Yes, things will "get better" when we actually have people (especially a president) in a leadership position with a genuine soul, coupled with a heart and a brain, to guide this Byzantine disaster of nation. Political cowardice and partisan paranoia has trumped real leadership in America. Today, we have nothing but inflatable candidates made large than life by mass media hype and then anchored down, like Macy's Thanksgiving Parade balloons, by corporate interests and Political Party Machine manipulations.
The last president we had with a true sense of honor was Harry Truman who went over Pentagon heads, and his own party, as well as being contrary to the will of the vast majority of the general public when he desegregated the US Military. Lyndon Johnson could have been a great leader (as big as Roosevelt) if it had not been for his mistakes in Vietnam -- although he did give us medicare and medicaid, as well as the student grant and college loan program. Today, all we have are shallow duplicitous personifications of political ads in suits steering the country into the gutter of history and towards the inevitable fate of civilizations past their glory.
Get ready to learn to speak Chinese or Hindi if you want a job. In twenty years our major cities may quite possibly look like what old Calcutta, India did in the 1960s replete with beggars, and the only jobs available to US citizens will be pulling rigshaws for foreign tourists. Oh, but we will probably still have some sort of minority left to kick around and blame for our own premeditated decline.
I fear we have become just as deluded as the main character in Voltaire's book, "Candide", who kept insisting that "It is still the best of all possible worlds" even as one disaster after another befell him.
But, sometimes simply saying something is so just isn't enough, especially when it ignores what actually needs to be changed. Obama had a chance to do that, but he favors the status quo, and the GLBT community is a threat to that recalcitrant status quo which only has room to accommodate insecure conformists who so willingly bow down to fluctuating societal norms and entrenched corporate power hierarchies.
To people like Obama, who just want to fit in, we are an annoying reminder of his own minority status and a threat to his membership in the exclusive club he once thought he might be denied admission to. We are a bridge too far. A place he is not willing to go. And this is especially so if that advocacy for us should remind others in the White, heterosexual power structure that Obama is not actually one of them; not one of the "good old boys" either. I believe his capitulating to the military on stripping anti-discrimination provisions out the House DADT repeal bill is a prime example of that.
But this not a racial phenomena, there are members of the LGBT community who have also been known to sell out even their own kind in order to be granted access to power. GoProud and HRC immediately comes to mind.
So, Mr. President, don't simply tell all of our GLBT children at risk that "it only gets better"; rather, give them a reason to believe that claim by actually making it better. How could you do any less and still honor the high office you hold? I know that hackneyed phrase, "actions speak louder than words", has been bandied about a lot lately questioning your real commitment to civil rights, but sometimes actually doing something affirmative, instead of just talking about, may quite possibly have the side benefit of restoring people's faith in you.
Without a realization of results, your much vaulted "Audacity of Hope" message is nothing more than meaningless rhetoric. You owe more than that to the children of America, and especially to the only segment of children in America to have the ugly specter of government sanctioned discrimination lying in wait for them, like a bully after school, as they grow into adulthood.
President Johnson once said that his pushing the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress would doom the Democratic Party forever in the South, but he said that it was the right thing to do. Can you make that kind of commitment to our Civil Rights as well? GLBT children and adults in America need you to say, "yes I can" and then actually honor your commitments. We all chanted "yes we can" to get you elected, now it is your turn.
If there is no affirmative support from you for the unequivocal equal human rights for all American citizens, then there should only be a vote of no confidence for you. If you don't get the message; then you don't deserve to be in the high office you hold. No other issue is more important than human rights. That is what this country fought a revolutionary war over. That takes precedence over all other considerations. Without equality, nothing else matters. Nothing.
As an after thought -- I must say to those who will settle for next to nothing, because the alternative for them is to hard for them to bear -- remember, when you vote for the lesser of two evils, you still end up with evil. I'm not ready to sell my soul for that; if you are, then you don't deserve anybody's respect. At the risk of mixing metaphors, I must point out that it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, but if you put a sock in your own mouth no one will ever hear you. That doesn't make you safe, it just makes you irrelevant.
@ "Bud" E. Lewis Evans, 2011
