep them if you think they are valid, what I’m saying is that you cannot support politicians that will enact legislation that prevents all Americans from having equal rights.
So here we are now.
It’s not funny. Please explain to me how you felt left behind by the Obama administration because his policies hurt you ….how? What do you think is going to be different for you now? If Hillary had won then Racists, homophobes & Christians could still get married. You could still think women should be submissive to men like the bible says and that they should be punished for getting abortions or that homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to get married. You could still buy guns and think black people are sub-human in your heart. You could still think the world is 5,000 years old and climate change is a liberal myth. You just wouldn’t be able to legislate those things. Would she have brought back the coal and steel industry? NO. Because those things have died and NO ONE can bring them back. But that wasn’t good enough. You needed to make the OTHER that you felt so threatened by HURT.
I moved to Colorado right around the middle of the Obama administration so no one has really seen me get political here. But here we are now and please, unfriend me or whatever you have to do if you disagree, but otherwise you should strap in for 4 years of THIS. Because I will not stop while my loved ones get hurt by this administration. And they will. Both the introduction and destruction of legislation is coming and it will create a climate that is unsuitable for a lot of good people. Americans.
I have friends and family who helped make this happen and I’m really struggling with that.
But most of all I’m heartbroken by my parents.
As my Parents, whether you like it or not, you had quite a lot to do with why I turned out so liberal in my politics. Dad mostly, though he’s turned a rather weird conservative corner in his old age and I’m convinced Fox News has quite a lot to do with that. If you get your information from mostly one source for too long, or only sources you tend to agree with, you’ll eventually stop thinking critically and just assume it’s true because it feels true. After all, if you like those people and agree with what they are saying, how could they be wrong? My dad was the guy that gave me the autobiography of Malcolm X, which really changed my life. He gave my brother a nuanced lecture on why it wasn’t okay for him to use the “N” word, after my brother insisted it must be okay because “they call themselves that”. This was a big deal to me morally as most of the rest of my family, teachers and even friends made excuses for racist behavior. Especially from old people who were “from a different time”, which I never thought made it okay to be horrible. Judge people on the content of their character. My dad gave me Joseph Campbell which taught me to think critically about belief and the power of myths. Mom was certainly more conservative even then, but she was just as important. Mom taught me to appreciate things for what they were worth, not what they aren’t. She taught me the value of a dollar and the importance of hard work. My mom taught me to look for the common ground in people you disagree with and try to understand their perspective even if you disagree, which was really hard in my rebellious 20’s. Flash forward to now, my mother HATES Obama and my father suddenly HAS to buy a gun, even though he’s never had an interest in them his whole life, because Obama is going to take them away from us. What the hell happened there? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

My point is this;
I’ll never know what it feels like to be Gay, Transgender, Female, Black, Mexican, but I know how it feels to be treated poorly because someone more powerful or more acceptable than you has decided you don’t belong and must be punished for it. I was a weird kid. I loved science fiction, comic books and action figures. Sure, all of that is cool NOW, but I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up. Before I was even 13 years old I had been beaten up by someone almost every day. I had bricks thrown at me, I was regularly called a faggot and told that the things that I loved made me WRONG. Hell, my own mother told me I should conform so the bullies would leave me alone. Great lesson to learn. Don’t be yourself. As I became a teenager I remember girls telling me I would be more likeable if I wore different clothes and listened to different music. All of that doesn’t compare to the experience of someone who needed or still needs legislation to protect them from a society that doesn’t respect their humanity. The difference is I was ostracized for things I CHOSE, not for the color of my skin, my gender or my sexuality. And that’s the whole thing. Every human being is born how they are born and until they do something to deserve otherwise, their humanity and equality in society should be the same as everyone else. As white, straight people, especially the men, we have the advantage. We are afforded more opportunities to fail, we are allowed to be more ignorant and uneducated. If you don’t believe this is true, ask yourself this;
Would I like to be treated like a non-white person? A homosexual or transgender person?
If the answer is NO, then we are not equal and there is work to do.
Which leads us to today.

I’m just heartbroken that we are where we are.

But I have renewed hope.

I went to the Women’s march in Denver on Saturday and it reminded me that this is still the place I love. This city and the whole nation pretty overwhelmingly voted against the coming change. There are people who will protest, people who will fight. That is afterall how things progress. Large groups of people making themselves heard.

I know this was a long winded ramble. And I feel I need to stress that I think my parents are wonderful people who may have struggled to understand me, but I have never felt that they don’t love me. These two competing sides of the coin make all of this very hard. I’m usually better at navigating this but I fear this is abnormal and I’m no longer equipped to hold these competing ideas in my head and heart.

Or maybe I need a little more time.

I don’t know.

But I’m hopeful again, which is not nothing.