VenusPlusX

Home of COLUMBIA

Op-Ed: . .Tis The Season of Love . . . and Not-of Love

También En Español.


Which will you choose for 2012? Will you commit yourself to the power and supremacy of love? Will you check yourself to make sure your actions are “of love?” Are you willing to call out those who are not-of love?

The stark realities and compounding errors of the feckless conspiracy of the greedy and the stupid are in sharp relief. These realities become clearer, bolder, and more desperate by the hour, with no exit strategy that doesn’t involve even greater hardship to the rest of us who own this earth. Who are the humane and the inhumane? Who are those “of love” and who are those “not-of love?” It’s easy to spot each camp. People cannot help showing which side they are on by the commitments and actions of their everyday life.

Our task is to co-create a world free from the bondage of a few. The few, let’s call them an aged, economically privileged, mostly entirely white, and corrupt. They are a small group, roughly .005% of the world’s population. They are characterized by their own polarizing fear of anything “other,” and naturally devolve to attacks at the intersection of race and sexuality because these two things so obviously threaten their ragged, useless paradigm that has brought nothing but social and economic injustice to the entire planet.

These folks are the ones in need of serious re-education. Movements such as Occupy Everything is doing a sterling service by pointing out this dislocation of world resources and the income disparities that are dismantling otherwise benign and serviceable institutions. For the first time in history enough people are mobilized throughout the world to flip that script once and for all, while the insane inanity of the now lock-step radical right, led by a new and rather freaky breed of (irreligious) American fundamentalists, is doing its part to speed along the process of their eventual demise.

Start with governments, “the state.” Governments are instruments of the people, and have an important role in maximizing the efficient uses of our collective resources, and in guaranteeing education and equalizing opportunity. An ideal government would have as its motto, “Privilege For All,” and carry on policy, programming, and administration to make that possible. Gone will be the most coercive arm of the state, the military, an end to the horrible choice given young people, unemployment or lack of tuition versus enlisting to fill body bags of endless asymmetrical wars aimed at justifying huge government budgets. That’s wrong, obscene.

Why must the state interfere with our reproductive rights? A private relationship between a patient and her physician is a precise example of the type of voluntary association that replaces its current coercive system that leads to nothing but heartache and more social and economic dislocation.

Why can’t teenagers have access to birth control? Condoms are more widely accessible, but why are teenage girls prevented from getting the morning after pill if they choose? The American fundamentalists driving governments insist that this is killing a . . . a what? a zygote?

“Personhood” proselytizers would have you believe that life begins at the moment of conception, when (the) sperm fertilizes (the) egg, and anything or more correctly, anyone, interfering with that “life” is guilty of a poorly thought through illegality. But they haven’t thought this through at all. The personhood laws would make every female guilty of infanticide every month because menstruation discharges those “eggs” that failed to attach. Shall we look all women up for their pre-existing condition that calls them monthly murderers? It make no sense and laws like these perforce are destined to the gooey dustbin of failed attempts to control people’s destiny.

These are just a few headline examples demonstrating how easy it is to separate out the haters among us. With the upcoming election, as crazy laws make their way through right wing controlled state legislatures, as mean-spirited Republican candidates spread their vitriol, it should be easier and easier for us to isolate and eradicate the draconians among us.

We have to have courage and call them out at every turn, and women are leading the way. Everyone, including men, comprising our 99.095% must join in to bring about a season “of love.”