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Pony: over the shoulder
2.27.2004
Things I have learned while reading over people's shoulders on the streetcar this morning.
Anais Ninn gets quoted often in self-help books for woman, especially this one that urges women to get out of the box:
"finally, it became more painful to contemplate remaining a bud than allowing oneself to bloom".
Oh, Anais. So flowery.
A few days ago, I read about four pages of Michael Moore's Dude ect. over a tweed blazer shoulder on the streetcar betweem Ossington and University. Under a few rules about republicans:
They are afraid of things they don't understand. That fear becomes hate.
That is an overly-tidy way, perhaps, of explaining the bizarre gay marriage opposition. You can imagine they have never met a loving gay couple. If they have never encountered it, they don't understand it. and so on...Clearly easier-to-grasp able issues like child poverty don't resonate as much as the ones those they don't "get".
But this is all so obvious. I don't want to harp on the gay marriage issue, because -not to devalue the cause- it has become a red herring around election time, distracting both sides from focusing on the invasive, liberty-snatching, debt-racking, media-manipulating,lying, cronyist boys'- club of a government that, if we are going to speak religiously, seems hell bent on hastening their own nation's apocalypse.
I believe that denying gays the right to marry will become as unthinkable as banning black people from pro baseball. Or women from voting.
At my university, there was always this bathroom graffiti that slagged feminists. It is the only time when I actually took issue with my sharpie and wrote back. I explained once that "feminist" probably evolved as a term when "humanist" was not adequately addressing women. How if it wasn't for that shrill, tenacious, seemingly humourless quality we decry in activists (or feminists or environmentalists...), we wouldn't be able attend university. That we internalize those changes so quickly, that within one generation, we are dissing the people who gave us those freedoms.
I don't know who will be the next president, but I hope that the next generation will be carefree and comfortable in their freedoms,and look back at the bush regime as a bad dream, with the luxury of rolling their eyes at the shrill tones.
