The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon September 21st, 2007

Brian M., who always makes useful and wise comments here has a lengthy discussion of my previous post, which I hope you will all read. I actually agree with much of it, and appreciate it. Where we differ is in our assessment of the power of individual action, and as I was composing a reply, rather rapidly since Yom Kippur begins at sundown, it occurred to me that I have never told this story on my blog, and should.

My mother and step-mother are lesbians. They have been together since 1979, when I was 7 years old, and my sisters and I grew up in their household. By the time my sister and I knew what lesbians were and this was something unusual, we were made aware in a whole host of ways that this was a dangerous thing in society. My mother and step-mother were very cautious about public evidence of their sexual preference, from necessity. We kept an empty bedroom that was my step-mother’s “official” room, so that no one who visited would know they slept together. When my parents divorce was being finalized, both father and mother warned us seperately not, under any circumstances, to mention my mother’s sexual preference to the judge who decided custody – because despite the fact that both parents agreed with and had a mutually acceptable arrangement, the judge had the right, power and precedent to take us away from our mother because of her sexual preference.

When it became known at school that my mother was gay, this was a matter of some great violence – my sister and I were both regularly assaulted by schoolmates who had strong opinions on this subject. We got in more than a few fights, and got used to running home from school. There were children not allowed to play with us, or come to our house. There were occasional and frightening acts of anonymous homophobia. There was danger that either could lose their jobs working with children if the circumstances were known. In our religious community, there were dark comments about the inappropriateness of their participating in religious rituals, and no effort to make these comments out of their children’s hearing.

All of this occurred in Massachusetts, which was and remains probably the most comfortable state in the Union for gay people to live in – which at the time was the only state with a publically gay congressman and other visible gay public figures. Being gay was dangerous, physically, culturally. It had, to a large degree, to happen in secret.

All this was true when I was 8. By the time I was 18, my step-mother had spoken publically at my high school on being gay, and there was a nascent gay and lesbian student’s association, sanctioned by the high school. The acts of homophobia, casual violence and threat and the muttering in church went away, as though they had never been. Responses were positive. Both mother and step-mother were out at work and everywhere else. My mother and step-mother were permitted to raise foster children, and were overwhelmingly praised for providing them with a good and healthy environment to live in. It is hard to describe the difference in the culture, and this is not merely my personal perception, or the difference between childhood and near-adulthood. I know dozens of people who confirm that their world simply, deeply, changed for gay people.

A little less than a decade after that, my mother and step-mother were married in their church, and a couple of years later, they were married in the city courthouse of their community, and their picture appeared in the newspaper. All of this in 20 years. It was not perfect. It was not pure – homophobia still exists, marriage is not legal in most places, there has been backlash and there is still violence. But the difference between today and 1979 is the difference between night and day.

Brian is certainly right, it would be every kind of hubris to imagine that I could change the world alone, or that any single individual action could be the lever that moved society. And yet, societies change, often radically and rapidly. It would be wrong to identify one single mover that made that change – was it Oprah and Donohue who put gay people on their stages? Was it the Drag Queens at Pride? Was it the slow opening up of people to their parents and families in ways that made them think, “Oh, I cannot generalize on this subject now – it applies to me?” Was it Barney Frank or Roseanne kissing a woman on tv? Was it political action and marches or everyday things people did in their daily lives, when they turned to a colleague and said, “Meet my partner, James.” I don’t know. But I do believe that every person my mother and step-mother came out to, every time they insisted that we are a normal family, every time I said “my Mom’s a lesbian – so what?” that made a difference too. It is not the difference of heroics, or hubris, or single actors. It is the difference of small things, and it was all the difference in the world to me.

When I came out as bisexual in college, I experienced difficulty and challenge, but the overwhelming support of a community, and nothing like what it must have been for my own mother at my age. She, after all, lived in a society where she could literally not know that she was gay, because being gay was so alien and unacceptable that she, like many people of her generation, married a man. I, thankfully, never had to live in that society – and yet she’s only 22 years older than I am.

This was more than just that people did, as Brian put, the best worst thing. This was people doing the *RIGHT* thing, and transforming society to make it far better than it was before, and quite rapidly, too. And because I’ve seen this, I believe it possible. It is not possible to stop all the effects of climate change. It is not possible to do it without pain and discomfort – there was pain and discomfort in the change of society around gays and lesbians. It is not possible for me personally to change the world by myself, except in the tiny and incremental ways that ordinary people do by doing, to the absolute hilt, all the ordinary things they are capable of doing.

Sharon

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Sharon September 21st, 2007

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

-W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939)

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39236

William Cline’s recent study on the implications of climate change for agriculture provides further evidence, just in case there was any real doubt, that climate change represents one of the greatest acts of human evil in history. Without intention, but without caring enough to consider and assess the consequences of their actions, the wealthiest, best educated, most priveleged, luckiest people on earth are going to kill millions, perhaps billions of the poorest, most desperate people on earth by their actions. We are going to commit an act of murder that exceeds anything ever accomplished by the Nazis, Pol Pot, Stalin or any of the great “villains” of history. We are, of course, still denying moral responsibility, or any connection to the bad guys.

And while we do it, we’re going to sit around and debate whether it is “fair” for us to have to give up our appliances, our car rides and our plane trips to visit family. Because, after all, such discussions show our virtue. They show that we’re very seriously willing to actually begin to consider not killing these people…we’re just not ready to actually stop *doing* it. Give us time, we say…give us time. Soon, I’m sure, we’ll stop, but if we stopped now, it would be hard for us. We’d lose our jobs, our economy would slow down, we’d miss our families. And of course, these are real hardships. And it isn’t fair. It is merely more fair for us than for people paying a higher price, who have never derived any benefit from it.

Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, people with families rather like yours live desperately on the margins, playing the odds so that they might eat, knowing, of course, that if the wheel lands on black (as it increasingly does because of our habits) they and their families and children will die.

http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2954407.ece

In Subsaharan Africa, which has the highest birthrates in the world, the population will grow and food growing capacity will fall. So people who already eat minimal diets will see more of their babies die in infancy, watch more children succumb to illness our own kids would shake off, see more people suffer and die before their time. All so we can have our cars and decide how much meat we want to eat in the name of personal choice.

We want to believe ourselves charitable and kind. We want to believe ourselves just and honorable. And we try to be. But we seem unable to overcome the enormous disconnect between people who are dying because of our actions, people we are killing, because we haven’t found a good way out of our way of life, and ourselves. I am not sure how we should bridge this gap, only that we must.

Over the last 150 years, the rich world has engaged in a massive transfer of wealth from the “have-nots” to the “haves.” We have plundered the natural resources of the Global South, and continue to do so. And now that we have most of what we want from them, we will simply destroy those resources, and the lives that depend on them. We will turn their forests to desert, their food producing lands to wasteland.

Were these people who lived in our towns and our nation, we would be horrified. But somehow, we’re not. We say we believe these people are real like us, but we do not live our lives that way. We choose not to live our lives that way. We act as though the deaths we are responsible for are secondary, and as though those who remind us of them are being needlessly unkind at mentioning that our actions cause the death of innocent people. After all, we need support, help, accomodation, kindness in making our transitions from plastic to cloth. Yes, people are dying in these poorer parts of the world, but it is cruel to mention it, because it might make well-intentioned people feel bad.

And thus we talk about more and more complex ways of “fixing” the problem. Here, we trumpet, is how we can reduce household energy use by 70% – it just involves the production of a few thousand more pounds of greenhouse gasses per household…each. Here, we are told, is the way we can keep our cars on the road without any inconvenience to ourselves…and reduce greenhouse emissions. Here is our plan for allowing us to keep our houses warm and toasty and machines doing our dishes while we reduce greenhouse gasses – because, of course, inconvenience to ourselves is unthinkable. And while we pretend we will accomplish these things, we have more than 150 old style coal plants in plans or production in the US. Each one will produce the electricity to run our computers and washing machines, to give us those glorious
conveniences that allow us the time to read blogs and dress nicely. And people who have had no breakfast and no lunch will give their weeping children grass to eat, until the grass all turns brown and dies.

Whenever I write these posts, I’m told I should keep things positive, that I sound too angry, that people need to be gently reassured, since they are doing the best they can. And maybe that’s true, that I’m the wrong messenger, because I do get angry – at myself as much as anyone else. I still have a car, although I drive it vastly less. There are lives on my hands. And I do not wish to be the kind of person who has preventable, eminently unnecessary deaths on my hands.

But I’m not totally sure that the warm cuddly narrative of “we’re all doing our very best job, and we should take our time and do it gradually” is sufficient. What for the people who cannot wait for us, whose lives hang in the balance NOW – for the people who will die tomorrow because of today’s greenhouse gas emissions. Do they get a voice, a vote? Does their fear and anger even count? Do we hope that somewhere, the starving people will say, “Well, you tried. You bought some offsets and used the cloth bag. That was good enough.” How would you feel, were it your life, your child’s life?

Tonight begins Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of Repentence, when we remember our dead and ask forgiveness for our collective sins. We beat our breasts, literally, and name the sins that have been spread among our community. On Yom Kippur, there is no escape from the notion that you are responsible for your actions. On Yom Kippur, there is no pretending that the dead do not follow us home and haunt our lives. On Yom Kippur, all the sins of one’s community and fellow Jews belong to us, personally – we expiate, to the extent we can, the sins of others as well as our own.

The rich world has a great number of sins to right. The first step, we believe, to making your sins right is to undo the harm that you have done, or compensate those who you have harmed. But we also believe you cannot make amends to the dead – the dead are dead, and no forgiveness is possible.

The only thing we can do is to cease making more dead. The only thing we can do is to stop killing. The only thing we can do is to recognize that this cannot be a question of comfortable accomodation, that while we can warmly congratulate ourselves on the steps we take, we must always be driven and prodded forward- further and faster -by the reality that lives as valuable as our own are on the line. We must do what generations of humans have tried, and often failed (but occasionally succeeded) at doing – treating others as we would be treated, doing to others nothing that is hateful to us.

And we must stop seeking the perfect technology, the 50K solution, the magic bullet. Instead, we must, as Auden says, love one another, or die.

Shalom,

Sharon

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