Wednesday, November 05, 2008

The Morning After With Thoughts To Match

For many of us in this country and this state, waking up today is to open your eyes into a world that is more hopeful than the one that you went to sleep in the night before. The concession and acceptance speeches all came around the midnight hour on the east coast so, unless you stayed up to watch it to the end, you might have gone to bed without the knowledge of the resolution.

That resolution has left this country starting to turn towards a new direction and a new set of possibilities. It will have to remain in the realm of possibility for now due to the fact that the change in leadership doesn't actually happen until January 20th of next year. It is a very odd feeling to be able to look at the possible futures and have them not feel like a repeat of the same ideas that had divided our country for the past 8 years.

It is also no small feat when you look at the man will bring those changes into the White House on the metaphorical hill. It was literally only around 50 years ago when people of the same color were not allowed to vote, let alone actually run for public office. Just think about that for a moment. You are considered a citizen of a country that looks at you as a second class citizen who has no say in the course that your country will take. This man is the culmination of all of the work and sacrifices that have been made for the last half of a decade and I think that he understands the importance of that and how it will always effect the view of his time spent as President.

For the rest of the country, that optomism is a solid thing that can brighten anything but that light seems a bit darker from where I am sitting. I woke up today to learn that my home state, one of the states known for being uber-progressive in so many ways, will actually be writing hate into it's state constitution. Maybe I live in a little happy bubble where everyone can get along and it's all happyness and raibows, but I thought that there might be enough similar thinking people in this big state to negate the hate that was being pushed into it's borders. I thought that my state was better than all of that and wound not succumb to the 21st century equivelant of race baiting.

But I was wrong. It made it past the polls seperated by 4 percent but there was still enough of the people that felt we needed to say that some fellow members of our state's population did not deserve the same rights as the rest of us have for reasons that I am still waiting to be explained fully to me. There were some people who say that it is about teaching about gays and lesbians in our schools. They even pointed to rules already in the law about this topic though they also left out the part about how the earliest that law allows children to be taught this would be middle school at the start. Then there were the people who talked about how it was based on just religion and the need to not feel their religious beliefs being shoved to the side.

That is the answer that left me feeling the least acceptive of it. The idea of marriage came from the world of religion and is singularly a facet of that world. When it comes to the world of government, the only time a person's religion matters is if someone is attacking them on that point. The governement looks at each and every person as their own seperate individual who should be accepted for who they are. Each of us is our own person in the eyes of the government and that is the way that it should be. When you force laws onto the books that only have any kind of basis within the religious world, they just do not compute with that larger world. The state and federal governments are not in the business of forcing a specific splinter group's ideas or dogmas. All they are supposed to do is run the state in the best way they can to provide all of us, no matter the color, sexual oritentation, or religion, with the rights and previledges that being United States citizens gives us.

There is definately a sense of optomism running through the world around me today. A large portion of the country have helped to move the rest of us towards the dawning of what could be a new tomorrow. While I definately can see that new day coming and welcome it, I am also kind of left wondering about the giant step backwards that my home state took today. The thought of wanting to purposely and with malice of forethought create a law or a change to the state constitution that is only based on keeping a group without a simple inalienable right. This is something that I just can't seem to understand and I'm not sure if I ever will.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home