Category Archives: Current Affairs

San Francisco Pride Parade:The start and finish

Americana, Around home, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized,

Like a James Bond movie, or a fireworks display, the Pride Parade starts with a bang and ends with a bang. The middle was much more prosaic; not prosaic like the Sonoma Fourth of July parade which was white bread boring prosaic, prosaic like regular people prosaic. The Pride Parade starts with Dykes on Bikes. Dykes on Bikes are famous enough so that even I, who before now – had never been to a Gay Parade – have seen dozens of pictures of Dykes on Bikes.

Still, they were a surprise. Surprise number one was that many, if not most, of them on rice-burners, less on Harleys than I had expected. Number two, there were just less of them than I expected. Number three, they soon turned into something more akin to Maidens on Mopeds. Then, rapidly, nice guys in pink shorts, holding hands. I don’t say that derogatorily, it was the most charming thing about the Parade. Just nice people saying Please accept me as I am.

There were times when the spectators were more fun than the paraders.

As an aside, it seems to me that there are two kinds of people who are here, on display. People who put together a costume or outfit to go to the parade or be in the parade and people who get out their costume. The costume, or one of the costumes, that they already had. I lived with a woman, with a spectacular body, who had what she called a cat suit; it was a very tight, black, body suit . She would get out whenever she could. Halloween? Check, wear it with rabbit ears. Costume party? Check, wear it with a white collar and black tie. San Francisco Pride Parade? I’m sure the answer would have been, Check, just wear it. End aside.

But the paraders were plenty entertaining even if they were sometimes a little hard to understand.

 

And then came the finale: the horsey set and the leather crowd . Both gay and straight and, to my eye at high noon, not all that appealing. But they seemed to be enjoying themselves. It reminded me of the joke; What did the sadist say to the masochist?….. Nooo!

That was pretty much the end of the parade, but it is not where I want to end the post. What moved me most about the parade, what brought me close to tears a couple of times was not the wild and wicked; it was the quiet and nice. The normal. I think that explains what is happening right now with gay marriage and the mainstreaming of gays in general. As long as they were in the closet, in the popular imagination, they could be anything. And past the popular imagination, they could be and do the unimaginable. As they came out of the closet, they began to just be other people. With problems and worries just like anybody else.

So the couple above just becomes another older, sort of overweight couple and not a couple of wackos or, maybe, not yet. The people below just become neighbors, some of who want to get married.

 

 

 

 

The missing baby

Around home, Current Affairs, Uncategorized

We have a deer with a bad leg that lives near our house and spends a lot of time in our backyard. Last year she had two babies: one with a goiter on its neck that just disappeared, and I saw the other one by the side of the road, dead. A couple of days ago, both Michele and I saw a new born doe by the side of our house. Michele said that when she saw it, it was still wet and when I saw it, it was standing, near its mom, on very shaky legs.

Then the baby was gone.

Last night, just at dawn, Michele looked out and saw the baby with its mom. It makes us both feel better.

.

This is so sad

Current Affairs, Politics, Religion, Uncategorized

This is just so sad and so hard to watch. It just makes me sick. Israel had such promise. It was going to be a beacon of  everything good and now it is just turning into another intolerant, right wing state. These beautiful, happy, clean cut, children marching through the streets chanting May your village burn. Slaughter the Arabs. As The Accidental Theologian said Is this how the pogroms started?

Israel in the West Bank

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics, Uncategorized

Listening to Bibi Netanyahu’s speech – OK, not really listening to it, just listening to stuff about it like Congress fawning over him – just puts me in a rage. I grew up in a family that thought Israel was the greatest. Bringing democracy to the heathens, making the desert bloom, blah, blah, blah. I am not sure when I started to think that Israel was doing evil – maybe it started when I realized that Making the desert bloom. was another way of saying that We are using everybody’s water, including the Palestinians, it was almost certainly by the time I learned that Palestinians children were being killed at a rate of over seven times that of Israeli children1 – but I do now. And I don’t use that term lightly.

For sure, I don’t use that term lightly. Using it opens me up to too many charges. Charges of being a self hating Jew; charges of being an anti-Semite. Because anybody who disagrees with Israel must be an anti-Semite. It puts me in the company of alot of haters that I find abhorrent. But – the bottom line is – what Israel is doing and what they have been doing is evil.

I don’t think that Americans have any idea what is going on with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and I don’t think we want to know.

It’s not just that the Israelis are building settlements in the west bank, it is – to protect those settlements – that they have to control Palestinian movement and access in the West Bank. Like all occupiers, to stay safe, the Israelis have to completely dominate and control the Palestinians. They have to maintain a full press occupation of the West Bank. Of course that leads to harassment both institutional and ad-hoc.  Alain Salomon and Katia Solomon have a Op Ed in the New York Times that gives a chilling description of going through an Israeli checkpoint near Ramallah. They say As we entered this narrow space I looked at the barbed wire further on. We are Jewish, and began to weep. How was it possible that our own people, who have gone through such suffering, can inflict this ordeal, intended to humiliate and intimidate another people?

Towns like Hebron have been turned into virtual jails.

And – very importantly – what Israel is doing will lead to failure for Israel. Thoughtful Jews like Emily Hauser and Rabbi Brant Rosen know that as do a huge number of Israelis in Israel. It is sad that our Congress doesn’t seem to.

1. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Interestingly – but depressingly – the American Press reports those killings at a ratio of about seven times – for the New York Times – to twelve times – for ABC Television -more for the Israeli children so we dobn’t know more Palestinians are being killed.