Sarx

EAR Californians (and others) who are upset by the recent Prop 8 decision… who are acting as if Californians don’t do this sort of thing…

I’m wondering how many gays were protesting in the streets in the 1970s when Proposition 13 robbed the state of tax funds and services and put California in a budget crisis in which it still lives.

How many gays were protesting in the streets when the state robbed “illegal” immigrants of the right to social services?

When I hear families speak of how Children-unfriendly the Bay area is, or when I hear people in San Diego complain about the Mexicans who do their laundry and water their grass, when I hear San Franciscans make fun of the Chinese, the blacks and “midwestern Christians”… I realise gays are just as stuck up as any of the other bigots out there.

How many get out to protest to social injustices of war, poverty and racism that are rampant in San Francisco…?

Yes, I know some do. Largely we do not. The current – fully expected – decision only robs us of something we didn’t even imagine to exist 10 years ago. But all these other things have been there, all along. While the “gay movement” has been largely white, middle class, secure – and ever more so in California! – it has largely ignored the injustices that it was helping to create and engender.

I can’t help but imagine that if we didn’t look so faux-helpless with our cushy jobs and our big houses our designer clothes and our fine wines, our music festivals and roving sex parties, our multination travel budgets, our electronic toys, our yachts and condos… if we had gone out into the farms to protest with the workers, if we were to go to the slums and the tenements and the projects with food… maybe, just maybe, we’d have more friends to vote with us. And I do remember driving around richmond in a car filled with white college students taking note about the African Americans we were observing. Maybe we could have had some different friends. Maybe.

And while some of us do, most of us don’t.

Not once. Not ever.

Even a few of the gays I know protesting today will vote Republican for the “sake of better business policies”. They will complain about “our pristine neighbourhoods” when SF wants to build high-density housing and low-rent housing. They will winge about the homeless and the destitute. They will continue to make selfish choices based only on their own interests and will only complain when the gov’t takes something away from them. When that same gov’t takes away from others – and gives to the middle class – no one seems to care.

Through it all rides the question of populist government anyway. In my own book that’s not a problem: I think populism works. But only in small areas. San Francisco is one culture – San Jose is another. And there are about 15 cultures between them. Berkeley is another and there are at least 5 culture pools in Oakland that I know of. Any one of these cultures has the right to vote on itself.

But California? State wide-with literally thousands of cultures and communities? No. That state should not have the right to vote on the rights of others by mob rule.

Is it possible that Californians will see the light here and vote to return to a representational democracy? Hardly. I imagine we’ll see referenda on the rights of Catholics and Mormons shortly.

Y’all have fun.