Here is the picture I should have taken after doing my first real Christmas shopping today. (It’s of a rainbow — if you have better ones, please add them to the comments.)
Here is the event I should have gone to today before, well, doing anything else really. (more rainbow coalescing, here.)
But I did not. And I am sorry. I should have gone. No excuses. Instead I overslept and went running and forgot about the marches until I noticed the rainbow button of the girl behind me in line at the National Geographic warehouse sale at the D.C. Armory. It’s always good to see lots of rainbow buttons in the National Guard training gym and hers looked, at first glance, like mine. I have a rainbow Obama button. I like Obama. I like rainbows (had one painted over my bed as a kid) and I like a whole lot of gay people. (So give me the button already, DNC volunteer, and quit staring at my wedding ring and that dude with his arm around me.) There for a while, I kept saying “I’m gay for Obama,” until I realized how 36-year-old straight white womanish in the suburbs it sounded of me. In my defense, I I got the line from a Dan Savage interview on “Real Time with Bill Maher” when two beefy Ohio State frat boys told Savage they were gay for Obama (If you’d like a clip of that interview, I’m sure the Ohio State Pike chapter has one). Still, no excuse.
Anyway. Back to the other button. The girl behind me in line had on a People for the American Way rainbow button. I love that. First off, it’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance because the right wing crazie cooters have taken all those patriotic sounding names from us. And secondly, it is AWESOME and CORRECT. The American Way is away from the religion and state burrito we’ve been force fed for the past eight years.
So I talked to her about the rally and thanked her for going for all us lazy forgettable schmoes who get locked into their lives and little thoughts and forget that if you say you’re outraged about something you have to actually be OUT somewhere RAGING about it.
I was feeling all guilty and blecky about it until I walked out and saw a huge perfect rainbow over RFK Stadium (it’s kinda in the picture up there in the first line). I’m going to take that as a sign. I just don’t care. God loves everyone under the rainbow. You get to see Jesus in a Slurpee. I get to see God in everyone and every couple. Hope is back, ya’ll – just like all the “g”s on the end of Sarah Palin’s verbs now that she’s off the trails) and I’m hopeful that this crazy Proposition will go the way of all those prepositions that the before-mentioned SP has used to field dress the English language.
I am digressing (and still obviously still digesting the bad piece of veep we almost got served). It’s what I do when I need to make a good point about a big important thing. I digress and I notice really small details and try to make them add up to nice case for errant points. To wit, coming home, we heard a tornado watch on the radio. Ominous? No! Tornadoes, at least when they’re still in the “watch” stage, are cause for all kinds of cliched but unstoppable Wizard of Oz allusions. Going out to walk the dog? Don’t put him in your bike basket. Need some ruby red slippers? No, I’m already dressed in technicolor mango track pants and lime green fleece. So I’ll fit right in, just let me and the dog loll about in the poppy fields for a while.
But of course what Oz gives us is the brightest of the Rainbow Brite pieces of evidence– not just the rainbow we’re all trying to get over (yes, you black-tied and white-shirted Mormons, these hues are for you, too), but also the scared little man behind the curtain trying to control everything through scare tactics, cosmetic wizardry and empty, fantastical promises of what it takes to get to the homeland.
Sound familiar?
I still don’t how or if my day of Christmas shopping, RFK rainbow-awing and button-tale swapping can be wrapped up without going down that cliched, yellow-bricked road into Liza Minneli Mama land, but if a storm comes, we need it and if we wind up way out of comfort zones (and light years away from still crimson Kansas) well, we need that too.
What we don’t need are any more characters without hearts, brains or courage. We don’t need any voters hiding behind the curtain, pulling the levers to rob others of what was theirs all along.
