Just a note: This essay was done – finished, or at least ready for more editing on Sunday morning. Then, I managed to do something I haven’t done since I was typing on my Apple IIC back in the 80’s. I was just finishing up a chapter of my Master’s Thesis, twenty pages of cross country running history. Then lightning struck. No, it wasn’t a brilliant workout plan to win the State Meet, it was real lightning, and close by. The power went out, and so did my Apple IIC, along with twenty pages of text NOT saved to the floppy disk drive (5 ½ inch floppies – kids today would have a whole different definition for that!!).
Somehow, today’s essay disappeared: not saved under the wrong name, not in the “recovery” file, not out in the ethernet – just gone. So here’s round two, maybe better, maybe worse, but no way to compare and tell. I’ll definitely save. Enjoy the fruits of my duplicate labors!!!
Guns
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an essay in the “Guns Series” called Fear Itself. It was about the historic linkages between Americans, guns and fear, right from the very beginnings, even before the American Revolution. I won’t repeat all of that (you can click the link above if you’d like), but this past week has been the “example to prove the point”.
In Kansas City, an old white man shot a skinny young black man for mistakenly knocking on his door. No words were spoken, just gunshots through the door, hitting the young man in the head. In North Carolina, a middle-aged black man shot a white neighboring six year-old girl and her father. The cause: a basketball rolled into his yard, and they tried to recover it. In upstate New York, a white man shot and killed a twenty year-old white girl. Her mistake: pulling into his driveway.
There’s more. There’s the cheerleader in Texas who was shot for getting in the wrong car. And the Florida men: the mistaken grocery delivery drivers shot at by a home owner, and the University of Tampa man (white), shot and killed for getting into a private car he thought was his Uber ride. Both district attorneys declined to file charges. Under Florida’s infamous “stand your ground” law (remember Travon Martin back in 2012?) the homeowner and driver were “in the right” defending their property (save).
Legal Tender
All of these incidents have three things in common: fear, guns, and innocent victims. The shooters were fearful: of the knock on the door, the neighbor in the yard, the strange car in the driveway, the stranger opening the car door. And they all had guns.
Fear is the “legal tender” of our media world. Here’s today’s “random” feed from my Fox News app as I write this essay.
- Mass shooting leaves at least nine people hurt at after-prom party in Texas
- Wisconsin attorney reacts to trans woman flashing male genitalia at girls in locker room
- Christian prayer warriors to attend Satanic gathering in Boston
- Dangerous Hawaii man scales razor wire fence in jail escape
- Texas cattle found dead with tongues cut out with “apparent precision”
- Backlash intensifies following transgender state lawmaker’s “hate filled” remarks
- Former Disney World employee took hundreds of “upskirt videos” (save).
Be afraid. Don’t send you kids to parties, or locker rooms. Satanists are out to out-pray you, and dangerous criminals aren’t stopped by razor wire. Transgendered women are full of hate, and even at Disney World the employees are perverts. I’m not sure what’s up with the cows, but it’s pretty weird, if not scary (save).
Orientation
It’s not just about guns. When I was a kid back in the 1960’s, homosexuality was illegal in much of the United States. Saying you were homosexual – gay – wasn’t illegal itself, but having physical love was against the law. Of course there were gay people, but most were “in the closet”, rumored and secretly discussed, like the man who lived across the street in Cincinnati. I remember being seven and trying to understand the whispered, “ He’s a man who left his wife for another man”.
The famous Stonewall Protests weren’t until 1969, and when I started teaching a decade later, teachers still “weren’t allowed” to be gay. Of course some were, but their secret was closely kept; open knowledge would cost them their jobs. Americans feared what they didn’t understand.
Even in the 1990’s I was teaching when a male student had the “audacity” to come out in high school. He was beaten up in the locker room and constantly bullied in the hallways. It seemed that many male students, and even some of the staff, thought he “earned” the beatings by being honest about his orientation. That was all about fear, that somehow being openly gay might cause an “epidemic of gayness”, or that he represented a threat to the other males in the school. Even just thirty years ago, we didn’t understand the forces that drove sexuality.
It’s not that it’s easy to “come out” as a gay person now. But there’s a lot more understanding, and a lot less institutional bias then there was just a couple of decades ago (save).
Gender
Today, transgendered kids face the same kinds of discrimination. They face the fear of others who don’t understand, and aren’t willing to allow them to live their lives. Some of the persecutors are folks my age, schooled that gender is all about a single ‘Y’ chromosome and genital equipment. And parents worry – will “peer pressure” make my kid trans? Are you kidding? Science now knows that there are dozens of factors that go into gender, and that, as difficult as it is for the “regular” world to understand, there are boys trapped in girls bodies, and girls in boys bodies (save).
But multiple state legislatures across the United States are outlawing medical care for those trapped kids. Instead of allowing the kids, their parents and doctors to determine what course they should take, legislatures are virtually requiring them to grow up in bodies that are betraying them daily. The state legislatures are doing it to “empower” the parents, but really they are stripping them of their ability to make the best decisions for their kids. And as for the surgical solutions – hysterectomies and castrations followed by reconstruction; there are almost none of those performed on minors in the US. That’s the “straw-man” argument, just like the “gay child molester” boogie man.
Legal Cruelty
It’s cruel. We’ll look back in a score of years, and wonder just how we could have stooped so low, just as we look back at the 60’s gay laws. We are bullying the most vulnerable, using them as political pawns; and generating fear. And, as the transgender state legislator from Montana so eloquently put it, there will be “blood on the hands” of the lawmakers who wrote those laws. It will be the blood of suicidal young people, forced to grow up in the wrong gender. Some fear what they are told “not” to understand – and so they don’t.
If I were a parent, already struggling to help my transgendered child, I would be more than outraged. Those states are not just legislating, they are putting already at-risk children in greater danger. For parents trying to “save” their kids, that’s an unacceptable threat.
And for those legislators with future blood on their hands, it’s unconscionable.
(save)
