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Thinking Large and Showing Some Emotion

In just the first month of 2005, we witnessed the following:

1) The National Observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday with rallies and marches in support
2) The 32nd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade with rallies and marches in support
3) The protests and rallies against the presidential inauguration
4) The ongoing protests against the war
5) National GLBT organizations issuing a Joint Statement on priorities
6) A statewide Marriage Equality Summit held here in our fair City
7) A wimpy national opposition to protect Social Security
8) And a myriad of other protests and actions against the death penalty, against Arnold’s state budget, for better education funding, supporting Senator Barbara Boxer’s challenge to Ohio’s electoral votes, against torture and Bush’s choice of Cabinet members, and on and on and on….

Are we working together?

No, seriously, are we working together? Look at that list above. Look at the many different issues. Think not of how they are different, but of how they are the same.

Our opposition is the opposition to all of the above. For, really, we are all of the above. And the opposition sees that and knows that and works on that level.

We work in separate rooms, rarely fighting to protect the whole house because we’re so busy trying to save our individual room. The opposition wants to blow our house down altogether. In the old nursery rhyme about the Three Little Pigs, they were able to defeat the Big, Bad Wolf by being in a house of bricks—but the real story there is that they stopped trying to fight the Big, Bad Wolf individually and worked together to create a home that he couldn’t penetrate.

We need to build a home, an America, that the Radical Religious Right, the opposition to all of the above, can’t tear apart room-by-room, thus blowing the whole house down.

And this all means that we gotta think large. I know, I know, so many times we’ve said things like this before in our movements. But we gotta stop just talking about it, and do it. Because the Big, Bad Wolf’s wind is really strong right now, on all sides of our house.

When the opposition goes to lobby against a bill, or argue a point, or writes a letter, they don’t just talk about these things in a limited view as our side does. They say things like, “I’m a Christian.” “I’m for family values.” “I’m an American.” “The Bible says…” “I believe in moral values.”

What do we say?

“The reason you should oppose this legislation is because it will destroy a fundamental human right and it has been proven that statistically throughout the course of our nation’s history that the American public supports this issue by 50+1% and therefore we should not take lightly the idea that this bill clearly would harm your district’s residents by disproportionately diluting their resources and funding and their children will not have the allocations necessary for….”

See the difference in the above?

We talk intellectually and specifically, and clearly we have won the argument on the particulars of the legislation at hand and clearly sense and reason will prevail.

But, clearly, that’s not reality though. While we’re talking about court reasonings and monetary allocations and historical demographic shifts and whatnot, our opposition talks from the gut. The emotion, whether intellectually and logically sound or not, is real. And that emotion, that gut-level argument, may not win a debate at a university, can easily win politically.

And so where is our emotion? And where is our larger perspective of the issues at hand? Why don’t we say, why can’t we say, why don’t we argue, “I’m for equality.” “I’m for justice.” “I’m for privacy.” “I’m against discrimination.” “I’m for economic and social justice.” "I'm a Christian who cares..."

See the emotion in those statements. See the larger perspective that incorporates our issue and our friends’ issues and the larger issues of democratic values. See how many people we bring into our house and make it stronger when we think large and show some emotion.

These are not everything we want to say, but if we begin to frame our conversations in a larger perspective, rather than pinpointing our individual issues and saying to others that ‘that’s not my issue,’ can we not see how these larger frameworks encompass our issues and all of the above? For really, these are all of our issues when we frame them not just in the specific context but in a larger, emotional, guttural, human context.

And once we begin to create our free, just, equal, private, American home, and protect it, from all sides and all anti-American fronts, our many diverse communities can finally enjoy an equal strength against the Big, Bad Wolf. But, in order to do this, we gotta think large, and we gotta show some emotion.