I'll Make My Choice...Please Make Yours

It's election day.  This has been the most contentious campaign season I have experienced in my half-century of life.  I have lived through the anti-war movement of the Viet Nam era and I have seen marchers for civil rights assaulted by clubs and German Shepards.  I was a participant in the lock and key protests of Act Up and I have watched the generation before me march and fight for my rights to make my own choices for my reproductive health.  I have watched the process designed for us by our founding fathers play out on the public stage of the free press but I have never, ever seen anything like the snarky, tasteless, no-holds-barred assaults on the right to disagree than I have over the last year.

I am a full blown, 100% authentic, "bleeding heart liberal", as they were refered to at the far right wing, conservative dinner table I grew up around.  My parents freely used the N-word in conversation and I was forced to go door to door to hand out "Agnew for Governor" emory boards when I was 10 years old.  My parents were such rabid conservatives that I had no idea what the other side stood for until I was well into my 20's and had had a crack at the New York Times and lived in California for nearly a decade.  I learned to be a liberal.  I learned to follow, what I had always known to be the right thing in the first place - my heart and to organize my beliefs around the ideas voraciously consumed as I became an adult.  I knew when I secretly went steady with a black boy in the 8th grade and someone wrote "N-----Lover" on my locker that I was existing in a household that did what ever was necessary to keep love, compassion, empathy, justice, love thy brother as thyself, basic human decency out of the prison of hate that was our home.

Hearing family members spit acid- like disdain for so many souls in our society day in and day out was an impossible environment for me to live in as a child.  I was forever startled by how separate my parents felt from other people and we were always held at arms length by neighbors who knew that their Jewishness, their foriegness, their differentness from us-ness was held against them, behind their backs inside the four walls of our house.  I felt bad.  Not badly.  I felt bad, almost evil in the shadow of the judgemental intolerance we breathed for those that did not toe the right-wing, pull yourslef up by yourboot straps, lazy lookin' for a handout, different color skin, commie, bleeding heart liberals that were not to be trusted.  They were not us.

So, this election season has be a bit traumatizing for me.  I have heard hatetred slung around and an undercurrent of racism and sexism that I truly believed the United States of American had outgrown.  I guess not.  I guess it all just went underground.  I guess instead of out-loud declarations, people had taken to whispering  under their breath.  I am hurt and ashamed.

For me, this election season and the choice we are charged with making is about human rights and the rights of the indivdual.  I have been stymied by cries for smaller government by people that want to crawl into the bedrooms of other Americans to regulate whether they are doing what's right behind closed doors.  I don't understand how someone who was raised on Goldwater can turn around and think it is their business to tell a woman how she can care for her body, what she can do with her body and worse still, what is or isn't rape as determined by old white men who apparently skipped biology classes but somehow don't know how stupid they sound when they say the things that they say.  How is it that it is moral to allow assult weapons into movie theatres and to murder prisoners who have evidance to proove they are innocent but a woman should have to pay for medication, out of her own pocket, in order to prevent the very pregnancy that could take her out of the work force and onto the public dollar where apparently she will loose her will to ever go back to work because watching Judge Judy all day to tune out the complaints of hungry kids is so much fucking fun.

We don't really want to say it too often but much of what is bothering people is that we have a black man in our white house.  We worship the American Dream and relish accounts of the American story.  Yet when a true American story, right out of Central Casting, takes the political stage, it is all a lie.  Apparently the lack of validity of our President's story has something to do with the black man in the white house thing.  What a bunch of self-serving, insecure dimwits we can be.

The challenger for this job hasn't said very much during this campaign except to call our current President a liar, inept, divisive, not American.  He has made up systems of math and science that have nothing to do with reality but he cannot be transparent with his personal financial life because we poor slobs couldn't possibly understand the hundreds of pages of the magic math and financial double speak that gives him a pass on paying taxes.  He has accused our President of not understanding the working guy but has the audacity to tell unemployed women, living by the skin of their teeth that he is unemployed.  He occupies a seat of authority in a church that thrives on secrecy and exclusion of non-belivers and we are not entitled to any explanation of his religious beliefs.  Even though he wants the power to take away our right to choose, to marry, to adopt children, to get an education... individual rights are a two-way street.  I respect yours, you respect mine.  Why does it make sense to trust someone that does not trust us to make decisions for us that could alter the course of our county?

I have been threatened and my property has been vandalized.  For what, you ask?  For pieces of paper that express my beliefs.  For bumper stickers and lawn signs and buttons on my pocketbook.  I have been told I should "die for my liberal bullshit".  I have had people come onto my property and vandalize something I have placed there, my right as a citizen and property owner.  If I walked on the right side of political ideology, I guess I could have used my gun to straighten out the "problem".  I would never lay my hands on someone, or their property to express my belief that they do not have the right to disagree with me.

When tonight is all over I hope we can begin to take some stock to how we speak to one another.  I hope we can refresh our knowledge of civics and revisit manners.  I hope that people will step out from behind the mask of their digital devises and say what they mean to peoples faces so that they can feel what they are saying and how it affects other people.  I'm not preaching peace and love here.  I have been kicked in the shins too many times to go there anymore.  But people, we have got to find a way to respect the rights of others as individuals as we would like them to respect us.  Let's grow the fuck up, shall we?

A New Beginning

I've wanted to separate my business from my philosophical.  My commerce from my personal.  My art from my Self.  Well, that's a little more complicated and perhaps it is in the gray territory that both blogs will overlap but perhaps the juicier content will dribble over to here and be more comfortable not needing to be wiped clean.

I am an artist.  I am a writer.  Most of all I am a thinker.  I live to think, really.  I nourish myself on ideas and entertain myself with chewing them about and tasting their morsels. 

I hope I have something interesting to say here and that you will find it worthy of return visits.

Peace - give it a chance
Nell