There are several things that most people don’t understand about humanity, traveling the universe, extrasolar planets and extraterrestrial civilizations.

Unfortunately, space based science fiction tends to amplify ideas and thought processes about life and the universe that are just not true or are vanishingly implausible.

One false idea, that I notice even intelligent progressive science educated people espousing, is that if and when we encounter an extraterrestrial civilization, it is likely to be like us, similar to us, and at a level of technology that is graspable by us.

To illustrate the truth, let me focus the gentle reader’s attention on an admittedly only somewhat accurate but illustrative graph below:

The bottom graph is the one of planet earth.  There is an assumption built in that microbial life has been around for the entire history of the planet, but it could be just as easily read as “no life / microbial life”.

Faux populism is protecting the powerful.

Whoever they are.  And then making it seem as if it’s about your interests in a good or bad sense as if the powerful are on your side.  So they will ask you to stick it to the other guy at election time, then talk about coexistence and happy happy joy joy cooperating with those self same people they wanted you to be angry enough to stick it to, whenever it’s in their interests to “work with” or “cooperate” with those self same people they wanted you to hate.

So you will have the Democratic Party.  You will have the Coffee Party, which wants to act as if it cares about your interests but is really interested in protecting selected politicians.  And you will have the Tea Party as the court jester and buffoon they want you to pay attention to.

My, my, it’s getting thick.  The theater is really all quite amusing.

Fuck all that we’ve got to get on with these

Gotta compete with the wily Japanese.

No need to worry about the Vietnamese,

Gotta bring the Russian Bear to his knees.

Well, maybe not the Russian Bear,

Maybe the Swedes.

We showed Argentina

Now let’s go and show these.

Make us feel tough

And wouldn’t Maggie be pleased?

Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah!

Not now John,

We’ve got to get on with the film show

Hollywood waits at the end of the rainbow

Who cares what it’s about as long as the kids go,

So, Not now John

We’ve gotta get on with the show.

Can’t stop

Lose job

Mind gone

Silicon

Stockholm

What bomb?

Get away

Pay day

Make hay

Break down

Need fix

Big six

Click click

Hold on

Oh no

Bingo! (Bingo!)

Good luck with Bingo, Democrats, in November.  Obama said, “make me do it”.

I am saying ‘make me care’.  Really, I want to.  You just have to act in such a manner as to let me, and not make it obvious to one like me that it’s just a stupid little game to maintain your political power and keep those donations flowing.

This comes before any other consideration.  For too long, we have suffered in the shadows, and, at best, incorporated obliquely as part of a greater whole.  We are not a people.  It is time for us, in the face of our obliteration and lack of consideration, to be, a people.

I was posting a series of posts on facebook, and this came to me.

If you are GLBT, the fact is, you are laughed at.  You are taken for granted.  You are mocked, and ridiculed, even by the people who claim to need you, and to want you as part of your coalition.

You are DESPISED.  You are LAUGHED AT.  And, what is so ironic about this is, you are despised, laughed at, mocked and ridiculed, despite everything having been taken away from you, that you need nothing from these people who are mocking, laughing, and ridiculing you.

If we do not get justice, and swift, severe, uncompromising justice .. then …

It is time for a GLBT nation.

It is time for us to start seeing ourselves — and I would argue globally — as a people, as a distinct (how shall I say it), uh, world.

Gay people are persecuted in China.  We are persecuted in Uganda.  We are persecuted in the United States.

And the irony is, people in BRITAIN — BRITAIN, for god’s sake — they see our individuality and our value as human beings, despite their country’s greater acceptance of our civil rights, as more important of attention than the people in power do in our own country.

If you are an American, Obama and the Democrats laugh at you.  Really, they do.  They issue trite speeches on your behalf, but have no intention of actually doing anything for you, or even in exchange for your vote.  In other words, they don’t treat you seriously .. this is the same, politically, as laughing at you, and Obama himself has mocked you, personally, for trying to hold him to account.

If you like being mocked, ridiculed, and taken advantage of, then carry on.

They see you as being so unimportant they won’t even count you.  Oh, yes, they argue about counting married couples and whether you should be included in that — but as individual GLBT people, worthy of being counted?  This is how meaningless your entire existence is to them.  And these are the people, putatively, who care about your civil rights more than anyone else in this country.

We have tried to exercise our influence within the existing big tents.  What I would argue is this is, has been, and continues to fail.

We need to go beyond political parties.  If out of extreme necessity if nothing else, we need to be a global union.  In so many words, whispered, a phantom — the beginnings of a NATION.

The people who mock, despise and ridicule you, at the same time, and in a very singlehandedly sinister fashion, not only want, but demand your vote, your donation and your work on behalf of their particular political agenda.

Call it a union, if you must.  If you will.  But we must join together.  We also must show the way.  The corporatists threaten to engulf us all.  The corporatists know no nation, no national boundaries, but they hope to control us all.

We have to band together for the common good.  We have very different political philosophies.  We are Republicans.  We are Democrats.  We are — as I am — Greens, and others.  And we are Chinese, Americans, Ugandans, but we all live on the good green planet earth.

And we are in the minority.  Our cultures have adopted a philosophy of despising us, as outcasting us, as ridiculing us — as lepers, until they need us.

But we are all GLBT people.

Anger and hate are very expensive.  Trust me, I know.  You will sit in your father’s house, the same father who wasn’t there for you, for 20 years, and listen to him say, I just don’t know how to live with a fag.

This is expensive.  It’s expensive for your ideal of yourself.  You want to think of yourself as more than a set of genitals, that wants genitals of the same type.

You will get angry.  You will remember telling your father, you have tunnel vision, and, in the end, dad, this will cost you.  Then, twenty or thirty years later, forgive — like flipping a switch.  Yet, remembering.

You will listen to your father tell you, 20 years later, he doesn’t remember using that word.  That word, that destroys everything you think of as yourself, as just another fag.  Not a son.

Twenty years later, you will tell your father, you welcome the chance to have a relationship with him, only now, his acknowledgement of you as his son must now be unequivocal.

Anger and hate are very expensive.  Sometimes, so expensive, you will and must at least be willing to sacrifice your only remaining parent on the alter of exigency.

Bloodless bigotry is also expensive.

It will cost you your college degree.  It will cost you your self respect.  It will cost you everything.

But, don’t be gay.  Don’t like people of the same plumbing as you, or it will cost you everything, and your dissatisfaction with that lack of self respect will cost you more.

You will stare into the blue eyes of your father, the eyes that are exactly the same as yours, who, twenty years ago, make it impossible for you to realize your dreams, and understand, it’s not about him.

In the end, it has to cost.  In the end, it will cost you fear, self loating, and self disrespect.

And then, it will still cost you more.

It will cost you understanding it wasn’t about him, or them, and nobody can make your choices for you, but you.  You will understand, that you have to hold the world up, not just for yourself but for everyone who comes in your place.

In the end, you will have to understand, nothing will change unless you make it hurt.  And, this hurting has to come without anger.  You will arrive in the place of the bloodless bigotry foisted upon you in the first place.  You will have to understand a life without mercy, that costs you everything, because your oppressors, although very diffenly minded, arrived at the very same place in a very different way, the way without cost, without blood, without loss, the way of callousness, the way of not understanding and not willing to live and let live.

Then, twenty years later, you will stare into the blue eyes of those who did unto you and hear them say, “I don’t remember.  I would never say that”.

This will cost, it will go on costing.  We will pay, and pay, and then pay some more.  And, you have to balance.  You have to listen to the blue eyes of the person who did this to you, and hear him say I don’t remember, I wouldn’t do this, I’m sorry you feel this.  You will have to own your anger.

And then you will have to find discipline.  You will have to learn to forgive, yet understand the cost.

In the end, you have to forgive, but you have to master fear.  The fear of that same loathing and lack of self respect that have been forced upon you for twenty years.  Your inner lion.

I’m going to repost a comment I made at Daily Kos from someone who just didn’t get it (at least, the perspective I am coming from as one gay man, less the entire LGBT community), and since certain much nicer thread of conversations have been had also at Docudharma this same fine day, I thought it would deserve a little reiteration:

I’ve stopped talking to people who are all about Obama at all (with yes this one exception) or organization based ideology based group politics as the primary driver.  

I have given up and come to the conclusion that you will do what you will do.  To me, your hearts (plural, not personal) are hard and it’s all about political support.

The past has shown us (that is, all us GLBT people) that political support, given freely, is ignored and taken for granted.  We give political support, we are ignored.  Bitch and we are lectured to as if we are children, told that we are whining and wanting a pony.

So, our hearts have to grow hard in turn.

If what is wanted to do is find a way to condescend to gay people and make them subservient to related but not necessarily consonant political demands, well, mission accomplished, but if that makes one feel good, I’ve concluded that people can do it without me.  It’s obnoxious, though.  It’s homophobic, and irritating enough to make some people give up and say, “whatever, go away”.  And I mean that as a phenomenon and as a syndrome.  

To dangle other issues and expected support for singular people and personalities and political parties like a carrot using openly suggested homophobia (like making things about an entire class of people in exchange for something else one wants), the price is too high.  For me, anyway.  I will not eat shit to please some person dangling a hallucinogenic carrot at me for a reward.  

If I need someone, that need is not high enough to make me cringe and say, “yes, ok, I’ll do whatever you want, just support us”.  Because it’s craven.

I’ll do without your support if that is the price — that I and every other member of a suspect class has to please you as the price.  I’ll stop talking to you totally.  And less this small exception, that’s exactly what I’ve done.  And I’d suggest every other gay person on God’s Green Planet Earth do the same.  We will make progress when we are no longer treated like children and rewarded with beads and trinkets.  

Just my general philosophy.  Not to say all or even most gay people agree, us being, you know, very different people.

Now, of course, I have to (as if I have to paint an obvious picture as if finger painting with colors) I’m not Clark.  Gay people are all different.

My question, especially to Democrats seeking political support from gay people, reframed and repackaged as exactly what you might say:

At what point does repeated, systemic insult become political imperative, even with so much that other liberals and GLBT people might have in the way of common cause?

The first, most important thing you have to understand about Starfleet is the Prime Directive.

Democrats have tried to pawn off failure as success.  But while this may work for a while, among people that you didn’t notify or who, in your rhetoric, don’t “understand enough” let me show you something I do understand.

I work in a tiny company of 4 people.  We have no option, I have to get my health insurance from the individual market.

Here are my health insurance bill for the last 3 months.  From Aetna, if you want to know.

The first bill, from january is $888.86.  Of which, they say, I paid $387.88.  I paid actually $400.00, not that you would know it from Aenta’s bill.  This was for coverage from 12/24/2009 through 3/1/2010.

The second bill (a month afterwards), February is $1456.23.  They say I paid $202.76.  In reality, due to an error with my monthly banking, I paid $312.00 (but not $202.76).  The bill is $1456.23.  This is for the period of 1/12/2010 through 4/1/2010.  

The third bill (a month after that) is $2175.13.  Of which they say I paid $389.64.  (I really paid $400).  This is for the period of 2/3/2010 through 6/1/2010.

In each of the above events, I have gotten a refund check saying I “overpaid”. Yet I am on final notice, and cancellation notice, for the following things.  

What I realize is that I have due to financial circumstances underpaid my bill for a while.  But this does not explain the variant inexplicable coverage periods or charges.  

I tried calling their billing department today, they say they don’t understand why my bill reflects payments that have no earthly comparison to the payments I made.

This is the same insurance company that has steadfastly refused, since the inception of my relationship with it, to pay ANY bills related to my health care.  And I have been with them for 10 years.

I have not paid attention to what is going on with them and their rate increases, true.  My bills are paid automatically and I have been busy.  Look at the increases, though.  They didn’t cancel my coverage, precisely, they just jacked up rates beyond imagination, for no identifiable reason, in an ever spiraling cascade of ridiculous bills and non-explicable references to payments not in the amount I made, coupled with refunds for no earthly reason, over a 3 month period.