#1 - sorry to go behind you and proofread - but the text colors were invisible on the grey background! I'm a nag, I know...
#2 - if I can take this up for a moment between paragraphs on my final....I wonder too, why this sort of thing is still a big deal. There's far more pressing concerns, and (on a more positive note) far more cooler things to do in that discovery-channey-boom-de-yada department Sagan excelled in. (Btw he did see us go to some stars, but if he were still alive, he'd have plenty left to talk about!)
What if we woke up tomorrow and suddenly it *was* all ok. If those who wanted to get married got married, and those who didn't didn't, and the swingers and leather daddies and shrimpers went right on with their thang, within or without the bounds of whatever relationship they dig. What if a starlet's records sold on (gasp) talent, as opposed to how many other starlets she slapped tongues with (note that it's only ever slapping tongues - for once, ONCE! i want to see a pop-bi princess go "yeah, what of it?" and whip out a set of handcuffs, a strapon or a laya spot or something! and know a thing or two about sexual history and politics...but i digress)
And that's just our own country. What if. What if people weren't beaten, raped, tortured, killed becuase of who they are and who they love and who they lust? that's where the real evil is.
What if it wasn't?
I still want one cogent argument about the eeeeeeevils of diverse sexualities. What is the problem with saying "look, it's none of my business. can you do this job?"
This all puts me in mind of an old (I think) Russian Jewish fable. A young rabbi starts taking the village kids for walks in the woods - this make him very unpopular, since the older folks regard the woods as evil, they say a monster lives there, and want their kids to scurry from door to door for safety. But the young rabbi loves to show them the wonders of nature, either in ignorance of this monster or not really caring.
Eventually, the monster decides to attack, and instead of running, the rabbi walks up to it and lets himself be devoured. He explored the inside of the beast and finds its heart. He plucks the heart down and holds it to his ear, and inside all the evil, the darkness, and the disgust, he hears a tiny whimper of fear.
He emerges victorious and tries to share this with the villagers, who promptly classify him as nuts.
Now, the whole point of this is the presence of what I'm going to call evil (yes, evil) - whatever it is in the social constructions and individual psyches that makes it "ok" to do violence to those "others". this is not supernatural, but an intimate and long-standing part of us. But at its root is fear. The most heinous things, the most horrible, can all be reduced to a "you're not like me and mine, so i fear you" response.
Perhaps it is naive of me (and that fictional young rabbi) to seek to humanize those in thrall to this response and its baggage, but come on....there's got to be a way to address it, to heal it. Many ways, many many ways which require genuine devotion to fixing whatever problems form the landscape of this evil, this violence, this hate.
Can it ever be done? Can we unite as a world to do that whole "to the stars" thing? Or will we burn out before we get there? I don't know. It tires me to consider it - I concentrate on the problems within my reach, the brokenness I can heal in some small way. And maybe that's it - drop by drop, in concert with occasional floods - perhaps that it what will cause us to raise our heads from such pettiness (in the case of Houston) or such hatred (in the case of so many others) and overcome whatever small whimper is at the heart of the problem.
