Happy Birthday/When Bigots Rule

Most years a birthday comes and goes as just another day. There's a bit more fuss in a milestone year, but as a rule the day passes with little fanfare other than a restaurant meal and store-bought cake. This year was noticeably different. 

Some people relish the attention of their day. They even drop hints it's coming or are vocal about its approach. I'm not that way. Corny as it sounds I treasure the everyday; I make a point of appreciating it; the more mundane and productive, the more I like it. Ritual days take me away from myself in a way, and quite frankly I don't understand the fuss about racking up years. Time as humans have constructed it––a day, week, month, or year––is wholly random after all, and marking our turns around the sun seems a bit illogical. 

In that way I'm a curmudgeon, or part of me is. Until this year. Having turned seventy-one it wasn't a banner moment. But I was taken aback at the way a rather garden-variety event became a point of true connection, or so it felt. It seemed that others, and I, I admit, felt the need to transcend the most shallow, half-obligatory greetings, engineered by the likes of Mark Zuckerburg and his team; Hallmark; and the grand poohbahs of capitalism that thrive on moments like it. 

Instead of the usual dashed-off sentiments I found people, and me, taking advantage of the opportunity to check in and ask, How are you doing?––the unspoken subtext of which was, In these difficult days? As we all know, obviously, but don't always want to say, it's not easy living under a fascist regime. The current powers that be are trying to erase a century of cultural gains, dragging the country and the world back to the bad-old days of white, hetero patriarchy; to the worst kind of religiosity and civic rule. They're trying to force small-minded, vapid, and hypocritical christianity down all our throats, and the worst part is they're being enabled by a group of militant christian conservatives on the supreme court and in congress.

In short, it's been a nightmare. 

I don't know anyone in my milieu that doesn't feel it, and that includes a handful of Christian friends who aren't at all sympathetic with the wholesale bigotry characterizing the current brand of christian nationalism. The upside of these terrible times is that people are starting to communicate more. They're reaching out whenever the occasion allows; myself included. 

I can't help but see it as the seeds of resistance. Perhaps we'd taken the social and cultural advances of the last sixty years in particular for granted. Advances in diversity, equity, and inclusion that are, contrary to what the bigots say, a beautiful thing. I hope people can see that more now than ever. 

After the flooding-the-zone with hate that we've experienced, the open war against liberalism, after the wave of legalized bigotry the only way out, or beyond, is resistance, not to mention the birth of a new vision, though it will take years. It only happens by connections between people who aren't buying what the regime is selling and who are unafraid to say. Marches, sign-waving, and postcard campaigns are important, but the most powerful stand comes from everyday talk among those of us who want a kinder, freer, less violent, and more ecologically-friendly world. Social isolation, fear, and cynicism are the fuel of an authoritarian government.

In that way birthday greetings should go to all us democratically-minded individuals who have been fighting this fight for decades and who are renewing our commitment to equality for all people, based not on a book replete with old-school bigotry––racist, sexist, and homophobic––but on a secular constitution that continues to morph as humans do. To invoke a cliché, democracy isn't a product but a process after all; and we have work to do.