Turn on Your Light

I never forget how lucky I am.
I am blessed beyond measure and I try to never forget that.

The person I love is adored and fully embraced by my family. (To the degree that I often wonder if they love her more than they love me.)

I married into a family that considers me a daughter and a sister and makes me feel welcome always.

I am able to be legally married, in a city that (mostly) tries to accept diversity.

Discrimination and hatred are not torments that find me daily. And it crushes me to know that many, many people face this so often.

Discrimination and hatred come from ignorance and fear. Fear festers in the things we don’t personally relate to or understand.
Fully understanding something and being open-minded to it are not mutually exclusive. That is the basis of tolerance.

Mankind is forever sharpening our axes of bigotry against each other in the things we don’t see eye-to-eye on.
Bigotry is fear borne ignorance.

So much about our world today distresses me. My daughter is a baby now, but I am flooded with trepidation thinking about all the things I am going to have to explain to her one day. How some humans are capable of so much love, yet can be so driven by fear and hate. In the spate of recent gun violence, I keep thinking of how many more people died because they wouldn’t leave their loved ones alone. How many stayed to protect injured friends. How many died trying to help strangers. The collective panic would have been deafening. The mutilating hatred of someone holding a gun is so often met with compassion and love being used as a shield.

I believe that at our core, the majority of us wish to connect and protect.

We have all let our fear and intolerance for differences, our selective religious doctrines, our self-righteousness and impatience cloud the reality that we are all just humans.

You don’t have to fully understand my lifestyle to support my humanness.

You don’t have to fully understand something to support the human.
A drop of patience can diffuse an ocean of resentment.

I grew up in a country where the laws still don’t protect me because of one aspect of who I am. Antiquated laws still state that I could be refused entry by immigration. I now live in a country where hundreds of thousands of other people can celebrate who they are. For many people this one weekend puts hatred on mute and the volume of acceptance gets turned right up. Luckily for the LGBT community that sound is usually accompanied by a sweet dance beat.

You don’t have to be gay to attend pride.
You don’t have to attend pride because you are gay.

It is an annual reminder that there is still a lot of fear based hatred that needs to be softened and educated.

If you have ever wondered why there needs to be a Gay Pride, all you need to do is check yourself daily in the way you think, speak, feel, react, consider, empathize and act towards people who might be different than you. In all of our differences.

Racism, homophobia, bigotry, xenophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, disdain because someone is ‘an other’ all stem from fear.

Fear is darkness.

Let’s all turn a light on together.

Happy Pride.
I love you.