Sean Davis tried to talk about current events with his teenaged daughter and she shrugged. So he decided to give her a history lesson.
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I spoke to my 18-year-old daughter today to see what she thought of the ban on same-sex marriage being lifted here in Oregon. She’s not of the oblivious texting crowd and has an incredible independent streak, but surprisingly she shrugged it off. She said she doesn’t follow politics. Almost instinctually, I took offense. After all, I am an Iraq War veteran who was injured in combat and, even though I know it takes a huge stretch of the imagination to link my combat in a Iraq with the defense of our American way of life, I like to pretend it’s there. With undeserved indignation in my voice, I told her how she should care. I told her this ruling is a victory for the long fought civil rights campaign.
On May 19th, 2014, same-sex marriage became legal in the state of Oregon and was celebrated by many people around the state. This process started over ten years ago on March 3rd, 2004. Four Multnomah County Commissioners decided that gay marriage should be legal. Three months and 3,000 same-sex marriage licenses later, a group calling itself the Defense of Marriage Coalition successfully fought this and passed an amendment to the State Constitution making marriage exclusive for heterosexuals. This process included jumping through a lot of legal hoops, organizing thousands of people, and spending millions of dollars, but just recently one judge legally ruled to overturn the ban.
Many people, including myself, believe this to be a victory for civil rights, but others are justified when they cry foul believing we bypassed the democratic system in place. I’m glad of the results, but I thought it was a bit suspicious when I found out that Judge who “struck down” the ban, Michael J. McShane, wasn’t elected into his position. In fact, he’s the first openly gay United States District Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, and he was appointed by President Obama.
To my daughter’s credit, she sat there patiently listening to me and, when I was done, she said, “So we can just skip the laws people vote for when we don’t like them?”
What could I say? Yes, I guess. Don’t the corporations do on the other side of this equation? When and how should the democratic system be skipped? Does it even work anymore? Could we have hit the streets and aggressively changed the law so everyone had the right to marry no matter their sexual orientation? We didn’t. This was a passive progression, a change made by one man with a definite stake in the politics, and should we be okay with that because, from our point of view, it’s a common sense ruling?
Has our system of government failed us so much that we have to circumvent it in order to right wrongs? This led me to talk about the 1960s and how that generation used to have sit-ins, riots, and sometimes they even died for what they believed in like at the Kent State shootings. She asked what happened to those civic-minded young revolutionaries. “Some were sent to Vietnam and came back needing help the government never gave, some kept doing drugs and retired from the revolution, and the ones that didn’t do drugs are now the asses in charge.”
It was a flippant answer but rang too true. Where are the dangerous thinkers in our world? Just in the last couple years, the federal government cut unemployment insurance benefit extensions, cut food stamps, gave record tax breaks to corporations with record profits, and has all but ignored the fact we’re headed for the cliff with climate change, not to mention preparing to kill net neutrality, all while dancing on the corpses of art programs, responsible journalism, and small community program funding.
I told her how my generation had something called the Occupy Movement a few years back. It had potential for a year or so before they became a Facebook page for posting clever memes. I remember going to an anti-war rally after coming back hurt from the war at Portland State University; the biggest banners there read GO VEGAN and LEGALIZE IT. I believe the rebellious spirit and the desire to fix the wrongs are still there, but either there are too many things wrong or we can’t focus.
Is it the thousand channels of HD television, multiple social networking sites, texting, or the billion dollar video game industry keeping us from making real change? I guess we finally did legalize marijuana in two states, but in the end will this be beneficial or detrimental? Legalizing pot and gay marriage are both those common sense type changes, but are we really creating these changes or are these small victories concessions by the corporate-sponsored government designed to add to the distractions?
What can we do to affect real change on issues that threaten our lives like environmental change, renewable energies, net neutrality, freedom of speech, or even stop with meaningless wars that cost us American lives? I’ve always told all my friends to vote, and I’ve always gotten flak for it. The people who don’t vote say it’s not worth it, nothing will change, or one candidate is as good as another. So many people are disillusioned, disheartened, and don’t believe in the process, maybe there’s a good reason, but according to the latest numbers in the Census Bureau there are approximately 280,000,000 people in this country and about 112,000,000 are ages 18-44 and around 97,000,000 forty-five and older. You can be as pessimistic as you want to be, but those numbers are correct as of 2010 and more of the asses in charge are dying every day. Plus, many of the older generation are coming around to our way of thinking. The new outnumber the old, and we have the power to be more than a social media websites with clever posts.
To paraphrase Churchill, democracy is the worst form of government, except all the other forms. The way we govern ourselves isn’t perfect, but it was created to be self-correcting. It can be done. In 1774, a bra maker changed the world when he wrote and distributed what we would call a zine today. Common Sense by Thomas Paine heavily influenced George Washington and the Founding Fathers. Yes, I invoked the Founding Fathers. They don’t belong to Hannity and Limbaugh. They were intelligent leaders who saw all these problems coming.
I told my daughter about the students of Beijing, China, in 1989 and how they started demonstrating against the government. Imagine democracy breaking out in Communist China during the Cold War; it was a huge embarrassment so they instituted Martial Law and people died. More tanks were sent in and, on June 5 of that year, one man stepped in front of a column of these armored killing machines. He stopped the entire unit and wouldn’t let them pass until the crowd pulled him away.
When I was in Iraq, one of our missions was to detain or destroy anyone around the Agriculture Building because they were holding their first democratic elections since the fall of Saddam. I still have video of the car bombs going off around the city, the small arms fire, and columns of smoke in the distance. People around the world face horrible death just to cast a vote, to dip their fingers in the ink, to have a say in how their government works. We can watch it happen on our flat screen televisions whenever we want.
I asked my daughter if it wouldn’t feel better to fight and win a political issue than it would be to like a Facebook status update or e-sign a petition then sit back and let a voter initiative expire? When a group fights for a right or has a say in the political process then they have a stake in society, which leads to a feeling of responsibility to maintain that society. Our political process deserves a hell of a lot more than a hashtag slogan.
She shrugged... and then nodded.
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Credit: Image—Tim Pierce/Flickr