more politics thoughts
Nov. 9th, 2020 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nenya_kanadkaIn my lifetime, I've now seen:
* gay marriage legalized nationally across the entire United States of America (and also Canada, before that)
* a Black US president
* a female US vice president (a Black and Indian-American woman, at that)
When I was a kid, they told us the last two of those would happen someday, and I believed it in the vague way that I thought we might someday have humans on Mars, but it seemed pretty distant and vague. When I first started paying attention to LGBTQ+ rights, the first one seemed impossible.
And yet.
I'm thinking too about how every US presidential election since 2008, aside from Obama's reelection in 2012 where I don't even remember who Romney's running mate was (but I know it was a guy), has had at least one woman on the ticket for one of the major parties. Palin, Clinton, now Harris. And this year's Democratic primary had several women in it. It seems like we're at a tipping point where, just like when all of a sudden there was a point where state after state was passing marriage equality, we might start having women nominated all the time now. Then they'll start winning. Then it will be normal to have either a man or a woman leading the US, the way it's not shocking anymore to have a female senator or congressperson.
(Canada, it's time to catch up on female party leaders please!)
And Oklahoma (!!) has elected the first nonbinary state legislator in the US in Mauree Turner, and former Biden staffer Sarah McBride has just been elected to the state senate in Delaware, bringing the number of trans people at state legislature level to five. State senate is what Obama was doing before he got elected to the senate at national level. We're going to hear more from these folks, I think.
And in four years NASA plans to send the first woman to the moon.
2020's been A Year. But even now good things are happening.
* gay marriage legalized nationally across the entire United States of America (and also Canada, before that)
* a Black US president
* a female US vice president (a Black and Indian-American woman, at that)
When I was a kid, they told us the last two of those would happen someday, and I believed it in the vague way that I thought we might someday have humans on Mars, but it seemed pretty distant and vague. When I first started paying attention to LGBTQ+ rights, the first one seemed impossible.
And yet.
I'm thinking too about how every US presidential election since 2008, aside from Obama's reelection in 2012 where I don't even remember who Romney's running mate was (but I know it was a guy), has had at least one woman on the ticket for one of the major parties. Palin, Clinton, now Harris. And this year's Democratic primary had several women in it. It seems like we're at a tipping point where, just like when all of a sudden there was a point where state after state was passing marriage equality, we might start having women nominated all the time now. Then they'll start winning. Then it will be normal to have either a man or a woman leading the US, the way it's not shocking anymore to have a female senator or congressperson.
(Canada, it's time to catch up on female party leaders please!)
And Oklahoma (!!) has elected the first nonbinary state legislator in the US in Mauree Turner, and former Biden staffer Sarah McBride has just been elected to the state senate in Delaware, bringing the number of trans people at state legislature level to five. State senate is what Obama was doing before he got elected to the senate at national level. We're going to hear more from these folks, I think.
And in four years NASA plans to send the first woman to the moon.
2020's been A Year. But even now good things are happening.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-10 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 08:15 am (UTC)I love this disclaimer, lol, even while I hate that you have to make it.
Cannot recall if he's the one who used to be married to Jeri Ryan (probably not) but there's probably some relation in there somewhere.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-10 02:22 am (UTC)I should like that.
(On other axes, it still strikes me as significant that Biden is the first Catholic President-elect since JFK, considering the number of Catholics in this country. We have never had a non-Christian President of the U.S. At the moment I consider that a much less likely prospect in my lifetime than a female President, although I'd be very happy to be proven wrong.)
And Oklahoma (!!) has elected the first nonbinary state legislator in the US in Mauree Turner
I was so pleased about that.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 08:00 am (UTC)I was thinking that about Biden being Catholic, and how cool that is (that he is Catholic, not that he's one of the first) & how it was more or less a non-issue compared to how it was for JFK.
Unfortunately I agree with you about the chances of a non-Christian US president. Joe Lieberman was a VP candidate, but of course he & Gore were never sworn in. I would like to see someone Jewish or Muslim or atheist or pagan. Someday. One can hope.
The head of the party I usually vote for in Canada is Sikh, though! There's a (small but) nonzero chance that Jagmeet Singh might end up prime minister someday. Also he has excellent taste in brightly-coloured turbans.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-10 02:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 08:19 am (UTC)It is. And the people working their asses off for goodness haven't given up or gone away either. It's heartening to see measurable signs of that, and I feel like celebrating and noting the victories is really important. Keep the faith, Sam Gamgee. <3
no subject
Date: 2020-11-10 08:52 am (UTC)I do think about the marriage thing sometimes. I can't believe we went from 1999 when I was crying in a bathroom at work because we (Alaska) had just passed a constitutional amendment banning it that got something like 70% of the popular vote, to not only legalizing it nationwide but legalizing it with majority popular support and very little pushback less than 20 years later.
I feel like - I hope, anyway - that 2016-2020 was an aberration and a wakeup call for a lot of us in the older Millennial/younger Gen X age bracket, because for most of my life there has felt like a sort of inevitability to the pace of change where it seemed to be inexorably trending forward no matter what we did. It felt like, even when the elections didn't go our way and that part sucked, things trended our way anyway. And then the last few years slammed into us and proved that sometimes you gotta get out and push to make things go your way. And I hope enough of us keep pushing to keep that snowball rolling, so all of this will just look like a speed bump in hindsight and not an actual change of direction.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 08:33 am (UTC)Sometimes I sit quietly and say to myself, "Gay marriage is legal across the entire United States of America, and has been for over five years." And boggle.
I can't tell (I am not sure I have a wide enough of a view on history) whether there's a general trend towards more justice or whether it's something each generation has to fight for or risk falling backwards. I think maybe both, because each time we win a more just version of society, we have that to look back on and gauge ourselves against. (We don't publicly behead our political enemies (or the ex-wives of national leaders!) anymore, and it's a shocking thing to contemplate--and yet, once that was just...how things were.)
At the same time, humans are both selfish and altruistic, and the forces of greed and xenophobia don't go away, so each generation has to fight them. But...I also don't think we're all doomed to darkness and despair. I think we do gotta get out there and push, I think progress isn't inevitable, but I think it's also possible and does happen. And I think that it's important to remember that even during the Trump years, national opinion on some social justice issues has actually moved in a positive direction. So stuff can go backwards and forwards at the same time, and that doesn't mean the good things aren't happening. Or that the bad things are impossible to fight.
IDK, I'm an optimist. More of a realist than I used to be, but reality hasn't thumped all the hope out of me yet, not while stuff like this keeps happening.
(And in 1999, I was barely talking myself into believing that it was OK for me, an AFAB person, to wear jeans instead of dresses, and I was arguing with people on the internet about how gayness was wrong. Fast-forward 20 years...and, well, I am one hundred percent sure I'm not the only one who made that kind of journey.)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-10 01:02 pm (UTC)There is work to be done, but it's doable. Things are changing.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 08:13 am (UTC)Yesyesyes. <3
Stuff we do matters. And not all the people with power to make things happen are pulling in the wrong direction.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-10 02:27 pm (UTC)I think the recent attempts to appeal to transphobia in the US are a reflection of this. Not enough people hate gays anymore, so they had to dig deeper to find an even more marginalized group to scapegoat. And even that backfired; some prominent Republicans who supported the "bathroom bills" lost their seats because even conservative voters perceived them to be wasting time on a relatively insignificant issue instead of focusing on real problems.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-13 08:11 am (UTC)Yes to all of this! We went from it not being quite politically safe for Obama to say he supported marriage equality in 2008 to marriage passing in the US in 2015 to Biden performing a gay wedding while in office and, now, flat-out openly saying trans rights are the civil rights issue of our time and appointing openly trans people to his transition team.
Like even if Biden/Harris is mainstream centrist Democrat, the mainstream centrist Democrat position has moved a pretty long way.
There are still people doubling down on the homophobia and transphobia, of course, but...there has been such a change and it blows my mind sometimes.
You can't rally voters using a form of bigotry that polls show the majority of Americans no longer believe in.
Exactly. <3 It's the same phenomenon as the corporatization of Pride merch: no, Target doesn't love us, particularly, but a teenager being able to buy a Pride shirt at a chain store in Oklahoma means that's something average people in Oklahoma think it's okay to do. Holy shit, y'know?
no subject
Date: 2020-12-22 06:06 pm (UTC)And I agree that there has certainly been good things that happened in 2020, too. Vermont elected our first openly trans legislator! It's so great to see more happening for LGBT folks in politics too.