The Rights Stuff

If I ponder an imponderable, it can’t be really imponderable, can it? That’s just the sort of thing that keeps me, and people like me, awake for hours each and every night, and gives us the sense that life is long and filled with riches, when it’s actually a bleak and desolate wasteland, fraught with misery and pain, and not quick enough.

Speaking of Tim Eyman, what is his problem? He referred to the protections granted by the Gay Rights Bill as “special privileges” when they’re just the same privileges of non-discrimination we all expect. Does he have someone specifically in mind he would like to be able to refuse to rent to? Couldn’t he find a better excuse? Who let Eyman own property? Can’t we discriminate against twits?

I realize that neither the Gay Rights Bill nor Eyman’s initiative opposing it have any bearing on gay marriage, but I can’t get that issue out of my mind every night I’m trying to sleep either, so I am going to set forth my latest political theory on the topic anyway.

Here it is: Let the gays decide it themselves. By democracy!

Is that radical, or what? I’m saying, maybe they want to, maybe they don’t. Let’s make them vote on it among themselves, and leave the rest of us out of it. Sort of like when we let the Saudis democratically prohibit women from breathing and driving at the same time, and we let them be our allies anyway. Let’s introduce democracy to gays! Then if we don’t like what they decide, we can say something Rumsfeldian about it, like “democracy isn’t always a pretty sight, you know,” or “the road to democracy is sometimes bumpy, you know,” or “you sometimes don’t know you know, you know, don’t you know.” “Could I repeat the question? Of course I could. But it wouldn’t be constructive.”

Who knows? Maybe the gays would vote marriage down. After all, it defies all their gay traditions. Why do you think they’re called gay, anyway? Gay, as opposed to miserable. Why ruin that?

But what I’ve really been pondering at all hours of the day is, how is it that a nation that has the cajones to claim to be exporting freedom and democracy throughout the world can’t figure out which part of that package is the cart and which is the horse? Why are Americans so stupid when it comes to freedom and democracy, when we ought to be the world’s experts on the subject, since we tell the world every day that we are, and since we kill who knows how many innocent civilians in the course of teaching the world about freedom and democracy, all the time.

Here’s the deal, as worked out by none other than the guys like Madison and Jefferson, the people who brought freedom and democracy to Anglo-American landowners: Freedom first, democracy second.

First you decide who you are. Are you all the people? Then all the people have to be free. Are you just the white people? Then just the white people have to be free. Are you just the heterosexual people? Then decide what fraction of a human a gay person is.

If you can’t bring yourself to say, in writing, that a gay man is only three fifths human, and not worthy of a vote, and so take responsibility now and for all history for being that big of an ass, then you need to sit yourself down and grant him all the same civil rights everyone else gets.

Then you can have democracy.

You can’t call this or any other system a true democracy as long as you systematically limit the freedom of any of the people that make it up.

Civil rights are a moral absolute. No one has the right to deny others their civil rights, not even by means of the ballot box. Eyman’s initiative isn’t only wrong, it doesn’t deserve to exist.

It’s the minorities, Isn’t It?

Here’s your Intermittent Science and Technology News You Can Use Catch-Up Roundup.

Our first item is news that the “Radar Scope” you ordered when you were a pubescent middle school boy will soon be available at the low low price of $1000 per unit. To be initially distributed in the spring only to our troops in Iraq, it will detect signs of unwanted enemy breathing on the other side of thick concrete walls. The hand-held devices should be ready for peeking into girls’ locker rooms as early as 2008. In the meantime expect it to be on your local police department’s Home Security 2006 Christmas Wish List. That’s News You Can Use!

Our remaining items belong to the “Social Science Marches On” category. A study of the Canadian Medical Association has concluded that giving homeless alcoholics up to 16 glasses of wine a day on an hourly basis can improve their health and behavior. In related news, alcoholics everywhere are saying, “we told you so,” and “what part of ‘self-medication’ hadn’t you understood?” Here’s a general rule to live by: when desperate people living desperate lives say they need something, they may know more about it than the comfortably ignorant.

Of course the free wine helps in part by relieving the need to waste valuable energy scrounging for wine in other ways. It also helps create a bond between the wine providers and the wine receivers, which makes the wine receivers more accepting of other services.

Not all social bonds are good, however. A sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has determined that the cell phone has brought too much social connection to modern life and is now increasingly a factor in domestic strife. Family life is being interrupted by work life; work life is being interrupted by family life. So the social bonding that helps an alcoholic accept help to get off the streets can also break up families, when there’s too much of it, and put moms and dads on the streets. We are complicated animals, aren’t we?

How complicated are we? Scientists are looking into it! Socio-evolutionary-anthropological scientists have been theorizing about the very evolution of the mechanism of social bonding that we all take for granted. How have we humans successfully evolved the means to bond outside of families, to create the friendships and comraderies that tie us one-to-another and keep us from killing each other all the time, instead of only just some of the time?

The answer is truly complicated. Nature, these researchers say, has endowed some of us with “imagination” that we use to modify our own behavior for the purpose of creating bonds. Examples of this can especially be seen at Star Trek Conventions, and among Goths, Raging Grannies, Filkers, and Canasta players. The imaginative people bond by sharing the products of their imaginations and through their enhanced facilities of suggestibility and geeking.

But the genius of social evolution is that every one of its successes creates more opportunity. As imagination evolved to bring some people together, those who lacked that advantage evolved mechanisms to compensate. Hence, the unimaginative have learned to bond together in what researchers refer to as “clumps” defined by shared boredom and the shared paraphernalia of stupidity, such as alcohol, reality TV, and designer jeans.

Further Questions and Activities.

1. List ten ways a device to see through walls could improve lives. Next, list ten ways the invention of walls has already improved lives. Combine your lists. See them negate each other.

2. Get a kitchen timer. Set it for one hour. Before it goes off make up six conclusions for future scientific sociological studies to have.

3. Here’s an experiment to try with the whole class. Use your imagination to try to bond with the student on your right. When the student on your left tries to bond with you, report him. When it’s over, who’s in detention? It’s the minorities, isn’t it?

Chicago

Speaking of Hygiene Center slogans - this gem turned up at the first North American Street Newspaper Conference held in Chicago last month, attributed to activists in Atlanta. It was too precious to pass up:

Pee for free with dignity -

like Jesus did in Galilee!

Yours truly, even though still homeless, attended the conference as a guest of the Real Change and it's director, Timothy "Big Spender" Harris.

The conference was replete with Poetic Moments. Here's another, which shows that I was not the only one struck by the irony of our presence there.

This is a very close rendition of an actual conversation in a Chicago cab. Tim, myself and two other conference participants were present. Our Polish immigrant driver spoke first:

"So, what, you are with big homeless paper meeting?"

All: Yes, we are.

"But you have places to stay, you are going eating?"

Absolutely.

"You are not from here, you come from all around?"

The U.S. and Canada.

"What do you do? You take train? You take Greyhound?"

We came by plane.

"I am KNOWING IT! I am STUPID! I am IDIOT!"

"They all say go America, work hard, you will be making it!"

"I come America, I get taxi, I drive TWELVE HOURS a day"

"NO MONEY! I get off work I want taxi - I can't pay!"

"You - YOU - HOMELESS in AMERICA, you take plane, taxi, stay

hotel!"

"NOW I SEE! I SHOULD HAVE BEEN HOMELESS - I call back to Poland,

that's what I tell!"

Tim: Yes, homelessness been very, VERY good to me...

"But - HOW YOU PAY? YOU HAVE GRANTS? YOU GET WELFARE?"

Me: Well, we're paying YOU today with Food Stamps.

"Yes, YES, OF COURSE! Don't fear, it's OK, I tell no one

anywhere!"

PS: No need to report us - actually, Tim paid cash (and a tip for the entertainment).

Unfinished business regarding July's "Homeless Gourmet" article:

After talking to Mel Jackson, director of the Millionair Club, I now know that napkins are usually provided at meals. They just ran out the day I was there. Clearly, more donations from the public would prevent such shortfalls. Let's get on it, people!

Meanwhile, Anitra, fellow editor, who lets me sleep on her kitchen floor, wants her one dumpster rating retracted. Since the cornflakes,she has served omelettes, avocados with cottage cheese, and salmon ravioli, among other delights. Her food is REALLY QUITE GOOD and actually rates zero dumpsters.

That's ANITRA, who lets me sleep on her kitchen floor. I am not being extorted in any way.