Category: Politics

Posting On My Blog About Posting On My Blog About Me

I perceive that my writing energy, what of it there is, is being spent on correspondence. I wish this was not so, or that I was devoting more time to writing than I am. This is most apparent on Facebook, and to a lesser degree, on Twitter.

I think my twitter is super boring. I hate that I’ve let it become about leftist politics and the Democratic Primary horse race, which is already such a sh*t show that I can’t believe it. I really don’t like centrist Democrats. They’re so full of it.

The thing that’s annoying me the most is the seemingly successful smear job they’re doing on Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s get this straight: The candidate who is basing her campaign on the need to stop doing foreign regime change wars is, somehow, an imperialist. Also, someone with a 100% score from the HRC is a secret homophobe.

Got it.

And so it gets harder and harder to look at social media, because most of my friends are het up about politics, because politics is such a sh*t show right now, and because I’m also het up about politics, and sometimes I just don’t have the heart for it. I don’t even have the will to finish an argument when I start one. This stuff is BORING.

I’m sick of idiots, and I’m sick of the led-around-by-the-nose centrists who are bound to go fight for Biden Man (as I call him) when Biden Man is the latest example of the sort of Democratic pol who is, at heart, more responsible for Trompe (as I call him) than any other faction in the country, including his own base.

But I digress, egregiously.

I’m depressed, and therefore more distractible than usual, and the human race is draining me of hope right now. There are a couple of factors here. One is that I am feeling a bit rudderless about my writing, and less than productive. It’s hard to remember that I’ve done a couple of things since graduating, and that I can, if I choose to, keep the momentum going. I’m making that choice.

The other is that I am lonely and feeling spiritually dark. I’ve been embracing my inner goth. Winter is really hard for me, and it takes until around this time of year to get over it. So I think I have a one or two month window in which to be as productive as possible, then I have to start splitting time with the film fest I program for.

I have to start being very strategic with my time. I am picking projects I really want to do, and putting as much love into them as I can. That’s the way I know of to keep myself going. I need to be excited about what I’m working on. That’s why the write-every-day experiment that I tried earlier this spring failed so badly — I had to force myself to the computer every day, and that sort of thing just will not work with me. It’s a problem, but it’s the truth.

Some Thoughts In the Wake of This Week’s Election

Results of Tuesday’s election were not conclusive enough for anyone to feel particularly triumphant, nor entirely defeated. We must move past “us” and “them” if we are to move forward as a country. How do we do that?

While it may not have been a resounding victory for either of the country’s two major political “tribes,” I consider the 2018 election to be about as positive a result as we could have hoped for. We remain a deeply divided country. The election results reflect that. Any result that went farther in one direction or the other would have been seen by the other side as unjust.

Even so, the current status quo satisfies no one. Both of our major ideological camps suffer from groupthink and blind spots, and both sides view the other as not dealing with reality. I see that both sides use critical thinking, but selectively: only to question the opposition’s narrative, never the one they subscribe to.

President Trump manufactures a constant string of lies (6420 untruths documented in his first 649 days as President.) He uses anti-press rhetoric as a smoke screen. It’s a strategy that’s proven effective with those that already agree with him. Trump does have a point about the press, yet completely obliterates it with his deliberate lying. Still, the mainstream press is not innocent, and is subject to the wishes and demands of its corporate ownership.

The charge “fake news!” resonates because there’s some validity to it. The media exhibits pro-corporate bias, constantly offers up false equivalencies, oversimplifies complex issues, and ignores important stories that contradict the accepted narrative the media is at pains to keep intact. Over the years, the press has done enough damage to its own credibility that the president’s protests fall on some sympathetic ears, even though he sources much of his information from a television news outlet that falsifies information more than almost any other.

Not that the competing opposite-partisan cable news outlet fares all that much better when fact-checked.

No wonder trust in the news media is so low. Yet those who consume news invariably choose sources that confirm their biases rather than posting the complicated and sometimes even contradictory truth. The cost of this is as we see: a democracy that functions less and less well, and a population that increasingly fails to realize that we are all in the same leaky boat.

We shut each other out when we should be listening most intently to the voices we disagree with. We decide that those who can’t even accept what we know are facts are just not worth talking to. Without the ability to reason with each other, we subject those we disagree with to dehumanizing ad hominem assumptions. The only response we see as valid in these circumstances is force. We have to win our victories at the polls, and when we don’t win there, we don’t accept defeat, we just become more bitterly entrenched, because they won’t see what we maintain is simple common sense. How can anything but tragedy result?

My suggestion is that we try something new… well, actually old, as old as the age of reason, as old as Socrates, as old as the Buddha. Let’s try dialogue. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s look for the ways we agree rather than the ways our position is superior to those we disagree with.

Dialogue begins with humility and compassion: two things sorely lacking in our current environment, and which we desperately need to cultivate. It’s important to understand that dialogue isn’t surrender, it isn’t weakness. Dialogue actually requires great personal strength and integrity, along with a willingness to be vulnerable. Dialogue has a lot in common with love. You could say that it’s a way of loving humanity, because it seeks uplift in a dynamic way, as opposed to debate, which seeks to declare a winner and a loser.

I think we’ve had enough of picking winners at others’ expense.

Election Jitters 2018

A meditation

As a transgender person and a Green, I’m viewing the trends in US culture and politics with increasing concern. In the days leading up to next week’s election, I monitor polling at FiveThirtyEight and elsewhere, looking for signs of what’s to come.

That FiveThirtyEight was less than accurate in the 2016 election cycle means that  I can’t trust what I see in those maps and charts. I honestly have no idea what this country will wake up to this coming Wednesday morning. Like many of my friends, I can neither look away nor stop fretting about it. It’s difficult not to feel that the future of this country — that my own future — hangs in the balance.

My hunch is that things are going to go a little better than expected for the left. I’ve seen signs that point in other directions: I also recognize that living in Massachusetts puts me in a liberal bubble; things in Texas or Indiana may fail to conform to my expectations. The polling aggregators show the conventional wisdom, that the Democratic party will retake the House of Representatives, but that the Senate is most likely to continue in Republican hands. That’s not the best of all possible worlds, but it would at least slow down the rapid slide towards fascism the country may currently be in.

Many of the more vulnerable folks in this country won’t fare well, even under the stasis of a partial Democratic victory, but the status quo is better in the short run than the regression towards darkness that I fear. The problem is that the status quo is not nearly good enough. Protecting and uplifting our most vulnerable citizens will still not be done as it should given the best possible results of Tuesday’s vote.

I have a sneaking hope that the Democrats will take back control of the Senate as well as the House, because the effects of recent events may not be showing up yet in current polling. There is some Republican backlash against the Trump contingent, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the establishment media overemphasizes this.

Should the Republican Party maintain control of all branches of government as a result of Tuesday’s election, I fear that some Americans may not be safe. There have been threats made, and recent events have underlined those threats: for instance the MAGAbomber attacks on prominent Trump critics and two racially-motivated mass shootings, all in the last week. Trump himself has said that there will be violence if the Democrats should fare well instead, though he falsely claims that leftists will instigate it.

I’m trying to keep my optimism, and hoping we all find our way past the delusional tendencies of these times. May the country move towards justice come Tuesday.

I Need You to Vote Yes on 3

An appeal to voters to respect the human rights of transgender people in Massachusetts by voting yes on Question 3 in the upcoming state election on Tues. Nov. 6, 2018.

In just under three weeks, voters in Massachusetts are going to undertake an enormous responsibility. You who share this state with me will be deciding whether I, as a transgender person, and those like me, are going to be subjected to legal banishment from public spaces or whether we are going to be allowed to remain equal citizens before the law.

I feel fairly confident that the people in my state will make the right decision. Freedom For All Massachusetts has out-raised its opponents by about an 8 to 1 margin. Recent polling suggests that roughly 3/4ths of voters in this state are planning to vote yes on Question #3, but are confused about what their yes vote might mean.

The Secretary of State’s internet page with summaries of the ballot questions as they will appear on the ballot provides the simplest explanation of the measure’e effects:

“A YES VOTE would keep in place the current law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity in places of public accommodation.

“A NO VOTE would repeal this provision of the public accommodation law.”

So, yes: this is Massachusetts’ “bathroom bill”, and it’s what I’ve come to expect from the good people of this state — a resounding “hell yes!” and a bracing hug to those of us who need this kind protection under the law, because even here, unfortunately, there are those who consider me a threat. Fortunately, I know that for the most part the people of this state have my back.

Even so, we can’t take a victory for granted. Throwing money at a campaign does not guarantee a victory at the polls. Strongly positive poll numbers can dissipate, or may be inaccurate. So I’m making this plea.

Please vote YES on Question #3. Help this state continue to be one of the safest places in the world for people like me. Understand that a loss on this referendum will create a backlash domino effect that will have repercussions against trans folk in places far distant from this state.

Massachusetts has, and has always had, an orientation towards justice and the power of moral leadership. Remember that same-sex marriage, which began here in 2004 with Goodridge v. Department of Public Health culminated in the Supreme Court of the United States echoing Goodridge with their decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, declaring that same sex marriage is guaranteed by the 14th amendment to the US Constitution. Question #3 is no different. If the electorate of this state ratifies it, the justice it represents will resound throughout the nation for trans people everywhere.

For all of us who have so much at stake, make your way to the polls this November 6th and, along with all of the other ways in which we must repudiate the encroaching of fear, suspicion, and bigotry that is so starkly and startlingly on the rise in this country, add your vote to the rolls of those who stand with us, to defend our humanity and our right to be safe in public spaces.

Thank you.

Goodbye, Roseanne.

The value of the Roseanne Connor character was the other side of the double edge that got her fired: frankness, a willingness to put her ideas out there, regardless of possible consequences. There’s bravery in that, and the risk factor made for good comedy, most of the time. The show Roseanne also felt essential in this time as an avenue for the dialog that we have long since stopped even attempting to have as a nation.

I have family who are like her — the character and the flesh and blood woman — in some ways. Though most people who might happen across this post might not agree with me, I think this culture lost an important opportunity today, a chance to dialog across this widening chasm between those of us on the left and those on the right. The point of the show was to look beyond the ideological stances that divide us so sharply and remind ourselves that even though we disagree, we can at least try to see each other as people: as family.

Still, what Roseanne was fired for, she absolutely should have been fired for. It was a gross betrayal of the very thing that was most crucially valuable about Roseanne. There’s nothing defensible about the things she put in that tweet. Those remarks were personally directed and indefensibly mean-spirited. They were uncalled for and bore no constructive value. In fact, quite the opposite was true: they were meant to wound and they betrayed an attitude of dehumanization and cruelty. Their ilk has been with us for centuries, and there is nothing to be said in response to them. One can only dismiss as irredeemable the person who would invoke those ideas at this point in history.

On the other hand, Roseanne has said harsh things about trans people. Those comments about bathrooms and trans folk still need to be addressed whenever possible, because public cognizance of us as normal, productive, well-adjusted members of society is new — not the truth of them, but the currency of them in our society. I hate to hear the sorts of things those who hate us say, but I would rather those things get said out loud than thought and not said, because I can’t respond to hateful, wrong ideas about who I am, about my experience, if I never hear them stated. If ideas like that can’t be said in the public sphere, people will only transmit that hate among the like-minded, in private. If somebody is hiding what they think of people like me for fear of the consequences of speaking their minds out loud, that’s far more dangerous for me.

I’m reminded of sitting with family recently, after my transition, an uncomfortable and impenetrable silence between us. Those people no longer talk to me. If only someone — either my cousins, or my aunt, or, for that matter, if I — had spoken up, said what we were thinking, maybe we could have found a way to still be talking, even across the divide and disagreement we would still both have between us, rather than the huge, resounding silence that is all we share now.

This November, my state (Massachusetts) is going to vote on my right to exist via a ballot initiative. I would very much rather have the conversation about who I am and whether I am a danger or not, as painful and frustrating as it is, than to have to worry about what’s going to happen with people who think one way and talk another. It’s the way they think that will determine what happens when they vote, not what they’re willing to say when I’m in earshot.

Roseanne was the one TV show making the attempt to conduct some sort of dialog between conservatives and progressives, on issues that are, frankly, life or death for many. It was rightly cancelled due to the words of its star. Unfortunately, I fear that the failure of this lone attempt at having a conversation is a sign that it’s already too late for us to find our way to be one national family again.