Well, well, well...ACA and Marriage for Same Sex Couples, the Law of the Land

Sometimes right just prevails.  Or maybe right prevails after people fight and sweat and protest and show up and take it to court and stand on their heads and many years pass, then right prevails.  But to have two such epoch rights happen within 24 hours of each other is really something to get excited about.  Yet, then we have the massacre in Charleston. And yesterday President Obama's eulogy for Clementa Pinkeney somehow squeezing some measure of hope out of the murder of 9 innocent people by a psychopath wrapped up in the Confederate flag.  Don't ask me how he summoned the guts and pure damn eloquence to do it, but he did.  And leading the people in attendance to "Amazing Grace"...wow, my peeps, it don't get too much more mind-blowing than that on a Friday afternoon.  May we somehow find a way to dig down deep in our souls and confront the legacy of slavery in our country once and for all.  It's killing this country.  It's killing young African American men every other week it seems.  We have a prison system that incarcerates in hugely out of whack percentages black and Latino men, which my friend, Joan, refers to as slavery, and she just may be right.  President Obama referred to slavery as our country's original sin. I've heard it put that way previously, but to have the President of the United States say it in front of God and world...wow and mercy.  So maybe the next right to prevail will be that.  It will be some kind of national spiritual upheaval that makes us look reality in the eye.  And do something about it.  Like for instance, if we recognize that our police officers carry our projected and denied racial hatred on their shoulders and act it out for us in shootings of unarmed black men, and instead, recognize that racial hatred in ourselves, maybe we will start getting someplace, white people. No offense, my fellow white people.  But really.  We got to own it and stop pretending racism is something of the past. And I do not mean by that that I, you, we go around saying "I hate black people and Latinos and Asians and Native people".  That ain't it, my white peoples, my tribe, my familiars.  It is recognizing that we have benefited from institutionalized racism that is the legacy of slavery.  Period.  That legacy has driven a psychic and spiritual wedge between "us" and "them".  And the "us's" are the ones that have to do something about it.  Start with yourself and go from there.

The other thing is this sudden upset with the Confederate flag.  As these things go, it is better than a sharp stick in the eye as a place to begin confronting our long history of racial hatred.  A Bill Moyers posting says it better than I ever could.  You may have seen it on Facebook or some other social media.  The author is a guy who grew up in Mississippi and knows of which he speaks.  I shall attempt to include the link here:

Why the Confederate Banner Must Come Down

That's it for now.  Let's create a world worth living in.

More on Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner

This is not a topic that I would think to write about out of a clear blue sky. But this whole thing that has been stirred up around Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn has just gotten me thinking about a bunch of stuff. I have identified myself as a feminist since my early 20's. Over all those years I have fought against the sexualization of women. Not that I have necessarily been in the streets about it. More in my own life and where I might have influence on other lives. It offends me and I think degrades women for Caitlyn to pose for Vanity Fair using all the bells, whistles and technologies available to her, the end product being a dolled up caricature of a woman. For chrissake, this is a 65 year old person. What the hell is the matter with posing as a 65 year old woman?? What kind of message is being sent to girls, boys, women and men by this ridiculous caricature? That the only kind of woman worth anything is a young, beautiful one?

The other part of this that really bothers me is that Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn, has been a part of a family that has made celebrity into some kind of circus act. They have dedicated themselves to appealing to our very basest instincts such as greed, an obsession with "looking good" and other degrading bullshit. I get that it is a good thing for all of us that a famous person has come out as transgender. I just don't think that posing in this circus act way for Vanity Fair does one damn thing to "normalize" this variation on our humanity. It just makes it seem glamorous. So in other words, this, like all the other cheap antics of the Kardashians, is just another glamorous thing for the rest of us to long for and never quite achieve, gay, straight or transgender. I believe the harm this image does outweighs the good in the long run of things. What would have been so bad with being a 65 year old transgender woman, plain and simple? Instead we have an image that promotes self delusion and foolishness. And, believe me, I understand that Caitlyn gave up her youth playing the part of a man she didn't feel herself to be.

I want LGBTQ people to live in a world in which they can be people. Just people, not stupid caricatures. To marry, have civil rights, have children if they wish to. I want to live in a world in which sexual and gender identification is no longer some kind of a hot political issue. I wouldn't mind seeing the end to sexism and racism. I want a lot of shit that I probably won't live to experience. I'm just not sure that glamour poses on the cover of magazines does much to advance us toward those ends.       This is me, last year, age 65: