Sigh. Life can be terribly busy. But today, at the height of the editorial madness at work, one of the women I work with came running in and said, "Hey guys, look out the window! Look at the rainbow!"
And there it was. Faint, but easily discernable. A huge half-arch rainbow reaching down from the sky and ending at the Empire State Building. It was an unseasonably warm day. There was a lot of mist and fog in midtown. The skyscrapers were not as distinct as they usually are.
There it was nonetheless. An honest-to-God rainbow. I don't think I have seen a rainbow in years. Literally and figuratively.
It is very easy to be pessimistic. There is so much to be pessimistic about. On "Super Tuesday," the semi-viable alternate candidates in the major parties lost big and later conceded. I voted for Bradley. I usually vote for underdogs and the doomed. Only twice in recent years have I backed a winner. Clinton in 1992 (I voted Socialist in 1996) and Eva Moskowitz in 1999 for City Council. It's a shame that elections have become choices between lesser evils and marketing strategies.
Another Super Tuesday disaster: The "Knight initiative" in
California passed, denying marriage rights to gay men and
lesbians. Here the results of Californias Proposition 22 to put a
limit on marriage, with 100% of the precincts reporting:
YES: 4,160,706--61.4%
NO: 2,617,838--38.6%
Nothing like the resounding voice of the people to ensure second-class
citizenship to 10% of the population for no real reason. See my friend
Tony's weekly
rant, entitled, "First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage" about this,
for real vitriol.
Meanwhile, over on Staten Island, some very religious of souls put up some billboards with anti-gay "quotes" from the Bible. My favorite is the one from the The Living Bible, which says, "Homosexuality is absolutely forbidden, for it is an enormous sin."
Far be it from me to interpret the word of God or anything, but I can interpret the interpretation. The word HOMOSEXUALITY is not in the original Bible. This so-called Living Bible has been animated with hateful, preferential language. This sort of hatefulness is sort of what I expected from Staten Island, the most conservative borough. I was born there, and my grandparents are buried there, but my association with that island ends there.
Well, wasn't I surprised when the community of Staten Island protested such a hate-filled act. Even arch-Republican Guy Molinari was publicly appalled.
Another reason I have not written for a while: My dad is in the hospital with respiratory failure. It's been a very uneasy month, with no clear end in sight. He had a trachestomy done, and can only talk a few minutes a day with a speech valve. Dad told me tonight, with the help of the valve, that being able to communicate "gives him hope for the future." Poor Dad has been through so much in his life. Polio in 1929, and subsequent "medical experiments" that in the end amounted to buying magic beans. And then Dad thrived and walked on canes and supported himself, had adventures, and then had a family. He even accidentally walked through traffic in the Place d'Etoile, not knowing there was a pedestrian underpass. The power of post-polio slowed him down though.
And yet, in a hospital bed in the respiratory care unit, on a ventilator half the day, he has hope for the future. And despite the evils of "christians" who preach hate and immoral public "propositions" and certain doom in the face of adversity, we have hope. Even after a flood, Noah's Ark landed and the first thing the survivors saw was a rainbow. (I bring this up for symbolic purposes).
Will there ever be a rainbow? Absolutey. Nature provides them, and maybe people can also, if they are really optimistic. The 20th Century witnessed some of the most appalling events of human history, but we got through them with a lot of optimism. In terms of language, optimism can be expressed with the phrase "it's possible."
For what it's worth, I think anything is possible. If we all see a world where the things we truly want are possible, how could we remain pessimists?
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