California: from summer of love to fear of love

When the great Tao is forgotten,
goodness and piety appear.
When the body’s intelligence declines,
cleverness and knowledge step forth.
When there is no peace in the family,
filial piety begins.
When the country falls into chaos,
patriotism is born.

Tao te Ching
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“OH MY GOD! A faggot touched my lawn! Somebody call the swat team!”

I actually screamed that from my balcony in October, 2008 to mock my neighbors who called the police in response to the theft of their pro-Proposition 8 sign by a kid. Being a left-wing pinko nut myself, I laughed and cheered as he ran up to their property, deftly leaped their conservative little picket fence, and ran off with their propaganda material.

I don’t think my neighbors like me much.

“The liberals are coming! The liberals are coming! Everybody take cover!!!”

The police, who actually showed up and stayed to guard the property against this dangerous criminal, didn’t appreciate my contributions either.

About 15 minutes after the police arrived, our law enforcement helicopter took to the sky, hunting down this dangerous rabble-rouser. The perp couldn’t have been more than 17-18 years old, but apparently in Conservative Christian California nothing short of a full armed response would do. I kept expecting to see the National Guard march down the street in riot gear.

The sight of a multi-million dollar helicopter circling the skies above our placid little beach town was too much for my logical sensibilities to handle. I made a call to the police. I asked them to please explain to me why my tax dollars were going to support a manhunt complete with aircraft to catch someone in the act of what really amounted to a childhood prank. The woman at the desk mumbled something about potential for violence in these situations (???) and said that the resources were available, so… I could actually hear her shrug with apathy.

That night, these signs went up on my 2nd story deck, where they could be clearly viewed by my neighbors.

Later I found out through http://eightmaps.com that those same  neighbors had donated $10,000 to the “yes on 8” campaign. Ten. Thousand. Dollars.

That’s a lot of personal hate. Wouldn’t that kind of money be better spent on therapy?

Human Rights are only for those that think like me…

When it came time to vote, I was shocked to see these words on the ballot under the proposition description:

“Eliminates the rights….”

Hoodewha?

How could any sane American in the 21st century click “yes” next to anything that starts with the words “eliminates the rights?” I don’t care what you think about homosexuality and marriage or whether or not you’re afraid of butt sex and how its existence might tear apart the fabric of society; it was unfathomable to me that any human being could click “yes” after seeing those words.

And yet they did. 52.5% of them. They saw a chance to take away human rights from a group of people whose crime is wanting to love one another. Victory for the baby Jesus.

Even here in hyper-conservative Orange County, protestors came out in droves. My husband and I carried 5 foot signs saying things like “Recent Polls indicate there is a 52.5% chance that you are a BIGOT.” Most of our resident gays were much more peaceful, carrying rainbow flags and messages of love and hope. It was us Straight Against H8 folks who were flying flags of anger, calling upon our inner 1970s child to rage against the Man.

But for all the marches, protests, and public outrage, so far we are still the state that eliminated human rights. California. The same state that successfully shot down the Briggs Initiative in 1978 has wandered backwards in time to become a stronghold of prejudice, fear, and hate.

Will California be the last?

I read this morning that Connecticut finally ended its battle late Wednesday, passing a bill to update their state laws to allow for gay marriage. They will now be the fourth state to do so, after Massachusetts, Vermont, and Iowa.

IOWA?  Yes. Corn-eating, truck-driving farmers are now more progressive than the state that hosted the Summer of Love. Every Californian should hang their head in shame. We should be leading the charge towards civil liberties, and yet we’re an anchor dragging in the beds of oppression. Shame on us.

Now we have Miss California, Carrie Prejean, proclaiming during the Miss USA pageant that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. She later defended her words by saying “God was testing my faith.”  Her faith in what? Massive stupidity? Ms. Prejean, a very public representative of our state, is proudly giving our message of intolerance and prejudice to the world. And the world is listening.

Our legacy

In the future, history books will contain the records of this battle right alongside the stories of racial freedom and gender equality. California’s shame will be preserved for eternity, causing students to shake their heads and cluck their tongues. They will try to fathom the minds of those who could vote in such a way, just as they try to understand those who could support apartheid, slavery, discrimination, and McCarthyism.

My parents’ generation is famous for a worldwide revolution of love, peace, and acceptance. My generation will be famous for hatred.

I’m so proud.

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Romance of the Mundane

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Tao te Ching

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When it comes to romance, tightie whities and a toothbrush outweigh flowers and candy every time.

When my husband and I first entered into cohabitational bliss he traveled a lot. One thursday night I came home from work to find a message from him on the machine.

“You may not get it, but this is a very romantic message. Can you remember to take the trash to the curb tomorrow morning?”

Had we already been together for a number of years, I might have puzzled over why the hell he thought trash was remotely romantic. But fortunately, these were the early, chemistry days. The time in the relationship where the sound of his voice still makes your heart flutter and all the smarmy songs on AM radio finally make sense. My endorphin-addled mind understood the inherent romance immediately.

I swooned. And in an instant, my life changed forever. This was the secret to true love.

Taking out the trash. Putting away dishes. Folding laundry. Feeding the cats.  These are the moments of a life shared. When you brush your teeth and look in the mirror and there are two faces instead of one. Breathing in rhythm as you sleep. Chuckling together along with the canned laughter on TV. Things that you used to do alone, and now do in harmony (or counterpoint, or even beautiful dissonance) with someone else.

I think many of us keep wanting to recreate those feelings by repeating the “romantic” experiences of those early twitterpation days. We want moonlit dinners and walks on the beach and flowers delivered. And when Barbara Streisand wails “you don’t bring me flowers any mooooore,” we cry along with her at our failure to make love last. We put pressure on ourselves and our partners to invent creative and elaborate romantic moments. And along the way, we set ourselves and them up for failure and disappointment.

Of course we fail. We’re trying to create a fiction. We want to run across the heather-covered moors into the arms of the Lord of the Manor. Bah. What insipid nonsense! I prefer gazing through my half-lidded eyes at my lover as he pulls on his ridiculous old man underwear in the morning. If you haven’t seen that, you don’t know romance.

In the days after my beloved asked me to take out the garbage, I meditated on the meaning of romance. I made a firm resolution to remember the wonder I felt seeing all the potential vistas for lasting love opening up before me. And I decided to hold fast to that concept.

As I meditated, I realized that this newfound joy in the mundanity of every day life wasn’t limited to my partnership. What if I could take each of the tasks that seemed trivial and repetitive and find in them the moments of a life LIVED? Why spend more than half my life waiting for the weekend when every Tuesday morning brought with it the potential to exist in joy? So much life wasted trying to slog through the practical and get to the fun, when the fun was with me each time I drew breath. It is only a matter of redefining “fun.”

These days I do my best to notice the taste of coffee in the morning. I find music in the sounds of the gardeners keeping the neighborhood manicured and blooming. I appreciate the feel of the hot water on my hands as I rinse the dishes, grateful that I can feel and stand and work. I drive my daughter to school and welcome time spent with her in silence (or more likely the pounding sounds of her music coming from the radio), knowing that these moments will soon pass and relishing that they are still here. I create schedules and project plans and follow up on endless details for my work, enjoying the gift of a mind that can concentrate and organize and plan. Pulling a tomato from the vine, gathering basil leaves, and using the food I’ve grown to prepare a meal for my family takes on a spiritual significance so profound that I am sometimes overcome to the point of tears.

But best of all are the moments in the day when my hand brushes against my husband’s as we work in the kitchen, or I hear him laugh, or I can sit beside him and share a meal. My heart leaps at the romance of it all. The moments of a life shared.

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