Prade Paride

Well, last Sunday was the Pride Parade.  Sweet Becko and I watched for a pretty long time (and this is the only photo I took; it's the SPD's vintage motor brigade).  I went back to our place, did a bunch of stuff, took a short nap, thought about various things, then ventured out to the hardware store and...the parade was still going on.  Swear to God, it lasted close to four hours.  That's a lot of proudness, people.  But hey, be as proud as you can for as long as you can.  Seriously.  It seems that there are people on the other side who want to negate all the gains of the last 50 years, not just for gay rights, but rights for unions, minorities and women, too.  Why?  They seem to have a warped notion that this great country was much better before those issues were prominent, when people knew their place and didn't get in the way of the ruling powers.  Yeah, the good old days.  Little do they realize that this country was founded by upstarts who fought the power and redefined how a government should relate to its people.  It wasn't perfect; it still isn't.  But we are constantly reassessing ourselves.  That's why events from recent history, especially from the last two or three weeks have me on alert.  I have no idea how to combat forces that are absolutely unconcerned with my existence.  I don't matter.  It's only slightly comforting that at least these same forces are not actively out to destroy me.  At this point, I don't know whether the amount of resistance people have been putting up so far has been enough. 

Once Bush was gone, the consensus opinion was that we were past all this stuff.  The people who wanted to haul us backwards were aging and dying.  It turns out that they were just honing their grievances and burnishing their feelings of victimhood.  And through a freak accident of the electoral process, their mouthpiece is in charge.  And he's got his own set of gripes that we have to endure every single friggin' day.  I've always characterized this administration as one that does the maximum amount of damage with a minimum of effort.  And it doesn't really care who it hurts, just as long as it's always hurting someone.  The ironic thing is that they seem to be targeting their own supporters a lot of the time.  That's just a chance byproduct of their recklessness.  But if they're really looking to negate you and everything you stand for, look out. 

I'm wondering what next year's parade will look like.  If the Supreme Court sets aside same-sex marriage, what will it be like?  If it suddenly becomes legal to fire someone for being gay, will all this seem like frivolity?  For a lot of people, winning means depriving other people of hard-won rights.  It turns out we haven't gotten beyond it.  In fact, we're right in the middle of the fight and we didn't even know it.