Matt Keeslar just appeared one day on my tv screen in an episode of Law & Order. I've never properly thanked the producers.
This morning I was checking on the blogs I read daily and saw that Richard Rothstein over at Proceedatyourownrisk.com is getting mail telling him he's a pessimist. Weeeeelll, I'm not in agreement with that.
Richard comes from a time in this country when people were not only ridiculed, but jailed because of who they loved. Talk about crazy! He is from a time when our sexual orientation was classified as a sickness, as am I. I vividly remember finding out that I was defective and being terrified as a very young child of what could happen to me if anyone ever found out. Of course they did find out, and of course, they whisked me off to a psychiatrist who was obviously as repulsed as everyone else at my existence.
So, to those who have benefited from the experience, the hard won, and grudging, acceptance, the sacrifice of those who came before. Learn where you came from. Don't assume that those of us who are older and have lived very different lives from you have nothing to offer. We are a wealth of information and certainly in this case cautionary tales.
I was also listening this morning to a radio program talking about the incredible erosion of Human rights in the United States since September 11. It makes me wonder where we're headed. We,as a country vote our convenience, not our conscience.
If it doesn't affect our SUV, our ipod, or our cable tv we are not the least bit interested. We are being led down the primrose path to the White House by an opportunist who WILL NOT be able to fulfill the promises we think he made. On one blog I saw a comment that said "Barack Obama is probably a better candidate than we deserve." That scared me more than any of the other negative stuff I read and heard this morning. You have to be kidding?
If this is truly what someone in this country, in this time, thinks, our education system has failed miserably and we are about to witness the cost of such folly.
I sometimes entertain the notion of withdrawing. Of just packing up and heading to someplace small and quiet where I can attain my heart's desire, which is to be left alone. I unfortunately have obligations, ambitions, aspirations, and can't reconcile the peace of solitude with the desire to be included, the obligation of a responsible adult. So there I stand, astride a fence of swords. Would I be able to live a solitary life and watch as the gains I, and others strove so mightily for be eroded and inevitably eliminated? Would I be able to be so selfish as to ignore what is going to happen to a country of men and women who live lives of such blissful ignorance? Can anything really be done to prevent what I think is coming?
Mind you, what I see coming isn't concentration camps and extermination, but marginalization, persecution, elimination of a segment of society from the mainstream in a systematic and unpreventable way. I see many younger men and women who live as though they are legally protected from such horrors. You are not! And you will not be any time in the foreseeable future. I suggest you act accordingly and protect yourselves as best you can.
So, I live in a quandary. Can I help? Can I prevent even a small measure of what is about to come? Or am I just standing on a hilltop railing at the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, Unites States of the 21st century?
