Category: Philosophy

Saturday speed blogging… reading… after almost finishing up with my morning chores and getting the old man out the door to a gig, I sat down to see if I could catch up with whatever I’ve missed the last few days. Not counting the “disputed” Iran vote, Palin vs Letterman, and countless other (often pointless) headline grabbers.

Cant take it. Hit a wall.

Please go read  Worthington, who is close to sainthood, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, you can follow my crumbs.

Also last night or today, read DD’s best… Winter Rabbit, Robyn, NightProwlKitty, and everybody else, as much as I can. 🙂

So I was trying to spend the first part of the week continuing with a a fictional story I have been working on.  Wall.  There was this realization that to really do the story justice, I needed to write a whole historical background for a people who had none.

Big wall.  Immense wall.

Then I had a rather severe allergy attack.  Putting the two of those together left me in a panic because Friday was fast approaching and I had nothing for the column.

But I was saved, sort of.  Chaz Bono came out.  That may seem a bit weird, being as how not long ago Bono was Director of Entertainment Media for GLAAD.  But there are different kinds of coming out:    

The WeaveMothers watched the train switch to the happentrack which they had just finished.  The transition was as smooth as ever it could be.  

The Engineer guided some steam through the whistle.

And the Storyteller began the tail of the Girl and the Five Fears.

Note: I repost this every now and then – it was my first essay here at DD nearly two years ago and was originally posted at Talkleft in 2006. With so many new people here lately I thought it’s time to post it again, this time with some new additions at the end of it…

In the nineteen sixties and seventies the western world was in the throes of a cultural and psychological revolution of awareness that at times threatened to bring down the governments and destroy the societies of some of the most powerful countries on earth, and terrified many who were unable to step outside of the structure and limitations of the worldviews they had constructed for themselves in the course of their lives.

Questioning cultural norms and prejudices and searching for alternatives that better respected and valued human beings and their relationship with the larger society and with the natural world as the basis and reason for societies actions and existence rather than society and the state and the status quo as the determining factors of how people should interact with each other, were the drivers behind this revolution.

The insecurity of many in the face of insistent and deep questioning that in a religious context would have been labeled blasphemy and heresy caused knee-jerk fear reactions that in many arenas turned into violent confrontations, particularly but not only race riots and countless smaller horrors of the racial Civil Rights Movement, and in the struggle for equality under law and social systems of  more than half the population in the Gay and the Women's Liberation Movements, and what was often termed a Sexual Revolution, all of which had been percolating and growing for many years and all of which naturally contributed to making up the more encompassing psychological or awareness heightening Cultural Revolution of the times.

Noted philosopher Alan Watts in the nineteen sixties in “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” described our situation, our human condition, this way:

I can’t say it has been a top of the line week.  Given that last week included the death of the faculty colleague I work most closely with, one might have expected this week to have little direction to go but up.  But one apparently would would have been wrong about that.

Of course leading off with Memorial Day weekend was a giant indication the week wasn’t going to be a whole lot of fun.  Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ramps up for veterans, whether the public is supposedly honoring the live ones or the dead ones.  As a former draft dodger who was arrested by the FBI and forced to serve as an alternative to spending five years in the Oklahoma State Pen, I’m not terribly proud of my service…but I did the best I could while I was there.

Irony is one of the things the military does best.  What better MOS for a draft dodger than military police.  There was method in the madness, however, since at the time, Nixon had told the public that draftees would not be made into combat troops and combat troops would be brought home from Nam.  What he failed to mention was that MPs were not combat troops, that the combat troops would be replaced by MPs and the draftees would be trained as, you guessed it, MPs.

I spent yesterday sitting in the too hot sun during Commencement at Bloomfield College, a little north of Newark, New Jersey.  I was also searching my mind for something to write about this afternoon, which had been pretty much a wash since the shocking death of a colleague on Tuesday.

Jane Cheng had been my discipline coordinator since I started working here in 2000.  It was she who had convinced me to apply for a tenure-track position here in 2001, even though it was not in my field.  As I kept telling everyone, I was a mathematician and new very little about programming languages.  But Jane had faith that I could teach myself enough to be an effective teacher in this area.  She and the academic dean, Ilona Anderson, whose retirement takes effect at the end of this month, had faith in me.  So I have felt more than a little bit adrift.

But stuff happened at Commencement that spurred an idea.  And other stuff happened today to broaden that idea.

Maybe it is not too far astray.    

The current issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel takes the extradition of the Ukrainian concentration camp guard John (formerly Ivan) Demyanyuk from the US to face trial in Germany as an occasion to look at the support the Nazi holocaust policy received in their occupied territories (in English).

The article is at pains to not deflect from the fact that the Holocaust was a policy invented by Germany and Germans and implemented by Germany and Germans – but there can also be no doubt that, without active help from institutions and inhabitants of the occupied territories, the Holocaust’s breadth, scope and sheer efficiency would have been much diminished.

I’m tired…in more ways than one.  The end of a long academic year contributes a great deal to that.  Recent illness certainly has added to it.  And just being old certainly has to be acknowledged.

But nothing seems to do more than having fruitless conversations with people who just don’t get it.

It’s really old and extremely tiring to have people say things to our political detriment and then say that if we complain, we are overly sensitive.  It’s frustrating to have to ask people not to use our identity as a weapon, with the assumption that accusing someone of being one of us is degrading to that person.  It’s depressing to have our identity used as the basis of unfunny jokes…and then be told, should we ask that it not be done, that we have no sense of humor.

So tired.

I even ended up too tired to write much about all that.  Too tired and not in the mood for more idiots who wants to defend their behavior.

So instead of doing so, I looked for some GLBT news.  I found some of the good variety and some of the bad.  The world changes slowly…oh, so very slowly.

As some of you have probably heard, I’ve been fairly ill for the past week.  I’ll include an update about that at the end of this piece.

But being ill…and it being the end of finals week, I had a difficult time generating a brand new topic.  Where are Bob and Doug when you need them?

So…like Felix…I reached into my bag of tricks and searched around for something to put together for tonight, even if it had to be somewhat hastily.

I remembered that I took some photographs at the end of the April, of the Bloomfield College 2009 observation of the Clothesline Project.

I wandered into a diary the other day, written by someone from New Hampshire who disapproved of gay marriage.  He calls himself a “Libertarian-leaning conservative,” which in his case apparently means that he is in favor of personal liberties, except for GLBT people.

I’ve experienced the very definition of mixed feelings about the news out of New Hampshire the past week.  I think it was fabulous that the state senate voted 13-11 in favor of marriage equality.  After reconciliation between the two houses, New Hampshire-style, it will be up to their governor to either veto it or not.

So that was a huge positive.  Most people missed the negative.  Totally missed it.

The same day it passed the marriage equality bill, this august body rejected equal protection under the law for transgender people by a vote of 24-0.

Yes, you see that correctly:  24-0.  Not even the bills sponsor’s voted for it.

You may have heard about it by now.  Or maybe not.  There haven’t exactly been that many news stories about it.

On Wednesday, April 22, Allen Andrade was convicted of the bias crime murder of Angie Zapata, which occurred in July of last year, as well as the theft of a car and a credit card.  He received the mandatory sentence of life without parole.

I wrote about the trial last week, while it was still going on.  You can read that here if you are so inclined.

I wish I could say I felt some degree of satisfaction about this.  But I don’t.  Surrounding the trial has been so much lack of communication and absence of understanding that I feel like going into my room and never emerging again.

Non-transsexual people are, in some cases, trying to be helpful with what they are trying to share.  Most often what I have read has fallen short of that mark.