Tag Archives: history

Abyss gazing

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It was 1986 and I was twenty-six years old, attending a regional science fiction convention with a bunch of my friends. One of the guests of honor was an author (we’ll call him Mr. C) that two of my friends were very fond of. I had read a couple of his short stories and thought they were good, but he hadn’t really wowed me.

But hearing Mr. C talk about the writing process, his influences, and so forth, made me much more intrigued. It didn’t hurt that when another panelist made a disparaging joke about my favorite science fiction author (who was not in attendance), Mr. C rather emphatically jumped to the defense of my favorite author.

After that panel, one of my friends commented that Mr. C’s takedown of the other panelist had been mean. It was true. Mr. C had ended the rebuttal with something along the lines, “…and it infuriates me when writers who don’t have a fraction of his understanding of how to write or a sliver of his talent make thoughtless critiques.” But, she had called my favorite author a fossil, I pointed out. Once one makes an ad hominem attack, you invite something similar in return. Since it was my favorite author being defended, I was more than a bit prejudiced.

So I wound up standing in line with one of my friends, clutching a pair of just-purchased books of Mr. C’s work, waiting for his autograph. That is the one and only time I have met Mr. C in person. He was pleasant enough, despite having had to smile, listen, and sign however hundreds of times.

After the convention, I tried to read one of the books. It was a collection of his short stories, which included the couple I had read before. They weren’t bad by any means, but after reading a few in a row, an unsatisfying feeling was developing. I sat the book down, not quite sure why I wasn’t enjoying the reading.

A few weeks later, I picked it up again and started on the next story. Again, the story itself was well written and interesting. I read another, then started on the next after that and, well, a few paragraphs in I realized that same feeling of wrongness was building up.

I did eventually finish the collection, but it took a few months, reading only a few stories at a time. And by the end I couldn’t really say that I’d enjoyed them all, but I also couldn’t put my finger on their shortcomings.

The other book was a novel. A novel for which he had won a lot of awards. It was based on one of the short stories in the previous collection. And the short story in question had been one of those I had enjoyed more than the others. Plus, I had friends who swore this book was a masterpiece. And it had garnered all those awards, so it had to be good, right?

I couldn’t finish it. I don’t think I’d even gotten a quarter of the way through before I found myself intensely disliking it.

I tried explaining what I didn’t like about it to one of my friends who loved it. As we were talking, I kept finding myself talking about abstract concepts, rather than actual events in the story. My friend said it sounded more like my baggage than the story. So I started explaining how a similar philosophical assumption underpinned one of the short stories. And that’s when I finally managed to connect the dots and say what was bothering me about all of the stories.

There was a fundamental notion forming the foundation of all the tales: if you don’t know your place and stay in it, horrible things will happen to you. A corrollary was that if you prevented someone else from achieving what was “rightfully” theirs, even more horrible things would happen to you.

When I articulated that, my friend began to argue. That wasn’t what was going on at all, he said. So then I made a guess at how the book I hadn’t finished would end. Specifically what would happen to certain characters.

My friend blinked. “How did you know?”

“Because, if you don’t know your place and stay there, forces, whether they be social, cultural, or fate, will strike you down. And if you stand in the way of someone else’s destiny—”

My friend grinned and interrupted. “Oh, wow! You’re right! That’s so messed up, because it’s like the opposite of what the main character says, but it’s really what happens!”

“Mr. C believes in hierarchical, patriarchic societies in which you behave according to societal expectations, and people who have the temerity to want to choose their own way of living are evil,” I said.

My friend shrugged and said, “You’re probably right. But I still love the stories.”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Just a few years later, a controversy erupted in a forum dedicated to Mr C on the (now long defunct) Prodigy network. The controversy was about a protagonist in another of Mr. C’s novels who experimented with gay sex midway through the book. Some people were angry Mr. C had included an “abomination” as a sympathetic character. Others thought people who thought gay people were abominations were bigots.

As the arguments raged, Mr. C waded in with a rather long discussion about the sin of homosexuality, why he felt he had to include it in the book (his reasoning, as I recall, was that in any community where people amass power there will be people who must dominate, possess, and destroy others, and of course homosexuality is all about dominating and destroying each other), and then had the gall to claim that anyone who called him homophobic were themselves bigots. Because he didn’t hate any gay people. They were just sinners, and if they refused to repent and stop being gay, well, they would face consequences.

His comments were quoted far and wide. And he got angrier and angrier as people “mischaracterized” his comments. He repeated, again and again, that he didn’t hate gay people. He wound up writing (in 1990) a long essay and getting it published in a magazine that catered to the members of the church Mr. C had been raised in, in order to explain his side in context.

While the essay repeatedly said that he did not condone violence against sinful people, it talked about how just as children must be punished in order to learn right from wrong, then adults will face greater penalties when they continue to act outside the bounds of propriety. He talked abstractly about the “day of grief” that each homosexual would eventually experience if they did not repent. He talked about the horrible consequences homosexuals face if they refuse to adhere to propriety. But he was not advocating violence even then, he said. If the faithful, such as himself, had been compassionate but firm in condemning the sin, they would “keep ourselves unspotted by the blood of this generation.”

It’s an old lie that bigots of a religious persuasion tell themselves all the time. They don’t advocate or condone violence, it’s just that god’s law causes these things. And when it happens, they pretend that the people who did resort to violence never took all the words of condemnation as permission to commit violence.

Think about it: if it’s god’s will that homosexuals should experience a “day of grief”; if god’s law demands that “blood of this generation” must be shed, then the person who inflicts the violence is doing god’s will. They are a special tool of god!

Heck, it isn’t just permission to commit violence: it’s encouragement!

I had already guessed most of this about Mr. C before he began writing publicly about his reasons for opposing the decriminalization of gay sex and other topics back in 1990. And so I had already made my decision not to buy any more of his books. I didn’t post rants about him, nor try to organize boycotts of his work. If I was asked, I would say that I disagreed with what I perceived to be the underlying philosophy espoused by his work.

Once he did make his very public statements, I felt it was appropriate to go a step further and point out that Mr. C was a hypocrite and a bigot who advocated against the rights of myself and others. I would suggest that perhaps there were other writers whose works were more deserving of people’s money, but wouldn’t go further.

In the years since, he has continued to write and speak out against gay rights of all sorts, eventually becoming an officer for a large organization that says it is out to protect “traditional marriage.” They try to portray themselves as narrowly focused on marriage, but anyone paying attention to their rhetoric and some of the other causes they support, can see that they want to roll back the few rights gay people have won. He donates his own money to the cause, he has organized efforts that have raised millions of dollars for the cause. He has claimed victory for every anti-gay amendment, law, proposition, or initiative that has been passed in the last ten years.

He has, now, gone far beyond the point of simply stating his opinion and trying to persuade others to it. He has gone beyond that disingenuous tactic of saying he was opposed to violence while providing double-speak that actually encouraged it. He has helped spread distortions and outright lies about all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. His organization has refused to obey public disclosure laws regarding their election activities in several states. He continues to fight to prevent gays, lesbians, trans people, and bisexuals full equality before the law. He continues to put forward arguments to take away what rights have been extended.

So, for that reason, yes, I agree with the people who have been disappointed that DC Comics hired him to write a prominent new Superman series. Yes, I support the comic book shop owners who have said they will not sell comics written by him. I support the artist who decided not to illustrate his stories after learning of Mr C’s views and activities. I urge everyone I know not to buy things he writes, not to go see the movie that is being made of his most famous novel.

I re-iterate: this isn’t just about a difference of opinion regarding marriage equality. For over 20 years he has advocated for restoring laws that made it a crime for consenting adults to have gay sex in the privacy of their own homes, and against laws that protect people from being fired, evicted, or denied medical care just because they are gay. And he has done more than just advocate those things, he has taken action to make them happen. It is not hypocritical of us to advocate a voluntary boycott of his work, it is hypocritical of him and his apologists to decry a voluntary boycott while they are campaigning for laws that will take away jobs, housing, health care, and more from entire classes of people.

Orson Scott Card is a hypocrite and a bigot who uses distortions and outright lies to hurt innocent people. Those are the facts.

Romanticizing the exotic

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My Great-uncle Lyle used to tell the story of how his grandparents (my great-great grandparents) married. Great-great-grandpa had been raised a good Irish Catholic boy. He wanted to marry a Native American girl. His priest didn’t believe in interracial marriage, so they ran off to Kansas until they found a minister who would marry them. And that’s how we ended up being Baptists.

Once he told that story within earshot of his brother, my Great-uncle Roy. Roy said that wasn’t quite right. He’d been told that the state they lived in when they met didn’t allow interracial marriage, they’d had to run off to Missouri to marry, then settled in Kansas.

Lyle shrugged, said that great-great-grandma had said it was the priest. Then they both started speculating that it might have been something a bit less noble, such as that they were already living together, so the priest didn’t approve for non-racial reasons.

There are a few problems with the story. One: Missouri didn’t repeal it’s law against interracial marriage until the 1950s. Now, some of those laws only prohibited Whites from marrying Blacks, and didn’t specifically mention Native Americans. I haven’t been able to find out the specifics of Missouri’s law back in the 1880s, but it renders that part of the story a little suspect.

The other is that there’s some doubt about great-great-grandma’s ethnicity. Clearly she told her grandsons that she was full-blooded Choctaw. In the couple of photographs that have survived of her she certainly could pass for Native American. One of my cousins who is into genealogy has found contemporary documents that list her race as either Indian or Choctaw.

But going back one generation further, we find that at different times in his life her father claimed to be from the Choctaw tribe, and other times from the Cherokee. Her mother apparently told at least one person she was “half Indian” at least once. No official records list them as such, but then, since great-great-grandma’s father was born only four years after the passage of the Indian Removal Act, if they had recent Native ancestors, their families would have had reason to keep it secret, or at least minimize it.

Also, the geographical location of the families of both of great-great-grandma’s parents for several prior generations in northwestern Virginia, doesn’t make the Choctaw connection very likely, as the tribe’s traditional territory was south of Virginia.

Finally, records indicate Great-great grandma was born in Kansas in the county where she married Great-great grandpa. No indication of an elopement at all. He was born in Ohio, and appears to have met her after coming out west to “seek his fortune.”

A lot has been written about why some U.S. white families claim some Native American heritage when little evidence exists, and also why virtually no U.S. whites ever admit any African ancestry. I’m sure those sociological reasons play into our family’s excursion into this genealogical conjecture.

The whole thing amounts to a personal “just-so” story—an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative to explain a tradition, a biological trait, or a behavior. For instance, my Great-grandmother I. wanted white hair as she got older. Her hair stubbornly remained black, with only a very modest sprinkling of silver right up to the end. She always attributed it to “Mother’s people,” saying that her mother and maternal grandmother had dark hair that never went gray. My two great-uncles both took pride in their versions of the story because it seemed to cast our ancestors as independent people unfettered by societal conventions. Great-uncle Lyle usually brought up the story whenever someone in the family made any sort of racist comment, and concluding with an admonition against racism.

My amateur-genealogist cousin has uncovered a lot of family stories indicating that other descendants of our great-great-great grandparents would bring up the supposed Native American heritage as an excuse for being short-tempered; a bit less noble than my great-uncles’ take, but not really any more sensical.

For a long time I thought of the story as a sort of affirmation of my own non-heterosexuality. If these ancestors could defy the social and legal forces that condemned their love, raise five daughters who all went out to have families of their own (all seeming to live happy lives as productive members of society), then no one in my family had the right to condemn my love.

The narrative each generation of the family wove fit their own sensibilities, projecting our own notions about what is right and proper (and whether “proper” is a good thing or a bad thing) onto the previous generations’ stories. I don’t think that’s wrong, per se. I loved and admired my grandmother, great-grandparents, and great-uncles for various things they did while we were together, and am happy to keep their memories alive now that they’re gone. They were each attempting to do the same thing for the previous generations that I didn’t get to meet personally, and hoped that perhaps I would help keep those memories alive, too.

Memory isn’t the same thing as fact. Even in our own lives, so we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that memories passed down have taken on a life of their own that strays away from the purely factual.

Did my great-great grandparents elope? Doesn’t look like it. Was Great-great grandma Native American? Can’t verify it. Was Great-uncle Lyle correct to condemn racism? Absolutely.

Maybe his facts weren’t right, but the point he always made was that despite appearances, we’re all descended from the same big, tangled family tree. That it doesn’t matter where some of the intervening ancestors came from, because ultimately we’re all human. And that’s truth, which sometimes is different than fact.

This time it’s (not so) personal

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When I wrote about how people process history and, more specifically, how believable character motivation in fiction is when based upon distant historical events, a few people pointed to ethnic conflicts which have gone on for generations as a counterexample. I had almost talked about that in the original post, but decided that might be one digression too many.

It’s certainly true that such conflicts have raged on for many generations, sometimes spanning centuries. The key here, I think, is that word “spanning.” People aren’t just holding a grudge about the injustice visited upon an ancestor 11 centuries ago, they are holding a grudge about indignities and atrocities they have witnessed themselves (or experienced the aftereffects of themselves), which they perceive to be a continuation of hundreds of other injustices going all of the way back to that original one.

For instance, a young man may grow up hearing tales from a very young age about how his father was killed by those evil Freedonians when he was just a babe, just as a couple of uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, and so on where unjustly arrested, or tortured, or raped, or killed previously. The Freedonians have always hated the Sylvanians, he is told. Since he is a Sylvanian, they must hate him, too. Everything bad that happens to him in his life, he blames on the Freedonians, either directly because a Freedonian is present, or indirectly because he believes his hardships would be fewer if they hadn’t taken his father from him.

The historical narrative of the many past conflicts between Freedonia and Sylvania provide a context to his personal frustrations and disappointments. Tales of particularly egregious atrocities from the past serve as a rationalization for any actions against Freedonians he takes. Or excuses for any atrocities that others may point out Sylvania inflicted upon Freedonia.

There is also a sort of compound-interest effect. The young man was raised by people who had internalized their own victimization until it metastasized. People brimming over with hatred are not very good at nurturing. The more generations in a row this happens, the less likely each new generation is going to be to empathize with people they perceive as “other.”

The problem is that anyone who has not been raised in the same culture, has not witnessed similar injustices, has not experienced first hand the animosity between the two groups, has a very hard time understanding what the fuss is all about. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read or heard someone ask about troubles in the Middle East, or Subsaharan Africa, or Eastern Europe, “Why can’t they just come to a reasonable settlement?”

Which gets us back to the author’s difficulty.

In order to make a reader care as much about the injustices inflicted by the Freedonians as your Sylvanian protagonist, you have to put the reader in your protagonist’s shoes. It’s not enough to have one of your characters lecture another, “As you know, Bob, the Freedonians are a merciless, hateful people.” You have to show them being merciless. You have to show your protagonist suffering at their hands.

That requires telling the story of how these sorts of age-old hatred are perpetuated because they are renewed again and again with each new generation. Even then, most readers are going to see all those past actions as abstractions. They may sympathize with your protagonist, but they’ll also wonder why he can’t see how odd it is to hold a person living now responsible for actions that took place hundreds of years before that person was born.

Which is a good question to raise. There’s a lot of good drama you can wring out of that sort of situation. If that’s the kind of story you want to tell, go for it! But that means going all in. No half-measures. No long expository dump where one character lectures another about the 1200 year history of mutual failed (but not for lack of trying) genocide between Freedonia and Sylvania.

Show it, don’t tell it.

Not the cool one

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I love The Big Bang Theory. I didn’t expect to. In fact, when I read about the show before it first aired, I was convinced that not only would it be horrible, but that it would obviously be a collection of low-brow humor built around making fun of nerds.

And since I’m a nerd, freak, and a geek from way back, I just didn’t see the point.

Then a pair of friends—both nerds—told me how funny it was. As one said, “Yes, the humor is at the expense of the nerds, but it’s things that are true about nerds. Not only do I know people exactly like them, many times I’ve been the people just like them.”

As I watched it, I’ve had one realization over and over. Every time I start thinking that while I am nerdy, of the four central characters, I’m more like Leonard (the least socially awkward one), Sheldon (the über-est nerd) will do something that is exactly like me. Or I will say something that I realize would be totally in character for Sheldon to say.

For instance, today a friend made a comment on Twitter about President’s Day, and before I knew what I was doing, I had replied to point out that the official Federal holiday is called “Washington’s Birthday Observance.” President’s Day is a completely unofficial name adopted mostly by advertising people. Explaining that to someone is something I could easily see Sheldon doing on the show. Having dipped my toes into Sheldon-land, I might as well leap on in.

I’m old enough that I remember when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was passed by Congress (it was signed into law during the summer of 1968—between my first and second grades—though it didn’t go into effect until January of ’71). I have quite distinct memories of teachers explaining, after the law was passed, how Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday would no longer be observed as separate holidays, but that a Monday between them would be the new holiday.

Except not one fact in that sentence was true.

Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, has never been observed as a Federal holiday. Some states at various times have observed it, but as far as I have been able to tell, none of the states I lived in as a child was one of them. I could digress for a bit about how there are no national holidays, and why states are free to ignore federal holidays, and why a Lincoln’s birthday is controversial in some states, but let’s leave that for another day.

Washington’s Birthday, February 22, was observed as a holiday only in the District of Columbia beginning in 1879. It wasn’t until 1885 that an act of Congress declared it a holiday to be observed at all federal agencies and offices throughout the states and territories.

In the 1950s some citizens started lobbying to have March 4, the original Inauguration Day, declared a federal Presidents’ Day holiday to honor the office of the presidency. A bill to name both Lincoln’s Birthday and this March 4 Presidents’ Day as federal holidays in addition to the existing Washington’s Birthday got stalled in Congress in part because some felt that three federal holidays in such close proximity was too much.

By the time the Uniform Monday Holiday bill was introduced, the first draft did specify that the third Monday in February would be observed as Washington and Lincoln Day, but that draft never got out of committee. The bill that was actually passed named the third Monday in February Washington’s Birthday Observance. Lincoln’s Birthday wasn’t included or mentioned.

A couple of states do officially observe a Presidents’ Day, but neither does so in February. Massachusetts recognizes May 29 (John F. Kennedy’s birthday) as Presidents’ Day in honor of the four men from Massachusetts who have served as president thus far: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Calvin Coolidge, and JFK. New Mexico observes a Presidents’ Day to honor all who have served as President, but the holiday is designated as the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Most of the rest of the states recognize the third Monday in February as Washington’s Birthday. In Virginia the official name is George Washington Day. In Alabama, the official name is Washington and Jefferson Day, in honor of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In Arkansas the official name is George Washington and Daisy Gatson Bates Day, to honor both Washington and Daisy Bates, a civil rights activist.

Currently, only three states officially recognize Lincoln’s Birthday as a holiday: Illinois, Connecticut, and Missouri. All three observe it on the 12th, no matter what day of the week that date falls on.

So the next time someone calls it Presidents’ Day, you’re prepared to set them straight.

Because neither Sheldon nor I can be everywhere.

Repost: Living for 9/12

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On another blog, I posted this a few days before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I re-post now because, well, I haven’t come up with anything wiser in the years since:

Continue reading Repost: Living for 9/12 →

Surplus Population

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In A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge is trying to get rid of the men soliciting charity donations, he declares, “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population!” Later, the Ghost of Christmas Present hurls that line back at Scrooge, when Scrooge is worrying about Tiny Tim’s health. The notion of people’s lives being a surplus to be disposed of sounds harsh to us, but it was an accepted notion to many people at the time.

Long before Dickens wrote that line, in fact, before Dickens himself was born, the British Parliament passed the Chimney Sweepers Act 1788, which, among other things, forbid Chimney Sweeps from “hiring” apprentices less than eight years of age. Climbing boy (sometimes girls) where small children essentially sold by families too poor to feed all their kids to Chimney Sweeps. They climbed up through the elaborate and dirty ducts of industrial chimneys to clear and clean them. It was a hard and dangerous life. Most died before puberty. Virtually all that live past puberty died in their late teens from “a most noisome, painful and fatal disease” called Soot Wart, which was eventually identified as Chimney Sweep’s Cancer, the first identified industrial-caused cancer.

But a lot of them didn’t live long enough to succumb to the cancer, since the soot they literally lived in (one master chimney sweep once famously disparaged another because he actually allowed his climbing boys more than two baths a year) contains all sorts of nasty substances, including arsenic. Others got trapped in chimneys where if they were lucky they would die of asphyxiation before they were literally cooked to death.

Then there was the habit some bosses had of setting a fire once the boy was up to make sure he moved fast (if he didn’t work fast enough, he died from smoke inhalation).

Being a climbing boy wasn’t truly an apprenticeship. The only skill one learned was climbing chimneys, and that didn’t lead to better employment. They were never paid wages. And their room and board included a nightly routine of standing close to a fire and while having elbows and knees scrubbed with brine on a stiff brush (which toughened the skin into something that resembled an insect’s carapace). In Scotland Chimney Sweeps didn’t use climbing boys at all, but rather pulled sets of rags and specially designed brushes up through the chimneys one ropes. In 1803 a man named George Smarts invented a mechanical sweeping machine, but virtually no one in the U.S. or U.K. used it.

But the climbing boys system was cheaper. The 1788 act was never really enforced, neither were subsequent acts (1834, 1840) that set the age higher and called for various health and safety measures. One reason they weren’t enforced is because the enforcement mechanisms proposed in each bill were always amended out in order to get enough votes to pass. A very few Master Chimney Sweeps switched to the mechanical brush system. From time a politician or other somewhat prominent person would take up the cause, but sending boys up the chimneys was cheaper and mostly worked. The price of the suffering and death wasn’t factored in because, well, there were always more boys.

It wasn’t until 1875 when a Coroner’s Inquest first ruled the death of a boy in a chimney as manslaughter (rather than “death by misadventure”) that anything really changed.

Then there were the baby farming scandals of the 1870s, in which people who were supposed to be fostering children (many orphaned, but most were the children of unwed or widowed mothers who had to work in grueling factory conditions, and couldn’t care for their own children) were systematically murdering them.

Or people like H.H. Holmes, who’s “murder hotel” was shut down in 1894, but not before he murdered (then either dismembered and sold to medical schools, or incinerated) between 100 and 200 people (modern serial killers are amateurs by comparison).

We live in this delusion that our modern world is more brutal and uncaring than “the good old days.” An event like a theatre shooting happens, and we tut-tut about how much more dangerous our modern world is.

Never mind that murder rates have been going down for centuries. The murder rate, as a percentage of the population, is far, far lower in 2012 than it was in 1812. Never mind that in the 18th and 19th century the overwhelming majority of deaths were due to violence, accident, or illness that is now preventable. It is only in relatively recent times that most people can look forward to the probability of dying of old age, rather than any of those other things.

The times are not getting more brutal. People are not more uncaring than we used to be.

And the solution is definitely not to turn back the clock. We’ve been steadily decreasing the number of deaths suffered through violence, industrial accident, and so forth for a couple of hundred years by incrementally improving how we do things—and sometimes that means imposing regulations with real penalties.

Fear, itself

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In December, 1999, a U.S. Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington became suspicious of one passenger driving his car off a ferry from Canada, and asked him to step out of the car. While she was trying to get him to answer questions while she checked his passport, other customs agents searched the car, and found a large number of bags and bottles of suspicious substances. The driver fled on foot, was tackled a few blocks away, and arrested.

Experts quickly determined that the materials in the car were ingredients to build a very big bomb, and soon put the pieces together of a plot to set the bomb off at the Los Angeles International Airpot on New Year’s Eve.

In Seattle, a suddenly nervous mayor and city council feared that there might be more bombers out there, and announced they were considering canceling the New Year’s Eve fireworks display at the Space Needle, just in case. People were upset. Businesses that had spent a lot of money for the celebration were very upset. People argued that canceling the celebration would be the same as surrendering to the terrorists.

After bit of sturm und drang, the officials agreed to let the fireworks go forward. But the park around the Space Needle would be fenced off, so the public could not come in. Some private property owners offered to clear out a couple of nearby parking lots so people could gather there. And the fireworks happened.

And Mayor Paul Schell (whose embarrassing defeat in the primary election the next year has earned him a bit of immortality, as reporters in Western Washington now refer to the act of an incumbent failing to advance from the primary to general elected as being “Schelled”) earned a new nickname: Mayor Wimp.

The stupid part was that fencing off the park didn’t put anyone in any less danger. Since the parking lots were announced days in advanced, any theoretical bombers could have placed their bomb near one of those parking lots and caused a horrific number of deaths. The only thing that the fencing did was make sure that those tragic deaths would happen on private property, so the city would theoretically not be liable.

As if a good legal team couldn’t argue the city was still somewhat culpable because the city told people to gather at the parking lots.

It’s tempting, when some horrible thing like a bombing, a shooting spree, or a threat of such a thing happens, for people to run around frantically doing things to keep people safe. Just in case someone else is planning the same thing. Or in case someone decides to copy the sociopath.

Bank robber Willie Sutton (who stole about 2 million dollars during the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and spent more than half his life in jail) is said to have once answered that he picked banks because “that’s where the money is.” He probably never actually said those words, but they remain true nonetheless.

The Millenium Bomber wasn’t targeting LAX because he had a grudge against that airport. The Theatre Gunman didn’t target The Dark Knight Rises because he hates Batman movies. These places are picked because that’s where people are.

And the reason no one was killed in a bomb blast near the Space Needle on New Year’s Eve, 1999, wasn’t because nervous officials fenced off the park. It was because no bomber was targeting Seattle that holiday.

If we all suddenly decide not to got to the movies, the next nutjob will just figure out where the most people will be, and he’ll go there. Hiding isn’t a solution.

There isn’t an easy solution. We can look at better ways to enforce gun laws and better ways to deliver mental health care. We can try to pay a bit more attention to our surroundings. We can try to increase the amount of goodwill and mutual respect in society. Those things won’t cure the problem, but just like that Customs Agent who had a hunch, sometimes we’ll get lucky.

Parading

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Several years ago I wrote descriptions of three parades I’d attended in Seattle. The Seafair Torchlight Family Parade had been full of drunkenness, near-nudity (and more than a few flashed nipples and butts), and many floats built around a sexual innuendo or erotic pun. The Fremont Arts Council Solstice Parade had featured (as it does every year) the nude bicyclists, among other things. While the Pride Parade that year had had a lot of families, several church groups, fully-clothed people dancing, one large group with their adorable Corgi dogs… and in general a lot less nudity and sexual innuendo than I had seen the year before at the Seafair Family parade.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t nudity and innuendo, along with brightly-colored feathers, beads, and way more body glitter than you can imagine. But the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Pride Parade and Freedom Day March (if I am correctly recalling what the official title was that year) contained a lot less flaunting of sexuality than either of the other two.

Another big difference between the Pride Parade and those others is a tradition that’s been around since the very first: as the parade goes by, members of the community that have been watching step off the curb and join, performing the simple (yet significant) act of walking up the street proclaiming that you refuse to keep hiding in the closet. That’s how a dozen fully clothed people with Gay Pride signs who started marching up New York City’s Fifth Avenue that June morning in 1970 became a crowd of thousands of Gay men and Lesbians by the time it reached Central Park.

It’s not the same closet that each of us is refusing to return to. The first time I joined the march, I was only at the, “I’m not sure where I fit, exactly, but I know I’m not heterosexual and I’m ready to stop hiding” stage. A couple years later I was at the “Yeah, I’m Gay or Queer or whatever you call it; You have a problem with that?” Then I mellowed to the “Yep! I’m Gay!” which quickly became “What do you mean, you didn’t know we’re Gay?”

Others march to say, “I’m way too fabulous for any label!” While others march to say, “People I knew and loved have died, but I’ve survived, and I will not let you forget them!” or “No matter how many times you beat me down, I’m standing back up!” Others join the march to say, “I’m not gay or bisexual or any of those things, but people I love are, and if you have a problem with them, then you’ve got a problem with me!”

And because there are people who do have problems with us, because kids are bullied (sometimes to death) just because other people think they might be one of us, because we’ve come so far, because we’ve still got battles before us, because each and every person is a miracle, because no one should be ashamed to love, we need to keep having these parades.

So, let’s celebrate!

Failing to learn from history…

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Growing up in Southern Baptist Churches (though not, technically, in the South), I was taught that the denomination was formed during the Civil War. Because there was an actual war going on, annual conventions couldn’t meet. Also, I was told, a lot of the northern churches were mixed up in politics and had been looking for an excuse to ditch the southern churches who were more concerned with missionary work.

Later, I learned that almost every last one of those details was utterly false.

The Southern Baptist Churches split off from the nationwide Triennial Baptist Convention 15 years prior to the Civil War. The primary reason they split was that the Southern Churches were pro-slavery. They were extremely pro-slavery, arguing that God picked which people were born one race or another because he knew which ones needed to be subservient, and which needed to be in charge. Most of the people who attended Baptist churches in the North were anti-slavery, and thought that all humans, being God’s children, should be equal before the law.

Continue reading Failing to learn from history… →

Elbow room

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I was running late, then the bus was late. When it arrived it was much much much more crowded than usual, so we were packed in like sardines.

This is day four of antibiotics for me, and I’m feeling more human each morning. I wasn’t the only person in the office either working from home because of illness or taking sick days over the last two weeks, so everyone’s asking each other how they’re recovering, et cetera. All of which caused one co-worker to point out that a good method to get a little space on a crowded bus is to sneeze.

I wish I’d thought of that this morning. Continue reading Elbow room →