December 2004

So, what to make of the recent election ... let us count the ways: Civil rights erosion. Irrational (but rationalized) war. Privacy invasion. Environmental destruction. The ruin of the economy. The respect of other countries. Renewed fascism...

OK, I'm ranting; maybe only some of this has happened, with the rest in the offing. Given the victory of gay hatred (11 out of 11 gay-marriage bans were approved -- I'm still stunned), the totally blinkered voting of more than half the country against their own self-interests, and the nearly complete contempt and marginalizing by the administration and Congress of the 49% that voted the other way, what can bi people expect in the near future?

"Compassionate" lip service at best; outright hostility and more at worst.

Will we eventually see a Kristallnacht and pogrom in gay and Muslim communities? Will there be a "final solution" to same-sex romance? Will state-sanctioned terrorism take a new tact and attack the most hated members of society through benign neglect or implicitly condoned violence, a la the torture-not-called-torture being sanctioned-but-not-sanctioned in Iraq and Guantanamo? After all, bi people can be seen as "subversive", right?: We subvert narrow-mindedness by trying to get people to think for themselves, right? And "subversiveness" can be equated to "terrorism", right? And so peace-loving bi people could -- in twisted logic -- be seen by paranoid bigots as a threat to "national security" because we cause conformists to feel terrified: We make them question and think!

Or maybe I'm just a ranting curmudgeon.

I'm no prognosticator, either (I assumed job-challenged Ohio would look at the facts and vote the other way), but my guess is that these bad things listed above will happen. 

The irony is that I believe in love and compassion, compromise and idealism, understanding and consensus, and I preach peaceful conflict resolution. But when the country's leadership rejects all of that and shuns nearly half the population (or more), and when the majority of those voting vote against their own interests just because they hate same-sex relations, it gets my bi bile boiling. Of course, that's probably not the only reason why the votes went the way they did, but it seems to be.

So what to do, what to do? The Democrats took their relatively best shot, raised more money than they ever have, and got more of their voters to the polls than ever before, and that STILL wasn't enough, even in the face of a pointless, deceptively executive, unpopular war (I guess not as unpopular as I thought), a totally mortgaged economy, the outsourcing of jobs to other lands, the reduction in the value of the dollar, the destruction of the environment, the diminution of civil rights, including same-sex unions ... oh, don't get me started. (It didn't help that the Demo candidate shunned the idea of gay marriage, too, but given that he did so in a halfhearted way and given the political realities he faced, I guess he had no choice. I guess...)

So what to do, what to do? I don't want to sound like Chicken Little, I prefer to be constructive. So I've put on my "bi beanie" and thought thought thought: What can bi people (and others) do to make everything right -- er, better? How can we at least be heard and not hated? Can we remake the world into a loving and kind place -- without getting angry ourselves? 

Sigh ... I think we can't ... but we still have to try. I think we're fated for a very rough two to four years, at the least. Americans usually don't react unless something hits home broadly (like a widespread economic depression or an attack on the World Trade Center -- hey, I'm not in denial that there really ARE people out to get ALL of us!) or war (yet thousands have been killed -- or, well, I guess they don't count because most haven't been Americans, and besides they're taking the hits so we don't get hit at home, right? So they're doing us a favor, right?...).

OK, I'm bitter -- no, not bitter, just stunned. Jaw-droppingly stunned. Can so many people be so ignorant and blind? Then again, how did Nazi Germany and Rwanda happen? Or the leisure suit? ... But I digress.

Meanwhile, it's interesting to reflect that "1984" was a good guess, just off by 20 years: "Compassionate conservatism" seems to be Big Brother double-speak for uncompassionate reactionary lip service; the Patriot Act hardly is patriotic as it dismantles privacy, free speech and the right to assemble and associate; and "pre-emptive" war -- in the name of national security when even the Security Council hasn't authorized it and the facts don't support it -- is irrational rationalization run amok.

On the one hand.

On the other hand, we can assume that the rest of America is ignoring us bi people cuz we just don't count and just aren't vocal enough, and so we will do what we've always done: build bridges, create and nurture our own subculture of peace and loving in our own world within the greater world -- and hope others will see, listen and consider the possibilities. The America I have known seems to have been taken over by some other thought process, some Martian-like way of seeing things that distorts every bit of logic and emotion (sorry to any Martians out there, I'm not against Martians personally, don't really know how they think, frankly...). So, just like the Jews of pre-Nazi Germany, we will live our own lives separate from and yet within that "other" America -- I just pray the end results are quite different.

* * * * *

Oh, I rant a lot about where America is headed, but I do so BECAUSE I love this country: freedom of speech, freedom to love, freedom of everything. Well, sorta. (We'll ignore for now the slave trade and lynchings and extermination of the first-nations peoples...) And because I love this country, I rarely stop to think about whether there SHOULD be a country. Bear with me, I'm not suggesting that there SHOULDN'T be an America, but given our history, should we be so domineering and at the same time so hostile to many of our own people (like bi people)?

And before Carnivore (or whatever the government's email scrounger is called) eats up this essay and puts me on yet another infamous list (I figure I'm on one just for being bi), let me assure you I want this country to continue and thrive. But from a historical perspective, it does seem odd: I don't like to think of us as an expansionist, colonial or imperial nation; at worst, I like to think that if we ever were so, it's all in the distant past: manifest destiny, the Louisiana Purchase, Seward's Folly, the movement west, the genocide of "the Indians", the swarming of the land from sea to shining sea (with Europeans), etc. So I'm usually dismissive about criticism from abroad that America is seeking global domination and empire. After all, if we had wanted that, we would have taken over Germany, Japan and so forth after WWII, right?. We didn't; we just wanted to be left alone -- well, so goes the legend and, yes, as far as I can tell, the general mindset of Americans for generations: We DIDN'T want to be the police of the world, we WANTED splendid isolation, we were (as per George Washington) Cincinnatus-minded. Oh, here and there, there might have been some rogue politicians etc. who wanted to be kings of the world, but the vast majority of Americans sure didn't.

... And then we invaded Iraq, in the name of the U.N., even though the U.N. hadn't sanctioned the invasion. And the rationale for the invasion appears to have been predicated on false information, quite possibly purposefully and nefariously misleading and at the least disingenuous. In any case, the stated rationale has changed so many times now that it's enough to make one wonder if perhaps those in charge of the government (or Halliburton) in fact truly ARE seeking empire, the stated reason for war be damned. Or maybe they just can't decide what they want. ... Hey, wait a minute, isn't that what BI people are always accused of??? ... Hey, you don't suppose that our leadership is ... hmmmm ..... Me thoughts the Republicans protesteth too much ......