Pride (Woke Weasels, You Asked For It, Part Two.)

Yesterday you came to lift me up

As light as straw and brittle as a bird
Today I weigh less than a shadow on the wall
Just one more whisper of a voice unheard

Tomorrow leave the windows open
As fear grows please hold me in your arms
Won't you help me if you can to shake this anger?
I need your gentle hands to keep me calm

'Cause I never thought I'd lose
I only thought I'd win
I never dreamed I'd feel this fire beneath my skin
I can't believe you love me
I never thought you'd come
I guess I misjudged love between a father and his son. ~Elton John, The Last Song

According to Newt Gingrich, "Traditional people" are appalled, appalled, I say! Supposedly, they're appalled because President Biden has rescinded the Trump administration's ban on US Embassies flying the Gay Pride flag.

I don't know any of these "Traditional people" and I say that as a former conservative Republican, former conservative Baptist, a US Air Force veteran and a boring ass old fat white guy who daily looks at the world around me and says, Roger Murtaugh-style "I'm too old for this shit!"

And I, quite frankly, don't give a damn if people who are on their third marriage (and their second one stemming from adultery, no less) are offended by US embassies flying the pride flag. I really don't give a shit when the person doing the complaining is a former Speaker of the House who was dismissed and driven out of Congress and his own party (at the time) for adultery, then succeeded by another Old White Man who'd later be convicted of sexual abuse. If this is "Tradition" there's some deep, systemic issues with it and I want no part of it. 

I'm not gay, it's literally none of my business, on a personal level it doesn't affect me. But also, I've always been a strong supporter of equality, freedom and human rights. 

Maybe it's because I was raised up mostly before conservatism fell down the rabbit hole of endless partisanship and whack-off navel-gazing while getting high on the smell of its own Cracker Barrell farts and reading a dog-eared copy of the Turner Diaries. Maybe it's just that I'm old enough to remember when things like nuclear war were a real threat and the enemy was Over There, and a real thing rather than ginned-up fear of one's own neighbors driven by the fake outrage of dubious news networks and talk radio liars.

Hell, maybe I just never was the kind of conservative that's prevalent now, sure enough there have always been a few of those people, but it sure seems like over the course of the last 20 years the inmates took over the asylum, and here we are.

But either way if this is what we've come to, having so little to worry about that we have time to be angry at who other people fuck, and positively appalled that our government is acting to support not only its own gay citizens but people abroad whose environment may not be as (legally, anyway) safe as our own, well I'm glad I got out. 

But I'd like to remind you that it's not always been so.

See, back in the day when I was growing up I had this neighbor, Mr. Whitman.

He was gay, for all intents and purposes retired and living on Disability or SSI or some such. He was also living with...which considering the time means dying from...HIV/AIDS. The house he lived in was his family's vacation home, made largely irrelevant by the fact that his Mom had moved to Florida.

Dude's health wasn't terribly conducive to doing physical labor, nor was his income level permitting him to pay somebody else to do it, so his mom paid my Grandpa to do shit like cut the grass, rake the yard, plow the driveway, shovel the snow off the walk and do whatever home maintenance needed doing...and out of that check that showed up in the mail every month, my Grandpa paid me minimum wage to do a lot of the work, whatever he didn't feel like doing, anyway. It was a job to support my tabletop RPG and video game habits and I was fine with that.

Fairly early on about the summer of 1988 or so, my Grandpa and my Mom sat me down and explained to me that Mr. Whitman was gay, and I was to treat him with the same respect as I would anybody else and that I was to listen to him and do what he said (within reason) same as any other adult person, and this was not negotiable or subject to conditions. And that was that, no if's, ands, or buts.

Mr. Whitman could be a demanding son of a bitch in terms of how neat he wanted the yard or how he wanted this or that minor project done or the snow shoveled and the walk salted (in his case as he became more frail that eventually became a genuine safety issue that we were very conscious of) but my Mom was that way too so I was used to it. He wasn't a bad guy, he had an impressive mental collection of dirty jokes and whatnot and he'd occasionally let me bum a cigar from him and smoke it while I was working. In the way of neighbors and shit, he was my friend.

Once I got old enough to drive, parking my Grandpa's truck or my Blazer (once I got it) in the driveway or at the edge of the yard (depending on whether or not the leaf trailer was hooked up to it) and playing my music became a thing. Mr. Whitman would make sure and let me know if the radio was too loud, or the rap music too vulgar, or whatever. He was religious and such things still kind of mattered in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

And over time, his health got worse. He put on a brave face and tried to hide it, but you could tell. The jokes got grimmer, he came outside to smoke less, and so on. Dude died in the summer of 1994 while I was away serving in the Air Force.

In his life, there was hardly any gay rights, nor even much of a push for the same past "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the military and a few local initiatives in places like Massachusetts and San Francisco. Lawrence Vs. Texas was fully nine years in the future when he died, open LGB (and remember, we're still working on the -T part of that) military service nearly seventeen years away, yet.

I often wonder what he'd think of today's world, of LGBT rights and pride flags and bisexual furries, of the White House lighted in rainbow colors for Pride month...or even that there is such a thing as Pride month...and the fact that it was a Republican President, George W. Bush, who put real honest-to-god effort into a (still-ongoing) program for fighting the AIDS virus in Africa.

To be honest, I feel a little bad for Mr. Whitman and all the other people who didn't live to see it, and I know that around the world that struggle is still very real for a lot of people.

And it's that, that's what flying the Rainbow Flag at our embassies represents, all of it.

Sometimes all you can do is say a prayer for those who've gone on before, and do your best to keep in the fight.

And then there's These Fucking People.

Anti-Vaxxers, wearing yellow stars and deliberately equating themselves with the Jews in Nazi Germany in protest of COVID-19 vaccinations.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Is there even one "Conservative" political issue in the Western world (and America and the UK in particular) that isn't rooted in cruelty, conspiracy theory or selfishness, with a heavy seasoning of racism and whatever other forms of bigotry that they can throw in?

These people don't have to worry about being killed, not a one of them, not even close. 

Nor do they have to worry that they might die of disease. They seem to want to. In point of fact, they're claiming a specific right to risk exactly that, no matter who else they might infect in doing so.

Because bullshit ideology, fake religion and the myths they tell themselves are more important than facts, science, or even life.

Because their convenience or privilege is worth far more to them than somebody else's life. The sanctity of their right to be an asshole trumps other human beings' right to exist.

And that is exactly what Newton Leroy Fucking Gingrich fucking means when he's talking about "Traditional People" and don't you forget it.

Countless people have died because, when presented with a choice between humanity and ideology, too many people went with the latter.

Too often we choose pride, in the most negative sense, knowing that it goes before the fall.

We just don't care.

Has there been enough blood yet?

I'm tired of it. I'm too old for this shit.

Part One.