A Word From Me

I have this problem....so many of the thoughts that I have in my head just refuse to jump onto this blog. I hope the folks that keep showing up as little red dots on the map won't give up and stop coming back. (I never know, since there are no comments!!!) I write bits and pieces and Life seems to keep getting in the way of the rest of the words getting on the cyberpaper. Keep coming back and I'll promise to keep thinking and keep adding as I can. There are so very many bumper sticker lessons out there! I learn one from the gifts in my life virtually every day. I'm hoping that this pseudo apology will encourage you and me to keep this going!

Thanks!

Not a Bumper Sticker, but some Thoughts....

June 28 marks the 40th Anniversary of the Riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Many people have no idea what this is. Just like many people may have no idea what the Suffragettes were or what the March across the Bridge in Selma, Alabama was about. (Ask Senator John Lewis about that one. He was there and has a skull fracture to show for it.) Each of these represent two things, in my view - moments when a marginalized people stepped out of the margin, marring the neatness of history and moments when the course of history was changed forever.

According to Wikipedia, that modern day icon of wisdom, "Suffragette is a term originally coined by the Daily Mail newspaper as a derogatory label for the more radical and militant members of the late-19th and early-20th century movement for women's suffrage..." It was coined in the United Kingdom and migrated to the United States. Yes, there were "radical and militant" women who actually once wanted the right to vote! Can you imagine that? How preposterous!

The march in Selma, occurred on Sunday, March 7, 1965, known as "Bloody Sunday." It was a march to protest the prohibition of the African American right to vote. Mary Stanton wrote in , FROM SELMA TO SORROW: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo (University of Georgia Press, 2000), "The marches drastically shifted public opinion about the Civil Rights movement as a whole. The images of Alabama law enforcement beating the nonviolent protesters were shown all over the country and the world by the cameras of television networks and newspapers. The visuals of such brutality being carried out by the state of Alabama helped shift the image of the segregationist movement from one of a movement trying to preserve the social order of the South to a system of state endorsed terrorism against those non-whites."

Here's an adaptation of the Stonewall story from "GLBTQ Social Sciences" Web Page:

Friday, June 27, 1969 found the world mourning the death of gay icon Judy Garland. In the early morning hours of June 28, police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a small bar located on Christopher Street in New York City's Greenwich Village. Although mafia-run, the Stonewall, like other predominantly gay bars in the city, got raided by the police periodically. Typically, the more "deviant" patrons (that is, drag queens and butch lesbians, especially if they were "colored") would be arrested and taken away in a paddy wagon, while white, male customers looked on or quietly disappeared. The raid began in time-honored fashion, as plainclothes and uniformed police officers entered the bar, arrested the employees, and began ejecting the customers one by one onto the street. But for some reason, the crowd that had gathered outside the Stonewall, a crowd that began to cheer each time a patron emerged from the bar, soon changed its mood. Perhaps it was Judy Garland's death, or the summer heat, or the fact that police had been especially busy that summer raiding bars and patrons had become angry and frustrated. Or possibly it was the sight of several drag queens being forced into a paddy wagon. Whatever it was, the on-lookers lost their patience.

As to who threw the first punch, accounts are contradictory. Some say it was a drag queen who initially defied the police, while others claim it was a butch lesbian. The crowd, now several hundred people, erupted and began pelting the officers with coins, which represented the payoffs gay bars had to make to the police to stay in business, then moved to stones and bottles. The police, surprised by and unused to such resistance from patrons of gay bars, beat those they could reach with nightsticks, but eventually were forced to take refuge by locking themselves inside the Stonewall Inn.

This single event brought a population that has been documented for thousands of years, remained hidden, "closeted" and oppressed, into the mainstream, in essence, likely short-circuiting the AIDS epidemic and thrusting medical research into a new century. (Think where we might have been if nobody had ever heard of gay rights twenty years ago, when HIV became an epidemic and had not been forced from the recesses of the shadows into the streets, media and limelight. Thank heavens for those drag queens and that crowd!)

In March, I visited New York City for the first time. Since I had worked all week, I had Saturday afternoon off and had an opportunity to "see the city" with a friend, who also happened to be in town. We planned a trip down to Greenwich Village and to the Hudson, to get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty and the river where the plane landed. We would eat dinner and visit Rockefeller Plaza, walk through Times Square, and end with a walk in lower Central Park.

Yep, that's the Hudson and the Statue of Liberty in the haze in the background!

As we walked back from the Hudson River (where Picture 1 was taken, showing the Statue of Liberty in the haze in the background!), Marc suggested that we cross the street and walk over to the Stonewall Inn. It seemed only fitting. Hence, Picture 2.

The Stonewall Inn -- Remarkably unremarkable to have changed history, isn't it?

So, why am I writing about this momentous occasion. Well, yes, I do support the cause of the GLBT movement. Yes, I do believe this was a monumental occasion. However, I think the more important point is the reminder that, once again, it was the troublemakers, the odd, the marginalized that brought about change, revolution and the freedoms that we all take for granted today.

I firmly believe my mother would have been a Suffragette. It was women like her who wrestled the right to vote from affluent, educated Caucasian men. After all, she had the wherewithall to obtain two unrelated Masters Degrees in 1942, to have the absolute audacity to not only continue teaching in an academic institution after she married, but also to return after she had each of her 4 children (which, BTW, she insisted on nursing when she was rather aggressively told by the medical experts that her babies would not grow up normal without being fed formula! Tell that to our 97 years of higher education!) It was the marchers in Selma who began the movement that wrestled the right to vote, live, marry, and be human from a Caucasian majority. Today, my family is about as "conspicuous" as they come! We are not only multi-racial, but multicultural, mutlilingual and multi-just-about-everything-else! When I was in grade school (and I'm NOT THAT old), my extended family would have had to eat in separate dining rooms, use separate restrooms and water fountains, and may have even been arrested! I have godchildren who would have been considered illegitimate because their parents could not have legally been married an any state in the union!

Far more importantly, I want us all to pause for a moment and ask what just may be in the air. Once again, a growing number of issues are being raised by a marginalized population. They center on the right to live, love, work, and be treated like human beings. These are not questions about sex any more than Suffrage and Civil Rights were about sex, corporate takeovers, destroying any institutions, or contaminating any aspcts of humanity. I remember the arguments in my eighth and ninth grade class that allowing "blacks" to marry "whites" would lead to a "gray" race and the ruination our future. It hasn't happened. Nor, has the 49 to 52% failure rate of marriage significantly changed in states that allow same sex civil unions (or whatever they choose to call them). The earth has not opened up and swallowed America because we have a President who is not Caucasian in ancestry.

Stonewall, Selma and Suffragettes remind us that we are all human. We live on a planet that has abundant resources, space, and creativity. While we cannot all have everything, but we can all have enough. Until we learn that the way to access this abundance is NOT to take something away from another, but to give freely and to find ways to creatively spread around what we do have.

Is it such an unreal vision of the future that, one day, our history books may not be earmarked by our conflicts, wars and fights, but by our successes. That we may not record milestones in terms of deaths, but lives saved. That we may not record geographic boundaries in terms of who destroyed whom to get to the top of the heap, but how many lives were enhanced and enlightened, how many mouths were fed and how many heads received shelter. That power may be defined not in terms of money, weapons, and potential for destruction, but in terms of how far arms are outstretched. That Peace may not be defined as the absence of war, but the persistence of a world filled with satiated appetites, warm slumber, dry shelter, and safe drink in time of thirst.

Am I a dreamer? I hope so. Then, I can walk in the margins with other greats: Like those radical militant women who got my daughters, nieces, great nieces and granddaughters the right to vote without even thinking about it. Like those irrational marchers, who crossed that bridge, facing loaded weapons and gave people of all colors, including mine, the right to vote, live, learn, work and love to their potential. Like those drag queens (reportedly mostly of color!) and butch lesbians, who brought an entire ten or more percent of our population out of the margin. Like a small movement you haven't even heard of that is trying to save hundreds of children from dying in orphanages in Ethiopia and other African countries while thousands of affluent Americans custom order babies from overpopulated countries, such as China, because they have the right skin color.

It's uncomfortable here in the margins. It's not popular. However, if we look at history, the "mainstream" has brought about very few changes. True change comes from the margins and the marginalized. From people who forgot to hear that they couldn't do something or other. Like these: John Stuart Mill, Emily Davison, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Sylvia Pankhurst, Julia Ward Howe, James Bevel, Amelia, Sam and Bruce Boynton, John Lewis, Bayard Ruston, Martin Luther King, A group of unnamed Drag Queens, Richard Berkowitz, and the list goes on. (Google some of them. You'll learn some things you didn't know!) These are the people who began to change history. What if all that dreamers likeme dream could be true?

Remember, they once said that electricity would never replace gas, the west would never be settled, slaves would never be free, women would never vote, blacks would never have rights, we'd never go to the moon, Maman would never have a cell phone, and well, you hear the rest every day! Maybe, they never consulted the Drag Queens!