Saturday, March 31, 2012

LET'S GO FOR IT

Recently something happened to me that I thought never would: I became a patriot. In the dramatic pre-election tension between America’s two parties, I began reflecting for the first time on what is involved in living in this country. In the sweep of time since the winter of 2010, it became clear to me that I was too far along in years to settle for uncertainty and conflict, but to arrive at an assertion of my identity as bisexual, I had to withstand enormous pressures pushing against me. Freedom in this country is a much mangled word. In the gibberish we hear from the campaign trail, for instance, we are urged to take a stand and free ourselves up from paying insurance premiums into a nationally mandated health plan. Or we are to be ‘free’ of ‘big’ or too big government. Yet these same charlatans are all to eager to interfere with a woman’s constitutional right to regulate her own reproductive destiny. Freedom, in fact, is a word bandied around like a ball in a sports game. Poor freedom. Never mind the millions of war dead resulting from the last global conflagration to fight for our freedom from the ideology of slavery. If there is any freedom guaranteed to us in these United States, it is the freedom to forge our own destinies. Sometimes this is not easy. We can comfort ourselves in our living room easy chairs and cast ballots, only to engage in consequent bellyaching when we do not have things exactly our way. Many do not understand that we live in the stream of history at least up to our ankles, without even experiencing the sensation of the flow of time and change. Having cut my teeth on the turbulence of the sixties, I build on a foundation of agitation for social change. This too is part of our legacy of Americans. 2012 will be a turning point for us. I don’t believe our current two-party system of government can endure, considering the poverty of the Republican viewpoint. An educated woman, I cannot even bring myself to understand what tradition they are attempting to uphold. Our constitutional heritage guarantees us the right to change our governance if it does not serve the people. Let’s go for it. We don’t need to use rifles.