“All you need is love.” -John Lennon
Q: “What are you protesting?”
A: “Whaddaya got?” -Bob Dylan
Not enough love. Too much protesting. The yin and yang of modern life, so it seems. Not so much in Tiny Town’s bubble, but seemingly rampant in the rest of society.
As is often the case, viewed through Canadian eyes and sensibilities it seems more violent, more in-your-face south of the border. But like contagion, it’s everywhere. It’s here. All you have to do is look.
Problem is, if you look too much, you won’t want to look at all. Or maybe that’s just my problem. More and more I find myself questioning why I bother reading newspapers and watching newscasts. They usually leave me feeling like I’d prefer not to know, sorry I looked or read. Don’t want to witness the depths to which humanity is sinking. Kind of like the feeling I had that led me to go cold turkey off social media five years ago. I don’t need this crap stinking up my life.
I don’t believe all you need is love, but I do believe you need the capacity and ability to love. And there seems to be far too many people who lack that fundamental element of humanity these days. Love, and the lack of it, seems to be the battleground du jour for warring social movements rending the social fabric that’s supposed to bind communities and countries together.
Life seems more—and less—complicated now than it used to be. Bear with me, this ain’t some old man moaning about the good old days. The good old days were only good if you were lucky enough to fit within the definitions of privilege. In the country where I grew up and the country I’ve now lived in most of my life, those definitions included being Caucasian, middle class and heterosexual. If that described you, life was good and those were the good old days, because the social norms were so powerful, and the machinery of government so oppressive, it was difficult to know or understand just how marginalized the Others were.
They were simply invisible.
If you were the Other, life was closeted, furtive, underground, dangerous. If you loved others of the same sex, if you loved others of a different race—or sometimes just different nationality—your love was not only wrong, it was, in many places, illegal. You could be busted, jailed, ostracized, scorned and even institutionalized, labelled a threat to society or a mental defective. Just because of the love you felt and acted on.
If you were black or brown or yellow or native, you could be publicly vilified, ignored, assaulted, and were always objects of suspicion of those empowered to carry out the will and laws of the privileged.
Those were not your good old days. They were the days of fear. Fear your Otherness would be discovered. Fear your Otherness was, like your skin, impossible to hide and therefore always a target.
But the creaky doors of privilege have opened. Or perhaps a better metaphor would be the creaky lid to Pandora’s box has opened. It’s no longer a crime to be queer here. Canada was among the first countries to fully legalize same sex marriage and full status for same-sex partners. Yet, there are still those, cloaked in the righteousness of a warped belief in their religion or a pathological revulsion of the Other, who just can’t bring themselves to accept that men can love men and women can love women.
Bad enough on a personal level. Depressing when it becomes an active front in the conservative-liberal culture wars. Horrifying when it becomes illegal and subject to state-sanctioned death in countries led by those who have more in common with our cave-dwelling ancestors than anything we now consider human.
The doors to privilege have barely cracked open for many of the others in the alphabet soup of Otherness. I can’t keep up with the most recent acronym that embraces the current inclusivity of Others. But the transgender, gender-fluid, questioning, and all the variations of humanity’s quest for love await their own good old days. Increasingly impatiently. Days that may never come, given the backlash from people appalled or hateful or fearful of those Others.
So far underground were they, few even knew they existed in the old good old days. And perhaps that’s part of the backlash. Where did they come from? Are they making this up as they go along? Is this just a game to see whether they can out-other the Others?
No. The “newness” of the rapidly changing face of sex, love and gender is more indicative of just how far down into the darkness they were subjugated in the past. They are our brothers and sisters, sometimes even our mothers and fathers, imploring us to accept them for who they are or at least what they believe they are in a journey for which there is no real road map.
That they are met with hate reflects not their “condition,” but the inability of the privileged to extend the same courtesies afforded themselves. They are reviled because of a defect in the capacity to love among those who feel threatened by them.
Worse—far worse—they are pawns on the chessboard, fodder on the battlefields of politicians who choose to pander to the most base fears of those who feel threatened by the demands of the Others to be afforded full status in today’s society.
As with so many things, it makes me wonder about the fine line between evolution and erosion. It seems somewhere along the way, a considerable part of what passes for humanity—at least in the parts of the world I’ve lived in—desires to return to the caves. Maybe they think that’s where the good old days are hiding.
I don’t know what motivates a group of people to get together and protest, for example, what they believe is a school board and educators in Ottawa they claim are teaching “gender ideology”—whatever that is—to children. Their rationale? Other than fear? They’re hanging their hats on bible verses, religious beliefs, their own interpretations of the words of their god.
Earth to protesters: Canada is a secular society. Most of us don’t buy your invisible guy-in-the-sky nonsense. It’s a shaky foundation to base your protest on. Call it for what it is—your fear, your unwillingness to understand, your inability to love. Understandable, I guess, for believing in a god who it is said literally wiped out most life on Earth because he didn’t like how his early creations were acting.
All you need may be love, but I’ll be happy if you just dial down the hate for now and leave the Others alone to do the hard work of carving out a place in this world for themselves.
