//Society
Dirty-Looking Hipsters Overrun By Actually Dirty Hipsters!
“‘Crusty Punk’ sounds fittingly like a euphemism for syphilis.”
a) I can barely tell the difference between emaciated cokeheads who spent hours making themselves look dirty and emaciated junkies who look dirty because they sleep in dirt. I suppose the nose will know(s).
b) “Gutter Punk” is so ’90s. “Crusty Punk” sounds fittingly like a euphemism for syphilis.
c) Williamsburg is not a “family neighborhood”.
d) Hilarious that the half-built luxury condos are now infested.
e) This is why I shun (and loathe) panhandlers. I have ever since living between the Upper and Lower Haight in SF. Fie on middle-class kids who don’t want to work but call me yuppie whatevs while simultaneously trying to wheedle money.
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Frowny Face Condolences
“Could we please put on our grammatical Sunday-best in matters of life and death?”
Some friends and I have noted a distressing trend, the noticing of which may make us ‘old’ or ‘old-fashioned’ or even dare I say, ‘persnickety’. I prefer to frame it as ‘retaining a sense of decorum’. Social networking has granted us the perverse contradiction of being better connected with everyone and yet far less engaged with the same. So, while Twitter and Facebook status updates let me know if you have a cold or your cat is M.I.A. or your doctorate thesis was well-received, I may not have spoken to you for more than four months.
Subsequently, I have learned of impending break-ups and divorces via social networking sites, complete with trite, diminishing icons such as Facebook’s ‘broken heart’, i.e. “[broken heart] Paul is no longer in a relationship.” Then the subject is flooded with emails, wall posts and comments along the lines of, “Ohhh nooooo! What happened?” The broken heart icon comes about when one makes changes to one’s Facebook profile, and more than one broken-hearted friend has been chagrined by the unintentional broadcasting of their bad news. Worse yet are announcements of love lost in status updates or other bulletin-board-y modes. By far the most disconcerting to date was when a friend told me of his impending divorce on the message board of our Scrabulous (R.I.P.) game. Okay, so Twitter and Facebook are easy, quick ways to let a lot of people know something you would like them to know. It can also, I have found, serve as a way of saying something you would rather not say, or imparting news you would rather not have, to wit, illness and death.
I think most of us have received news of a loved one’s loss through e-mail, or other kinds of mass distributed messaging. Of course in times like that who wants to spend hours on the phone, repeating something so painful and difficult to say in the first place?
Recently, a friend lost her father, with whom she had had a complicated relationship. What was novel was that she posted updates on his health, at times cryptically worded, on Facebook and likely elsewhere, probably from her iPhone outside the hospital. When he finally passed, she posted something along the lines of, “Dying looks so different than I thought it would.” So, that was an odd way of sharing difficult news during a difficult time. It would not have been my first choice.
What disturbed me far, far more than her posting the updates were the unintentionally glib and silly comments posted by friends in response, most attempting a helpful, supportive or consoling vein. Their undoing was their structure; their syntax and grammar and spelling:
Sorry UR dad died. 
U never really lose people because they R always in UR heart.
Let us set aside for the moment my penchant for fully and properly spelled words, not to mention sounding like an adult and not a 12 year-old girl. Instead, let us examine the complete negation of emotion accomplished by these ‘drive-thru’ sentiments, these Hannah Montana platitudes. We are all plugged into something hollow here and I am frankly aghast. Frowny faces should be reserved for pedestrian use. Could we please put on our grammatical Sunday-best in matters of life and death? Frowny facing someone’s death is a new high in lows, beyond the pale.
Let us suppose that she wanted support and condolences on Facebook, or that she wanted answering gestures to her gesture. She did set a precedence with her status updates. However, y’all couldn’t spell that shite out? Y’all gonna whip out some emoticon, the same one you used when the puppy cam was down?
Please people, let us make a pact today: when true tragedy visits and people we love (or know or met once at a party, or never met in person) are suffering, are grappling with enormous and painful circumstances, let us dust off our grown-up words and our grown-up emotions and try to make a real connection, to offer true comfort and support, if comfort and support be your aim.
ShareHow about about a history lesson?
I’m not going to tell people that their vote on Prop 8 was wrong or right. I’m just going to point out a couple of parallels in history that today are universally understood to be very dark times for civil rights in the US, but at the time were seen as justified just as Prop 8 may seem to some people now.
My hope is that people will look beyond their personal agendas, justified as they may seem, and see the bigger picture.
First up, denying marriage for one segment of the population:
In 1913, 30 states enforced laws banning marriage between whites and non-whites. In 1924, Virginia joined them when its legislature made marriage between white persons and non-white persons a felony. These laws remained in effect until 1967, when the US Supreme Court found them to be contrary to the guarantees of the US Constitution.
In 2007, 26 states had constitutional amendments explicitly barring the recognition of same-sex marriage, 18 of them prohibited the legal recognition of ANY same-sex union, and 19 more had legislation narrowly defining marriage to exclude same-sex partners. On Nov. 4th 2008, California, Florida, and Arizona joined the list, bring the total to 48.
Further back in history, another uncanny parallel:
Prior to 1835, the Supreme Court of North Carolina upheld the constitutional right of free men of color to vote; in response, the people voted in an amendment to the North Carolina Constitution removing this right by a majority of 55%.
On May 15, 2008, the Supreme Court of California overturned an unconstitutional ban of same-sex marriage; in response, the people voted in an amendment to the California Constitution removing this right by a majority vote of 52%.
It took until 1870 (a generation later) for government endorsed discrimination to be overturned by the 15th amendment, and another century before equal rights for all were guaranteed by law. Those ideals are once again under attack, the Constitution that once protected all Californians from discrimination and granted all people the same rights has been rewritten to single out one group of people for discrimination.
In both historical instances mentioned above, the justifications seemed reasonable to the majority at the time but are now universally seen as wrong.
Will America find a way to embrace equality once and for all, or must we leave it to future generations to prove us wrong once again? Will our children look at what this generation of voters has done in the name of tradition and hang their heads in shame?
Regardless of your religious beliefs or your personal feelings about your fellow Americans, equality is equality, is equality. Protect equal rights under the law in ALL THINGS for ALL PEOPLE.
You can help make a difference, do a little research and make your own choices:
Lambda Legal Defense Fund: http://www.lambdalegal.org/
Equality California: http://www.eqca.org/
Human Rights Campaign: http://www.hrc.org/
ShareTotally Might as Well Be a Racist
As Bad as Nana
Vote NO on Prop 8
Two things have NOT happened since gay people started getting married in California back in June of this year:
1) The apocalypse has NOT occurred, despite what your friends working on Wall Street might have told you.
2) People have gotten exactly 0% smarter. Or to put it another way, while all people are probably getting stupider each day, there are other people actively working to hurry the process along.
The result of the above pair of incontrovertible facts is Proposition 8. This is the latest endeavor by mostly out-of-state interests to codify discrimination under the California Constitution. They offer no apologies, no arguments of any believable substance, nor do they really try to disguise their Proposition as anything more than what it really is: An effort to deny constitutional rights and freedoms to a specific sub-section of our populace simply because supporters of Prop 8 woke up one day feeling like fucking assholes.
Oh shit. Excuse me. Pardon the expletive. It just slipped out. I totally did not mean to brand my fellow Californians (and also the Floridian and Utah Mormon financial backers) as total assholes. And yet…um…yeah…I sorta did. Don’t Mormon’s have enough damned discrimination to worry about? And after 8 years of Bush, frankly I think it’s time we took a long, hard look at why we’re listening to people from Florida at all anymore.
Proposition 8 is indefensible. If you’re not against it, please try to drag yourself aboard the train headed towards modernity where we all try to treat eachother with some basic human respect and don’t waste our time trying to Constitutionally discriminate against people just because they’re different. I have this feeling that it won’t even take you a trip to Wikipedia to refresh your memory as to why this is a shitty idea.
On November 4th, Vote NO on Prop 8. Don’t be a douche.
3rd Grade Gay
Gay Speakeasies
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//FROM THE ARCHIVES
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