I'm a huge believer in the indefinite article. I've spent most of my life differentiating between offering the solution when I really mean no more than a solution. While both may address a perceived need for a position, the former very effectively closes off further discussion, and that's rarely a good thing.
I am a flaming heterosexual (in keeping with my beliefs I did NOT say the flaming heterosexual) who is also a Caucasian male of middling height and weight (with a dazzling smile; checking to see if you were reading). I had no control over any of these things (okay, I'll give you the weight), which is just as well since, given choices, I'd have no idea what to choose and what to choose from.
That's why when we started to catch up across the USA and around the world in recent years with the realization it takes every kind of people and that selectively persecuting or prosecuting one or more lifestyles because they are different from what we consider 'normal' was just goofy, I exhaled as it appeared we'd weathered another storm of our own making on the dark and rolling sea of life.
But then I read stories like this, and like this, and I get dismayed and disturbed. We still haven't fully grasped that no matter how quickly we move we cannot outrun our own shadows and that each of our our lives is filled with other people. To pretend it's okay to choose to exclude suggests we've started down a path of no return marked with photos of people with shaved heads and colored stars and perpetually fired furnaces. Certain catastrophe for victim and perpetrator.
As a species, we evolve; not devolve. If we have learned nothing from the life and times of people like Alice Herz-Sommer then we are destined to be dust ourselves, and deserve nothing more. Hate is a wasted emotion and in light of the fragility of our planet, an egregiously stupid way to get along with one another. We are, as Dr. Seuss might suggest, all sneetches just waiting for our stars to be added and/or removed.
-bill kenny
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