"Mawage" in The eye of every storm

Listen, my horse don’t tread too high off the trail, and though I can’t lead it to water, it seems to find the holler with the shine just fine. That being the case, this here Georgian by way of Texas has some opine’s on the subject matter at hand:

It’s a damn shame. Really. It took this long for some basic rights to be bestowed upon some absolutely upstanding, tax-paying, science enhancing, art enchanting, exceptional dancing, mind romancing people that are apart of our society. We should be ashamed it took a Supreme Court vote (even with the 14th Amendment) to acknowledge a basic freedom already granted in the Bill of Rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I can imagine being a homosexual without the Bill of Rights would be incredibly taxing. Without the Liberty to be who oneself, the Life one leads would never lead to the Pursuit of Happiness. It would be a pursuit of futility; a pursuit of falsification, masking the truth. It would be a literal pursuit of lies, sworn on the oath of a country born of freedom and paved with the blood of those that balked ideology at its most basic core. The South may raise its bastard flag, but we were born rebels hundreds of years before they made a gun-powder factory south of Mason-Dixon and the mason glass to toast General Robert E. Lee.

The same principle guiding those who damned tea to the bottom of Boston harbor guides the same people who dare to take a stand in the face of fundamentalism, to say, “We are no different than you,” and continue to decree, “We are among you.” The statue of Liberty begs for our tired, our weary, our weak. Mother Exile demands the outcast and downtrodden. The New Colossus will accept nothing short than the wretched refuse, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It lifts its’ lamp beside the damn golden door!

When did we forget that? I’m guessing about the same time the United States hijacked John L. O’Sullivan’s Texas Independence speech coining the term “manifest destiny” and used it carte’ blanche’ to irradicate the original tired, poor, yearning masses of Native Americans.

This historic day reminds me of another day all Americans should mourn: April 4, 1968. A bold, courageous, valiant man was shot outside of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, at 7:05 PM. As his blood-stained the muddy waters of the mighty Mississippi, his martyrdom reminded an entire culture they were simply wrong. People that were there knew more than a man had passed. He took with him the burden of prejudice, lit that mother on fire, and used that light to shine his way to heaven and rejoice with those he fought so hard justify. Basic human decency doesn’t show pictures of Mahayla crying at his funeral, but he was a Father, and a Husband, a Brother, and a Son. Martin Luther King, Jr. was just like me, and he was just like you, and he cried, and he had birthdays, and he had joy, and he felt joy, and he lived joy.

One thing I have not seen today, amidst the mass celebrations, the weddings, the rainbows, the flags, and the parades, are any testaments to those before. I’m not saying they don’t exist, but sometimes you just have to be the one to say something:

James Stoll: The first minister to come out as Gay. Though no action was taken against him by his church, he was never summoned to ordain another service. His name is not well known, but he is the first clergyman to voluntarily come out as a homosexual and unashamedly lived his life loving God until he died from heart complications until 1994.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in San Francisco. He coined such Obama-esque phrases such as “The important thing is not that we can live on hope alone, but that life is not worth living without it.” He revitalized the Grass Roots campaign in a day of emerging media, and was elected by a majority. He was shot to death, much like one of his predecessors in Memphis. One of his last known utterances of his voice was a recording that said: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”

March 1968, the Los Angeles Police Department drug an unarmed Howard Efland from his hotel and beat him to death in the middle of the street. The grand jury ruled it an “excusable homicide,” a term by any standards in today’s society reprehensibly would be scorned and rescinded. He unabashedly declared who he was, and like many ideologues before him, paid the ultimate price.

In New Orleans in 1972, an arsonist set afire to a homosexual speak easy, killing 32 persons at the Upstairs lounge. Amazingly, as patrons tried to jump from roof to roof and plunged to their deaths, cars and pedestrians blocked emergency respondent’s from accessing the block. A man was arrested, who smelled like lighter fluid, corroborating a witness statement, but was released without pressing the matter.

Hell, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, who you may know as the author of The Glass Menagerie, a four character play, was nearly beaten to death in Key West, Florida. Before you scoff, just know that if you have high-school aged children, they’ve already heard of him (I hope), and are probably not corrupted, and most likely are still buried deep into their computer devices and ignoring you.

This once hits close to home: in 1988 a woman was killed while hiking the Appalachian Trail with her partner. Julie Ann Williams and Lollie Winans were embarking on a journey together nearly unfathomable to anyone that knew them. I know first hand the difficulties they faced through the ups and downs of Georgia, the elevation gain of North Carolina, and the water shortages of Virginia. They were murdered in North Virginia, just several miles south of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the half-way point of the trail.

In 1998, Matthew Shepard was tortured, beaten and tied to a cattle guard post in Laramie, Wyoming, where he was found starved, dehydrated, and barely clinging to life. This man created the laws against “hate-crimes” by becoming a victim, something I have no doubt he would be proud of, but much like Jesus, would rather have had this burden taken from him.

Several months before September 11, 2001, Fred Martinez in Colorado was stabbed to death by a person who just wanted to “kill a fag.” Let that one sink in. There’s no reason there except hate, and hate is no reason.

Hell, LAST YEAR in Seattle, two youths were killed execution style after they left a gay nightclub in Seattle, Washington AND THEY WEREN’T GAY. A muslim defending his “strict prinple’s” shot them to death.

And there’s that word again. Principle. I recall a few of those: Love thy neighbor as thyself; cast out the speck in your own eye before plucking the log from anothers’. We live in an exciting, amazing time in history. I wouldn’t be so arrogant to call it unprecedented, but it is incredibly existing no less. There have been so many gains in places no one should have ever fought to gain to begin with, however, this is where we are.

So many have come before us. I think in times where we celebrate, whether its the Fourth of July, Bastille Day, Boxing Day (eh?), Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Veterans Day, or any other day that simply ends in the letter “y,” we should reflect on all of those who lost their lives to make it happen. Every “freedom” we have we were born with, we lost, and then somehow, we took it back. That’s no small feat and nothing to ever lose sight of. The only right’s we lose are the one’s we don’t demand.

It’s ashamed we had to fight for this one. Yet, in an age of connectivity, and social media, a firestorm was created that no agency or entity saw coming in the new day’s dawn. In truth, it’s brought us together, except Ann Coulter, maybe, who claims this is a defamation against black people in the 14th Amendment (because somehow, she suddenly cares about African Americans). Seriously. We’re all more aware. We’re all more accepting. Bottom line: there doesn’t have to be any more killing, hate, segregation.

Like I said, I can’t lead my horse to water, and it rides low off of its hooves, but I can’t tell it to kneel. It knows when to cross the stormy waters and it know’s when its clear, and I’m damn sure it’s going to accept hay from any hand regardless of color, creed, sexual orientation, or religion. So this horse is going to kneel and it’s going to drink, and the water in the holler is going to taste as fine and sweet as it ever did, because deep within every molecule is a slight taste of freedom, and it’s a taste we can all enjoy.