Saturday, June 27th, 2015 -( 10°C / 50°F – Sunny & bright with last night’s rain drops evaporating from the fences in our little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 7:00 am )-
— Big news yesterday – The U.S Supreme Court’s decision made gay marriages legal all over the U.S.A. It’s about time. -No, it’s way past time. Way past time that a critical mass of us saw past the brain-freezing labels and recognized the living, breathing, feeling, loving human beings that some people who want to maintain their delusional power over us have been doing their damnedest to convince us were God-hating monsters, or at the very least, mind numbing statistics.
— I believe I was about twenty one years old when one of my friends sat in my car as I was driving him somewhere and painfully unburdened himself of the fact that he’d realized he was gay. I went into shock. My first reaction was to wonder how the hell I would ever be able to relate to him again. Yup, the rock and roll soundtrack of my life and times was singing, “Oh, my mind keeps going through them changes-” and I spent two or three days with all sorts of thoughts and feelings spinning around and my whole world view went on a roller coaster ride. Then, somehow, I woke up one morning and realized that the universe was still an unimagineably beautiful place. Cool morning breezes could still raise my spirits without warning. My friend had not grown horns and a tail and begun spitting deadly acid or breathing fire on everything that mattered to me. He was still the same person I had grown to like, who could read something I wrote and tell me why it stunk, or just smile and say, “It’s times like this when I know why you’re my favourite writer-” and make me feel like my life actually meant something positive to this world. And basically, maybe most importantly, I knew who I was, and who I lusted after, I knew he wasn’t about to hit me on the head with something and rape me while I was helpless, and I knew I wasn’t going to catch his condition from him. The next time I saw him neither one of us had to spend more than the first minute or two worried that our friendship had imploded. He told me that he chose to ‘come out’ to me first, because he was pretty sure I wouldn’t snap into a psychotic frenzy and kick the living cement out of him or unleash my lightning wit and rip his struggling self-esteem to bits of smouldering cinders with a few deadly words. And he was just the first.
— When I was revamping the web site for friends in the Connecticut Green Party, one ‘heterosexual as all hell’ type activist invited members of a group called “Love makes a family” to one of the local meetings. A couple very normal looking- maybe more attractive than ‘average’- women with no obvious neurotic fear of admitting who they were told us they were lobbying to get the Connecticut Legislature to make it a law that gay and lesbian couples could adopt children, or ‘win’ the custody of children that were biologically theirs from a heterosexual marriage. The green party guy who had invited them to speak to us was a typically messed up victim of PTSD and the US Armed Services, and the VA hospital ‘system’, and his politics were left leaning and he was an outspoken activist for all kinds of human rights, and he was stunned almost speechless when, at the next local meeting, the executive board like members of the green party announced that they had decided that they didn’t want to be seen as hitching their wagon to such a possibly unpopular cause. He gasped, stared at the floor for the rest of the meeting and later looked at me and said, “Well- I actually thought that would be a no-brainer- Ya know – with everything this party stands for-?” and walked away shaking his head and talking to himself.
— And then, we’ll jump forward in time. I had a few health issues, my father, who’d been so healthy as a child that he thought we were faking it when we came down with the measles for crying out loud- who’d been suffering so badly with asthma that he probably developed as a fireman when he pulled dead kids out of burning buildings and dead workers out of toxic chemical pools at the local factory that made brake shoes and donated landfill that the town happily accepted and then bragged that they had the only ‘fire-proof’ streets they knew of- began going downhill faster and faster, his doctors couldn’t take him down off his steroids to give his body the break it needed, and after twenty years of this his heart started failing. He had two heart attacks in three years. The first one earned him a pace maker. The second one killed him. (No, he wasn’t gay, he admitted there was a time when he thought that I might be- which would have shocked the bleep out of me if he’d said anything at the time. He did joke every once in a while that, no, he didn’t want to have anything to do any ‘Homoes’ – and grinned, “Thursday is my day for guys-” ) But after his death, and a couple other shocking deaths. -And a couple of world-view rattling ‘events’ like the attack on the twin towers, which happened fifty miles from my parents’ home, and then the mounting evidence that ‘nine-eleven’ might not have been caused solely by jets flown by terrorists who probably could never have steered the damned jets that accurately at that speed – and then more news about the Oklahoma City, Murrah Federal Building, bombing, where a close family friend’s father’s job took him in and out of that building all day, most days and we held our breath as she kept trying to get through to anybody in Oklahoma City to find out if her father was still alive- or in the hospital with life threatening injuries, or what?- And we found out that -One- nurses in Oklahoma City had treated burn victims, -US Armed Services special forces guys- who had gone into the Murrah Building and removed remote control detonators that hadn’t gone off like they were supposed to, and a few of those did go off, in the soldiers’ hands- And -Two- the US Air Force did a lot of testing with Fertilizer bombs like the one that was supposed to have blown that building apart, and discovered that a fertilizer bomb in a truck out in front of a building could not possibly do the kind of damage that had we saw- And one guy said that Timothy McVeigh, the self-confessed bomber, might not actually have been executed to death. The guy said McVeigh was convinced that his ‘execution’ would be a show, that he’d be revived later and shipped off to somewhere where he would continue to work in covert operations with a real celebrity status and enjoy the hell out of the rest of his life free to blow things up and kill lots of people for fun and profit. — & I have a cousin who lives in Littleton, Colorado, whose two step daughters were high school aged and matched the names of two friends that one hysterical young woman in the first reports we got was screaming might be still inside the school and might be dead- she didn’t know. — We did get through to my cousin right away that day, we got the news almost as fast as they did out there. And the two step daughters went to the other high school in town. — And now there’s speculation that some potential mass killers are given psycho active drugs and deliberately manipulated into their rampages by ‘rogue elements’ connected with government security agencies that want total control over us, and have been working on it since they brought Nazi scientists and devious fascist puppet master types into this ‘great country of ours’ after we ‘won’ world war two. I can’t say that the last ‘scenario’ is as plausible as insiders bringing down the twin towers and blaming it on inept terrorists, and the buildings falling straight down in a manner that seemed impossible – And how about that other building? And where the hell is the evidence that they shipped out of town in a big hurry, and why did they do that, instead of standing there with the ‘smouldering’ gun type evidence? And I can believe that a truck full of fertilizer bombs couldn’t possibly blow the hell out of a building it was parked next to- And the point of this paragraph has nothing to do with equal marriage rights for all – I just want to let you know that the last twenty years rattled my soul with all the power of a psychic atomic bomb going off inside my head.
— But I found Love. Real Love. With a real live human woman, and went through all the hell of becoming a permanent resident and then citizen of Canada to be with her. Compared to the other doo doo I’d been through, the hoops I had to jump through and the -every time we turn around, they want more money, while they won’t let me work, in fact, if they catch me working- they’ll deport me- compared to the conspiracies bringing down buildings and getting draconian laws passed with my freedom loving countrymen not only surrendering their freedom and privacy, but accusing anybody who squawked, or complained that something was not quite above board with that- of being a bleep bleeped terrorist sympathiser – hey, the hoops I had to jump through to live in Canada were a piece of cake.
— But-! The wild and crazy love of my life needed a medical test that needed a trip to a special office in Toronto. And I went with her for moral support- While we were sitting together in the waiting room, waiting for her turn, we were approached by someone we thought had to be another patient, who looked like she could have been either homeless or one step away from something like that. She looked at us and asked, “Are you Christian?” -Trying not to wince, and having a ‘thing’ about telling the truth- I said, “Yes.” This woman nodded and said she was part of some church and she just wanted us to know that all good Christians should be worried that if ‘they’ made gay marriages legal, then the devil will win, we knew that- didn’t we? – But her church was having a campaign and wanted to invite as many good devil hating Christians to come to their meetings as they could – (and she didn’t say a word about trying to get us to voluntarily give up lots of whatever income we might have, but I could imagine that would happen if we’d ever been stupid enough to go to any of their meetings) and she smiled and told us, that (then U.S. President) George W Bush was going to save us, he was on ‘our side’, but they still need as many good Christians to come along and make our voices heard- and she kept smiling a very weird smile, and kept nodding her head, and I got the really creepy feeling that she might have been an actual marionette, with some even creepier ‘individual’ pulling her strings, and the animatronics guys had almost made her look perfectly human and perfectly reasonable.
——— And now, today, with lots of people around the world believing that the U.S. Supreme Court has just made a giant step forward toward world sanity- I can’t get the image of that poor woman out of my mind. Propaganda specialists had worked overtime to convince her that fire-breathing devils would jump up out of the ground and run around stabbing people with pitchforks if ‘the free world’ ever allowed gay marriages to become legal.
——— And that’s just one more weapon in ‘their’ divide and conquer bag of tricks.
— I remember hearing about the ‘Tribulations’ that evangelicals screamed were coming at us. There would be wars and rumors of wars. Best friends would be turning on each other. There’d be earthquakes and starvation and people dying of thirst everywhere. I just never thought that any U.S. Government agency, or its -plausible deniability- ‘rogue agents’ would be behind it.
— So- now what? A lot of good people are celebrating. They have a right to. They’ve always had that God-given right. Now their government agrees with that. But I’m wondering about the poor, manipulated, terrified people whose only ‘crime’ is that they believed what their preachers told them- Are these poor people sitting in a corner? Shaking in their boots? -Terrified, and ready to jump when the wrong person gets up with the wrong message and tries to move them to some kind of insane action?
— How many ‘other shoes are about to drop’?
— Sigh.
— Very soon after I came to Canada, originally as a visitor, my friends in the ‘states’ began telling me that I was in the right place, that things down there were getting crazier all the time. The last couple times we went down there on a visit, we could feel the tension mounting almost as soon as we crossed the border. We have spiritual friends who tell us they can’t watch television news any more if they want to hang onto any measure of peace of mind.
— And in other news, yesterday. They reported that ISIS (which began as a puppet group/spin-off of Al-Qaeda, which was created and guided by the US Central Intelligence Agency —) was probably behind three suicide bombing attacks on three continents. I later thought that maybe I’d missed something because two of those attacks took place in Africa. Maybe somebody blew something up in Asia? or Somewhere else?
——— But at least I can feel good for the people I know and care about who are waving rainbow flags and enjoying a bright moment right now.
———And I’m wondering just how big a stick Teddy Roosevelt would think I should carry around with me.
~~~~~ Jim