2016-17: From Conflict to ...?

As we move on to the second millennium's late teen years I am struck by many things. As always as one beginning ends and another starts anew, we reflect. Through the power of social media, it is easy for people to share these reflections. Technology also makes it a simple thing to see your own reflections from years gone by. These reflections tell us as much about ourselves as they do the year itself.

Take myself for example. If you look simply at my posts on New Year's Eve throughout the last several years, one thing is fairly common: regardless of the year I've had, I'm always optimistic about the future. On good years, I feel the next will be even better. During rough times, it is a hopeful outlook towards things to come. I see this replicated by many of the people in my life. It comes as no real surprise given my love of optimism, but is still interesting to see so simply.

I see many others who want to have a hopeful view, but can't quite bring themselves to do so. Statements of: "Well here's to 2017. Can't be any worse than this year..." and the like give into the idea that things are bad, but also cling to the hope that the renewal will have a positive effect on their life or the world.

Still others focus completely on the year itself. This can be a dim view or a bright sunny one, but focuses exclusively on the past. Some of these pour forth a positive message in a time when the world seems anything but. An brilliant example of these came from the love of my life, in fact. Though it's not the way I normally express the change of the year, it is in fact my favorite type to read.

So what about 2016? Well this year is definitely an interesting one to examine. The 2000s "sweet 16" turned out to be as full of turmoil, and dare I say it, growing pains. It's almost benal, but for many people including myself, it was a year of incredible highs and devastating lows. In retrospect, I'm going to call it the Year of Conflict. As a political activist, many of my conflicts are probably obvious. For one of the first times, I found myself in actual conflict with people who in the past have held similar viewpoints. Later, I found myself embroiled in the conflict of facts vs opinions. In my
personal life, I fought against our family's economic situation. My community faced the most blatant conflict with the real threat of violence. This barely scratches the surface, but gives an insight into what I feel was a similar struggle for people throughout the country, no matter what side of any of these conflicts you were on.

To end here would place me squarely in the "dim view of the past" category I mentioned earlier. Luckily for me, there is the other side of conflict. Though conflict is hard and oftentimes painful, it does have benefits. It builds strength. The old adage of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" really is the truth. Through the challenges this year, I found myself growing professionally, expanding my creativity, finding love in unexpected strangers, and strengthening my relationship. I would never wish for conflict, but when presented with it, I'm glad of what I came away with.

This year, I end with a new fiancé, a new job, the framework for a fledgling company, and a solid foundation for my own novel. I will end this year, and start the new with some of my closest friends. I will laugh, and I will likely cry. I will mourn the loss of those we lost. I will feel a small tremor of fear for what can happen to the world of tomorrow, but I will look across the city with the same thing I always do, hope.

I cannot tell you what next year will be. I can tell you that we will be renewed, but we will also take with us the good and bad from this year. It is easy to say it's a clean slate, but the reality is that there is never a true fresh start. Rather than starting over this year, I resolve to bring forth the greatest that this year had to offer, and leave behind the rest. Lay down the conflict, but keep the strength, the love and do my best to make them grow. Yea, I'll toast to that.

The Surprising Problem with Trump's Speech

Like many people, I steeled myself and sat down to what was expected to be another night of complete insanity at the Republican National Convention. I mean for the past several days, we've had near violence break out over a sign that said "No Racism. No Hate." We've heard people called Satan, criminal, and seen discrimination come to epic heights. Putting Trump on the stand was guaranteed to take us to a whole new level.

Except it didn't.

Now don't get me wrong, I hated the speech. I was insulted when he claimed he would protect the LGBTQ community from external threats, especially while the Republican platform had its most anti-LGBT platform in history. I felt that there was, in fact a new level of pandering from Trump. But beyond that, the biggest problem with Trump's speech, is that it sounded good.

I don't mean good like Martin Luther King. I mean good as in it appealed to some sort of emotional self-preserving side that exists in all of us. He didn't fall back on lies. In fact, it may have been one of his most honest speeches yet. Most of his facts were actually real. For once, he didn't draw violently divisive lines. He didn't get angry. He didn't go off the rails.

And that is terrifying.

As I re-read the speech this morning, Britain flashed before my eyes. Here were all the exact same arguments that got people voting for the Brexit. Putting ourselves first. Stop trying to support the world until we fix home. Save the lower class. Make our country great again. Some baser part of my instinct wanted to nod along with the idea of roads and bridges that were actually modern. Jobs given to people who needed them. Crime being lowered.

And therein lies the problem. Much like we saw in the UK, Americans can easily want all of the things that he's talking about. We want everything to be better. And it is really easy to say that the only reason we're not reaching our potential is because of those "other" people. Yes, focus here first. That makes sense. It doesn't even matter that 90% of what he talked about doesn't fall to the President to make changes on. It sounds good.

Humans have an intrinsic need to feel good about themselves. It's easy to think: "My problem isn't me, its that circumstance, or that person working against me." "Leave me my gun so I can be in control of my safety." "Let me spend my own money instead of giving it to some bureaucrat to make decisions over." "Let me make my street safe before I worry about another country."

The problem is that while all of this sounds wonderful, it's false. The world doesn't exist in a series of separated city-states. That age has passed. Our world is too large and too connected to live in a bubble. Attempting to build walls to separate us, and choose who is "good" and who is "bad" only makes it so that we're isolated from a world that we need as much as it needs us. America has some of the most diverse resources in the world, and yet we're still not a self-sustaining country. We need trade. We need allies. When something is unstable in the world, ignoring it will only allow it to spread. And yes, that means eventually spread to us in our magic bubble. Ask Europe about how staying isolated works when an actual threat is looming.

"Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo..." This statement got a lot of cheers. Close the borders to "bad" people. Only trade with people who do what we want. These themes resonated again and again. America First. The United Kingdom said the same thing. They're regretting it already, and little has actually gone into effect yet. History shows us it doesn't work. Fact tell us this is a false sense of security.

But it sure sounds good.

Let's hope as this election cycle continues, we can break through the sound bytes and realize what all these great sounding things would actually do to us in the long run, before it's too late.

Senseless

I had literally written an entire post for today, and then ended up deleting the entire thing. Perhaps it was Facebook's Safety Check sending my 30th update of the day as my friends checked in one by one to say that it was ok. Maybe it was Donald Trump's celebratory tweet, or maybe it was the incredibly thoughtful posts that so many of my friends, both within the LGBT community and without have been spreading around. Likely it was a great combination of these things that made me feel that my thoughts were too clinical, and in some ways far too nice.

I am tired of these tragedies. This one hit closer to home for me than anything since 9/11. People are calling this attack senseless. It's a phrase thrown around a lot, and seems so full of sympathy. "This was simply senseless." This shooting was tragic, but it wasn't senseless. In fact for us to say it's senseless belies the truth of the situation. The truth in which too many people in this country have said "this is ok."

This shooting was a targeted attack. It was both an act of terror and an act of hate. This man came into a space that for so many people was one of the only places they felt free and safe to be themselves, and he deliberately attacked them. Over 100 people were attacked by this man. It wasn't a crime of passion, it wasn't in the heat of the moment. It wasn't senseless. He knew exactly what he was doing, and what he'd hoped to accomplish. And he did it well.

The main problem is that in many ways, what he did was ok to a lot of people. Look at the Lt. Governor's tweet about us reaping what we sow. Trump's call for more anti-Islam hate. Hell look a bit closer to home, where the Governor of Florida had signed into law a bill that stripped all adoption rights from LGBT individuals, because they "weren't fit to be parents."

When our elected officials are allowed to do things like this, they are being allowed to set the stage for what just happened. You can't constantly say that someone is less than someone else without also diminishing their basic humanity. I'm sure that Omar (the suspected shooter) didn't feel like he was killing real people. He'd been led to believe in his hate, that they were something else, they were "the enemy." This happened to the LGBT community. But we set the stage for it to happen to a lot of different people. Being different can't be equated with being lesser. One religion isn't right or wrong. One race isn't good or evil.

This Presidential election season has shown that we allow our hatred for things different to run deeply. So few people were able to converse about facts and issues without demonizing the opposition. Sometimes violence occurred. In terrifying instances, it was encouraged. Candidates were not called on just their issues, but who they were. Their sex, their age, their families. It's all the same thing. Anytime we allow someone to be cast as something less than equal, we open the floodgates, and I want to see them slammed shut.

I am overwhelmed at the support and emotional posts that people are spreading, and I hope to see them continue. I hope that as this news cycle ends and this terrible story starts to fade into the background, that we can continue to support ideals of hope and humanity instead of divisiveness and hate. Maybe then we can have less of these acts that we have to claim are so senseless to make ourselves feel better.

State of the... Union? Part I- Black and White

Obama addressed this in his most humble moment in the speech saying that, “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency – that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There’s no doubt a President with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.” It's important to note that he rightfully doesn't call out the Republicans. He calls out himself, and the nation as a whole. This is important, because it shows the truth of the situation. 

Last night we saw President Obama make his eighth and last State of the Union address. As promised, it was different than most, particularly being notably shorter and focusing more on the big picture than individual policy mandates. This was a strong choice in many ways, especially given that this kind of speech is what got America on board with Obama back in 2004. Now there's been a lot of commentary on the speech, and I have little desire to add my voice to that great ocean. What I'd rather discuss is the issue lightly brought up, but profoundly impacting the night: our political parties.

Before the speech even began, news commentators spent a lot of time talking about the nature of the room: it's potential hostility given the decrease in Democrats over the last several years, and Paul Ryan's role in the night. In his first year as Speaker, he received a lot of critique on his responsibilities. He joked beforehand that he'd worked on his poker face. As the speech began, the room did almost exactly what you expected. The Democrats looked engaged, the Republicans bored. Like most of his fellows, Ryan clapped a total of 4 times that I noticed, all on issues that had nothing to do with actual policy. When the speech wrapped up, the commentators said that these days you pretty much only get applause from the President's party, and that despite the nature of the speech, not much changed in that regard. They also said that questioning and polling showed that if you were an Obama supporter, this was lauded as an incredible speech, and if not it was a complete failure. No real middle ground was found.


The last few years have been some of the least productive congressionally. The reason is simple: our party-line voting has gone off the charts. Whatever divisiveness we worked hard to build up against each other during Bush has become finely honed over the last decade. Compromise is a thing mostly only mentioned as an afterthought when something fails. "Well, they wouldn't compromise...," etc. Reading Facebook political posts show that voters are no different. Lay down almost any issue, and the reactions are always split by party affiliation.

What's most terrifying to me is that even the truth can be changed via party lines. Hilary has great examples of this. She either broke the laws with emails, and lied about Benghazi, or both were hyped up farces. Which you believe will almost exclusively be based upon party lines. The problem is that only one is true. Now I can't claim to be in the field enough to know what actually happened in those scenarios. What I do know is that only one can possibly be true. When political arguments try to change the nature of facts, everyone loses.

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were some of the most politically divided individuals in our nations history. And yet, during their time, they were still able to build a nation. The reason wasn't because they could agree on everything- or much of anything for that matter- but because they were able to ultimately find common ground, and compromise. As Obama stated, "...democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic. Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise, or when even basic facts are contested, and we listen only to those who agree with us."

Hamilton and Jefferson didn't have Fox News and MSNBC to closet themselves in. They didn't have thousands of sites for them to re-read their own opinions back to them over and over. They had to look at their own sides, and then LOOK AT THEIR OPPONENT'S and see if and when the common ground could be met. Where there could be give and take. It allowed for there to be voices, but for the country to still be... united. They helped build a union that doesn't look much like one today. We have created two separate realities for ourselves. We're all black and white. It's all one way or all the other.

We can't do the hard work of fixing this nation unless we first are able to look at each other's worlds, and realize that they're actually one in the same. There isn't just black and white. There's AT LEAST shades of gray. In all reality there's a whole lot of colors. As they say, the first step is simply recognizing that we've got a problem. Then, maybe we can get about to fixing it.