diversity

This is a 2017 rant. It was before family separation at the border, the Muslim ban and other Trumpian greatest hits, so it is ranty in a regular way and is not to be confused with a 2018 rant which is fueled by a year of hopelessness and rage and can go sideways real quick. 

xox

“Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”
~ Bobby Kennedy

This morning dawned bright and cheery and I was in a good enough mood after my meditation to turn on the news.

Big mistake.

Dufus had just caved to the conservative religious right by Tweeting his most recent policy shift (you know like most Presidents do), banning transgender people from the military—yet another step in his never-ending quest to send us back into the dark ages.

As I sat there I couldn’t help but wonder what the fuck these old white guys are so afraid of?

Strong, opinionated women?
Transgender folks? (Listen, any trans person I’ve ever met just wants to pee in peace and be left the fuck alone.)
People of color?
Democrats?
The Media?
Educated Elite?
Sick people?
Poor people?

Then it dawned on me. It’s diversity. All of those groups are the ingredients that make up the soup that is America.
It’s what makes us great!
It always has you whiny, fearful sons-of-bitches!

Anyway, as I tried to get my head back in the game of life, I remembered this video of well over half a million people in London singing along—IN UNISON—With harmonies—to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. You guys, they even sang the guitar solo, duh.

Here it comes, a stream of consciousness…

So that got me to thinking about the fact that humanity can move me to tears with its inherent goodness, about how proud I felt to know that I could have stood in that crowd and sung every fucking word of that song at the top of my lungs—with a British accent, about music and what a unifying force it can be, about the potential of Kid Rock running for office, red states and blue states and the fact that we, as a nation, need to become more purple. More integrated. More unified. To feel proud of our diversity instead of afraid and then I remembered that purple is (among other things) not really My color, but it is the color that represents royalty and royalty brought me right back around to—you guessed it—Queen!

Is any of this making sense to you? It’s blowing MY fucking mind!

Then my sister sent me this:

And I knew the Universe (or Freddie Mercury) who I could feel in that gorgeous London sky, was trying to tell me something.

“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see
I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Because I’m easy come, easy go, little high, little low
Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me, to me”

And suddenly, all was right with the world. Are you with me?

Carry on, you diverse ones you,
xox

On Sunday and Monday, the weather seemed to mirror the energy of chaos that’s rampant in the world right now.

Isn’t that interesting how the weather mirrors energy? I remember 9/11 was a bright and sunny Indian Summer day in New York City with beautiful clear, blue skies, and the next day the skies turned grey and gloomy as they opened up and cried all of our collective tears.

I find that fascinating.

Anyhow, on Sunday, as the cold winds whipped our yards into a frenzy, tipping over pots and tearing branches off of the mature trees we have surrounding the house, and chucking them onto patio furniture, our cars in the driveway and turning the path to the front door into a sort of hero’s journey of leafy obstacles, I decided to do what I do best: hide in bed with the dog, a book, and some movies on TV.

Reading and watching TV at the same time is a habit I acquired as a teenager in high school.
It serves no purpose other than to keep every quadrant of my brain activated and occupied—so I’m unable to dwell on any of life’s other distractions, like personal hygiene, eating, or worrying about whether a terrorist sleeper cell exists in my neighborhood.

When I finally did decide to assuage the loud rumblings of my stomach by enjoying some cheese on a Triscuit and cup of Earl Grey—hot—I turned my full attention to the movie since it was nearly impossible to hold my book and a cheesy Triscuit at the same time.

It turns out the film was fairly recent and was only about ten minutes into the plot, which meant that now that I had given my body some brain food (as I like to call complex carbohydrates), I would be able to catch up quickly with what was happening on screen.

The movie was Invasion, a current-ish, snazzy remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a younger Daniel Craig (yum) and an actress whose face is Botoxed so heavily that NOTHING moves. I found this incredibly puzzling since the only way those infected with the alien virus (that has turned almost the entire population of earth into emotionless robots) can identify those who have yet to be “turned” is their show of emotion.
When an uninfected person would run or scream or cry, they would stick out like a sore thumb and get apprehended and infected into compliance.

Yet here’s the heroine of our story looking like a gifted ventriloquist, her mouth stuck in an insipid grin while out pours the sound of full monologues of terror and grief. “I can’t find my son!” she wails in agony while her face maintains the serene mask of a woman getting a pedicure.
Interesting casting choice.

But that’s not what I wanted to focus on here.

As I sipped my tea and snarfed my carbs, despite the sketchy casting choices, I started to marvel at the synchronicities the movie was bringing up as it drew me in.

I’d spent the morning getting caught up in the atrocities in Paris, vacillating between feelings of disgust and pity toward humanity.
What a fucking mess we’ve made, I lamented. Look at all the pain and the sorrow caused by a few people’s feelings of deep despair and hatred.

Human emotions run amok. What in heaven’s name is the answer?

In the movie, an alien species had devised an answer: Remove all those troublesome emotions from humanity and then have the wiped out, robotic humans clean up all of their messes, leaving Earth a sort of over sanitized, completely passionless and uninteresting version of itself. Like Disneyland or Switzerland on steroids.

In the background of certain scenes was TV coverage of wars ending, peace accords being signed and walls coming down.
Neat and tidy with a handshake and minimum of fanfare.
Sounds great right? Especially after the events in the past couple of days.
But along with the absence of hostility, there was a complete lack of joy, or passion, no relief or cause for celebration.

Worst of all—there was a complete absence of love. If you showed compassion or love—Busted! They’d catch you and infect you into a robotic shell of your former self.

Supposedly it was all done for our own good. A wiser species trying to save us from ourselves, but, um no thanks guys. We will deal with the emotional lows if you’ll leave us the highs of love, joy and caring—thank you very much.

And therein lies my cheesy, frozen-faced, synched-up Sunday afternoon movie revelation.

“Humanity is capable of such horrible nightmares and such beautiful dreams” to paraphrase a line from the movie Contact and as empty and fed up as I can feel after horrible things happen— if we try and force change—or wish the world were different—we unleash a whole slew of unforeseen complications and lose sight of our greatest gifts.
Freedom, Compassion, and Diversity.

What do you guys think?
Carry on,
xox

Me and Ruby watching TV and being Sunday bed-slugs.