Dear Ladies and Gentlemen of the Arkansas Legislature, You’re only going to be around, at best, for another 60 or 70 years.
After that, your Yukon Denali, your 4,000-square-foot mini-manse, your brokerage account with Stephens Inc., your Rolex Submariner, that bottle of Blanton’s you’ve pushed to the back of the bar to save for a special occasion, aren’t going to matter so much. Perhaps your heirs will appreciate it, if you leave a chunk to the alma mater they might chisel your name on a dorm, maybe you’ll get a sentence in a book that’ll sit dusty on a shelf (or inchoate on some server) for centuries hence, but you’ll no longer be around to delight in earthly experience. That’s just the way it goes.
If you think you’ve got the next part figured out, good for you. All I can say is what I heard Jackson Browne sing a long time ago, that I don’t know what happens when people die. Some say I’m damned for feeling that way, but I’m only being honest.
If there is such a thing as a God of Love, maybe He’ll grade sinners like me who haven’t been blessed with the gift of faith on a curve. I’ll just try to get along without hurting anyone, with believing in love and the fragile sanctity of life. If this journey turns out to be kind of a trick question, well, I guess the joke will be on me. He’ll just have to go ahead and toss me in that Lake of Fire. I had fair warning.
This isn’t about me, but if you don’t mind me saying so, I’ve got mine. I’m married to a woman (a really good one, by the way). I might not quite be in the demographic that pays for your suppers, football tickets and back rubs, but I live near enough to those folks to probably avoid most of the collateral damage you folks can inflict. (If I shower and put on my good suit I’d probably fit right in at one of y’all’s fundraisers.)
I know I’m privileged; I owe a lot to luck, and the color of my skin, and a thousand other little factors for which I can take absolutely no credit. There are plenty of people who could do this job, and (it seems) a lot more who want to, and someday, probably, somebody is going to tell me I can’t do it anymore. Then all I’ll be able to do is be thankful for the time we had together.
(It’s over too quick. One night you’re digging in the dumpster behind city hall looking for an itemized budget for redecorating the police chief’s office some disgruntled detective let on might have been tossed out; next day you’re staring at an AARP online retirement calculator wondering how to come up with the extra $1.7 million they say you need.)
Now I can understand why you might think you’re kind of a big deal, what with lobbyists and constituents and all the pretty words that get thrown about how you’re doing the people’s business and all. I know you figure you’ve got to at least sound like you’re coming up with all sorts of solutions to all sorts of threats allegedly posed to whatever your ideal of our way of life is, but I’d ask you to remember a couple of things:
First of all, it’s hard for people to understand that a lack of obstacles is the real advantage that accrues to folks of orthodox beliefs and bents in this country, because in their minds (and maybe in reality) they worked hard and persevered and all that. All I’m saying is that if you come from pleasant circumstances, if maybe your grandfather was as financially diligent as you intend to be, if your family held certain expectations for you, if you were introduced into the world as a potential captain, a bright young thing who someday might grow up to be, if not POTUS, at least a bank director, at least a member of the country club, then you ought to be at least a little humble because you got a jump on a whole lot of people who, by the way, you are not one damn bit better than.
So humility is the only smart play here.
And in the second place, regardless of how smart and clever you think you are, you need to understand that you are in fact a deeply flawed and corruptible human being who has no authentic purchase on the truth. What I mean is that we’re all trying to figure this out, and even the best tools we have, like science and logic, sometimes fail us. Certainty is a scary thing, especially when it’s mingled with fear of the ineffable and the kind of self-preserving distrust we who have to negotiate a world populated with hypocrites, opportunists and fools often develop.
But the still little voice within might be fibbing. Your “conscience,” your “moral compass” may be an assumption that’s been reinforced by your insulation from people different from yourself. If you want to be a genuinely good person, maybe you have to get over the part of you that automatically cottons to whatever affirms your prejudices and flatters your idea of yourself as the best, brightest and most wonderful kind of American.
Because I’ll tell you, you’re already suspect. The very fact that you’re in your line of work says something about a certain neediness in you. You might get defensive and talk about how you live to serve and about how you could make a lot more money if you’d chosen a less altruistic path, but really, you’re not Gandhi or MLK, boss. You’re just a kind of big fish in a kind of small pond. You’re hardly anyone’s idea of a profile in courage.
I am not naive about your business model. I know that to do good you have to first get elected, and that politics is not a game of bean-bag. I know you have to make nice with people who can help you and that you have to at least make a show of pretending to care about what the folks back home think, even if they really and truly have no idea about the pragmatic limits of your office. I know it’s not easy being you, and that there’s a lot of hypocrisy that just feels unavoidable. It’s just inherent to the difficult job of statecraft.
We see what you’re doing when you talk about how gay folks don’t deserve “special” rights. It’s a transparent, cynical move designed to appeal to the fluttering anxieties of people who aren’t all that comfortable with an Arkansas, or an America, that isn’t completely congruent with the people they run with. It’s an unworthy, mean position and you ought to be ashamed for exploiting and coddling—rather than educating and leading—those fearful folks who voted for you.
Because you know gay folks aren’t the problem. They’re just an easy class to demonize. It’s just a play to make: You can pretend that good Christian folks are under siege, beset upon by people who only want to pursue their own styles of happiness, to live according to the precepts of their own hearts and enjoy what little benefits their government, their elected officials, might bequeath. That’ll work. In the short run.
And 70 years hence, when history judges you a bunch of moral cowards and specious yahoos, you’ll be dead.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Read more at
www.blooddirtangels.com