Why it Matters

This is a guest post from Randy.   As most people here already know Randy is someone I admire greatly.  Randy is my online brother and a member of our family.   Randy is smart, funny, caring, kind, willing to reach out a hand to those in need while also willing to stand up to protect others.   Randy is the kind of guy who if he knew a co-worker had no other way to get to a much needed job during a snow storm he would get up out of his warm bed and go take them to work.   And not ask any for doing it.   I have asked Randy if he would be a guest author as he has time.  He has delighted me with the first two posts of what I hope will be many more.    Thank you my brother, Hugs.

Why it Matters

In this era of Blue Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, even All Lives Matter, the defining characteristic is that the authors, the progenitors of the movement, are trying to indicate to the public that there are folks who do not see the lives of some persons either being in jeopardy, being disenfranchised, being set upon as a second class, being abused.  The irreparable loses for some came too early, like the Native Americans, and for others they somehow bought in to the larger idea, others still labor under a “lesser than” status that evidences in odd circumstances when people need someone to blame.

It is easy to use extremes to make points in writing, so I’ll use one now.  In the late 1930’s an individual rose to power who realized that it was far far easier to capture the public’s anger and fear through hate and destructive rhetoric.  Hate is bred from fear, and Germany recovering from WW1 was reeling through poverty, inflation, low productivity, and a miasma from losing a war.  This individual captured that fear with not only an ideal he espoused upon the country but a scapegoat: otherwise said is “this is the ideal, but these are the people for whom to blame for our lot.”  It should be noted that an erstwhile general failure in his other pursuits, this individual honed a craft of speaking what people begged to hear in a manner that was convincing enough to overpower the very voice of decency within them.

What did that individual do?  He convinced people that it was ok to place a mark of second class on another human being.  He convinced people that they should be “segregated” for the good of the countrymen.  In time, it went from a fringe movement to the government’s position, and men, women, children were rounded up and “quarantined” for the safety of the citizenry.  Some bought into this with a passion, others were put into a position of placing their own lives in peril to not go through with this new government program as their neighbors were taken, were abused, disenfranchised and even killed. Only a sociopath would look upon the truth of this matter with anything but horror, but it’s amazing what people can justify to themselves when their own comfort is on the line, when their own well-being is on the line.  That individual, after committing war upon his own land, went on to view people in other countries as “lesser than”, as not worthy of existence as neighbors, and went to war with them.  The irony learned by the very public this individual used and then abandoned in his bid for power is that they were now only worse off after his blame-game and were forced to face what had been done in their name.

So, why is that relevant today?  Anytime, Anytime, Every time we accept a person to be cast as a second-class citizen for no other reason than their very being, we lose.  We lost when we decided that Native American Cultures were lesser than.  We lost when we decided that African lives, African American lives were lesser than.  We lost when we decided that whoever was in power at the moment, however that power was expressed- be it by government, wealth, violence- was the correct arbitrator of a person’s worth as a citizen.

This blog clearly speaks up for those who have felt the abuse of those in power due to their being gay, being trans, being somehow different.  Some have looked upon this championing as an acceptable forum for conversation and determination of another’s rights and status when said persons  have harmed no one and sought only to be genuine to themselves.  The false definition of reality seems a favorite of those who seek to justify abuse, and let it be understood that abuse of power is what it is!  I see no debate as warranted or even allowed when we seek to determine how another person defines himself.  That is their business, and though we may find it uncomfortable for ourselves we have no right to dictate to another who he or she or they express themselves.

I would like to harken back to the very extreme example used earlier in this writing:  Declaring a person to be lower class and unworthy of their own personhood, their liberty, is not American, but damn if it isn’t what Americans seem to demand.  Excusing and justifying abuses and horrors in the name of being free is antithetical to the very existence of the Constitution, and yet we do it.  Over and over again, we accept abuses on others.  You want examples? Ok, we accept a death knell of school children for the right to sell guns to near anyone.  We accept the demand that drag shows be stopped because it violates our own religious beliefs.  We are demanding that people exhibit who they are defined to be at birth despite who they genuinely feel themselves to be.  We demand that children starve in our public schools so that the wealthiest don’t have to pay a fair tax rate.  We demand that children go to school, then declare their well-educated instructors abusing them for allowing them to have an education.  We demand that the sick seek to gamble their very lives as they balance eating and health care.  And, we demand that the mother give birth to her child no matter how old she is, how she became pregnant, the viability of the fetus, the physical and psychological toll it will put on the mother, the financial devastation it will inflict upon her life, even the ability to feed, clothe, educate, and love the child do we still demand she bring it into the world, then we turn our back upon her.

We as a country seem to demand the right to make these decisions for others, to define them, to restrict them, to force them to conform to what we see as comfortable and proper for them, and yet in the near past, especially, have I seen excuse upon excuse for criminal and the worst examples of abuses inflicted upon others.  These so-called Christians – and I place that lowercase as they seem to refuse to follow the example of the one written as Jesus Christ – refuse to use a common reality, hold themselves accountable, hold others in their politics driven values accountable, and as I mentioned, refuse to do as Christ demands, yet stomp their feet if someone were to live in defiance of those somehow “deeply held religious beliefs”.  And, again, harkening back to the earlier extreme example:  1930’s Germany was a very religious country and look at what they allowed for their politics-driven morals and values.