Category: Philosophy

i am left with this one question: who are we?

cattle? feudal serfs? indentured servants? are we trapped? who’s in charge, anyway?

i only realize now that the real turn in my political perception happened after the Nov 2005 elections, when Democrats regained a slim majority in Congress. when i expected everything to happen. accountability. push-back at FISA, the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act, more oversight of the captains of industry and financial markets. i really thought, listening to the likes of Henry Waxman that the sane people, once again, had some meaningful influence over politics and policies.

what slowly began to dawn on me was that the people i thought would work to restore our country had sabotaging us all along.

so when i read Cheney on Wiretapping: “Congress said we could”

Cheney Rats Out Dem Leadership as His Co-Conspirators

By the end of the night we are expecting 5 to 7 inches of snow with a quarter of an inch of ice on top.  And my sinus is roaring in protest.  So the best I can do here is hope for something resembling coherence.

This morning there was a request by jlms qkw that we share A Few of our Favorite Things:

My favorite things are freedom from tyranny, especially the tyranny of the majority, the freedom to be Other, the liberty to be happy and at peace with myself.

But my most favorite thing is the ability to speak up for others who have not been as fortunate as I.

There are a lot of people who are less fortunate than I.  I cannot stand idly by while they don’t have the freedoms I have.

So I use the only weapon to fight for them that I have, which are my words.

Come on in and sit by the fireplace awhile.

So many things I could be writing about…but the entire week has seemed to conspire to draw me back into discussions I’d rather walk away from.  But I don’t, I guess because I hope that maybe one or two people out there might learn something.  I largely come away with a feeling of disappointment, but that disappointment would be directed at myself if I didn’t at least make the effort.

So I guess I’ll spill it all here and try to knit together a point out of the whole.

In Feminisms the other night, there was a discussion about women choosing to have labioplasties.  The column lambasted the women who would make such a choice as being tools of the patriarchy, I guess, or victims of it, and went on to deplore the procedure as abetting the practice of female genital mutilation.

I was astounded.  I mean, what kind of hypocrite would I have to be to speak against women choosing to have a procedure performed which I have undergone myself?

The semester stumbles toward a conclusion and I with it.  So creativity for today was severely inhibited.  But what is a person who has the onus of a weekly column to do?

My particular solution was to use whatever talent I have at arrangement to assemble some parables from various sources.

If there is a spiritual component to this, so be it.

An effort to reform society which is not coupled with an equal effort to develop one’s spiritual self cannot bring about lasting results. It is like trying to cool a pot of boiling soup by merely stirring it, while ignoring the blazing fuel underneath.

—Parable 14, Thus Have I Heard:  Buddhist parables and stories

(An open series for reflecting on, and overcoming obstacles on the path to finding a World Solution that works.)

This is the first barrier. We are one, but not one, in that our ways are myriad.

Each society has differences, cultural norms of behavior, religious based rules, and laws that may address either equitably or unfairly.

We, as Americans, tend to see all these variations through the glass darkly when they do not align with our biased Western perspective.

I believe the largest obstacle is how to allow the greatest autonomy in cultural preservation and freedom while trying to prohibit abuse of any persons individually.

The answer, in my opinion cannot be raising McDonald’s in the shadow of temples world wide, and demanding homogenization to a Western template.

The collective consciousness of the WeaveMothers sensed the impending change of gears of the Celestial Steam Locomotive.

The train approached a long uphill grade of the current happentrack.  The Engineer engaged the lever of night.  The passenger continued sleeping.  The listener fell into a trance.  And the storyteller dreamed for them all.

It was a tale of life on the borderland, of the place which was on neither this side nor the other side of the rainbow.

The WeaveMothers have appeared before.  In what passes for chronological order, they are here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Having ready Michael Greatrex Coney’s, Song of Earth is also helpful.  Or you could just relax and accept the possibility of the Celestial Steam Locomotive passing through the Greataway.

Crossposted at http://StephenJGallagher.blogs…

An obscure internet radio station  led me to American symphonic composer Gloria Coates, creator of some of the  most relentlessly bleak music I’ve ever experienced.  On the amazon.com page for one of her symphonies I saw a “listmania” item on the left side of the page. This is a user-produced  feature of  Amazon, sort of “If you like this, you’re gonna love the items on my list!” It was the title of  the list that got the hook in me and kept gnawing away at me for  the next several months.

I started out hoping to write about scarcity.  Specifically I was hoping to write about the scarcity of fairness and equality that to many people think exists, as if we can’t be fair to everyone and that it is necessary that some people have to have inferior rights in order for others to feel superior.

I wanted to write about just why that must be so…because I don’t think it does.

But I can’t get this exchange out of my head:

I’m a transwoman.

I have a rather large adams apple.  Am I not a woman in your opinion?

nope.

That was from a woman who thinks she’s more deserving of respect than I am, simply because she was born female.

And this came from a gay guy:

I got it

Code Pink has trannie members too so it’s not all women.

And people recced that comment.  I can only assume that’s because they agreed.

So I’m stuck writing something probably only for myself and a very small audience:  those who I believe could benefit from reading it will not.  Or maybe I should put that this way:  those whose reading it would benefit transfolk are unlikely to read it.  That is pretty much the nature of intentional ignorance.

It’s an old argument.  Old as the hills.  Older than some kinds of dirt.  But then, so am I.

The thinking goes like this:

Nobody could disagree with that.  Surely I don’t.  But as someone who taught logic for a quarter century, I am all too aware of human frailty in this matter.  Some people read that as having the implication that it would not be wrong to discriminate against someone because of what they did choose.

There’s the culprit:  thinking that it is okay to discriminate against people.

Cross posted from WWL

Its pathetic when I start to think of 2000-2008 as halcyon days. Remember when all we could focus on is getting rid of the Bushites? We were united, man.

Predictably, I see the Left splintering, like children who, now that the evil stepmother has been banished argue about who gets the biggest piece of candy and who gets theirs first.

Not even a moment of awe at America electing a man of color, we cynically start complaining immediately about his lacks both real and perceived.

Imagine, if you can, had McCain won, how we would be acting, what would we be saying, if you would be renewing your passports…  as he announced he was keeping Bush’s whole cabinet intact.

Rahm Emanuel has a lot of panties in a bunch, but hear me out, please.

In four states there were referenda about whether we GLBT people deserved to be treated equally with other humans…and the answer we received is that we did not.

We should be planning a way forward instead of casting the endless supply of recriminations, searching who to blame.  But people expect to see blame, so they usually miss the opportunities to look for that path forward.

ENDA, fairness in housing and public accommodations, and hate crimes protection are much more important, if only because they would benefit all GLBT people, not just the ones in relationships.  In my two decades of working on these issues, we have not made substantial progress.  It’s too easy to write these issues off as GLBT issues and tell us to wait until there is a better time.

And so we wait.  And we wait.  Just like we waited last year and the year before that and the year before that and every year I can remember since I came out.  And even before that.

Maybe while we are waiting, something could be done.