Tag: conservative

I Have No Heart or Brain

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

How have your political views changed over time?

They say that if you are a conservative when you are young, you have no heart. They say that if you are liberal when you’re old, you have no brain. They do not suggest the unexplored third option, the permanently exhausted political science student who really doesn’t like any of you. 😉 Actually, I think it’s also due to age. Gen X (technically, I’m a Xennial) is now the adult in the room, because people older than us don’t understand technology, people younger don’t know how to function without it. We are the hybrids that remember what it was like to function on paper, the glue holding pre- and post- internet together.

If there’s anything I credit with my political views changing, it’s being in college before the Internet was really a thing. I was still fascinated by T1 connections at that point- you mean it’s always on? I don’t have to dial into anything? Plus, when I got to university, I was studying poli sci in school and my boss in IT was also a lawyer.

A lawyer who had a t-shirt that said, “Charter Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.” Today, this would be ominous. It was 2000, so I still laughed. I’m not sure anyone knew back then how this whole thing would turn out, but I didn’t have Donald Trump on my Bingo card, I’ll tell you that much.

I will say that I think younger people than me are coming up with the best ideas on the liberal end of the spectrum, and I think what being conservative in your elder years means to me is deciding which of these ideas are too wild to fund and which ones are worth pursuing. At its heart, universal basic income is a good idea. Other countries have implemented it and it works. But how do we scale up something like that without breaking the funds available for such a thing?

When it comes to money, I want everyone at the table in terms of ideology. I want James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on every single issue, not what passes for dialogue now. It’s not a good idea if you can’t explain a liberal idea to a conservative or vice versa. That’s because 99% of the time people don’t get what they want because they don”t actually know the question.

The liberals don’t have worse ideas, they just can’t sell them. I think it was Aaron Sorkin who wrote that originally, but it has stuck with me. The Republicans demand complete buy-in and loyalty, the Democrats don’t because we like free thinkers. While not a bad thing, this has cost Democrats DEARLY and they have no idea how to fix it.

I’m including me in that statement, because I’d like to see the party embrace bigger and better ideas, but also to have a concrete idea of how to fund them. There is no sense of polity in the Democratic Party, because both Bill Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are Democrats, but their platforms were/are worlds apart. Hillary Clinton’s is closer, but that’s only because she stayed in presidential politics longer.

I am definitely a Clinton Democrat, because it’s the lens through which I take in information. I voted for Bill in 1996, my first election….. although I also went to the Republican convention in 1992 and was thrilled about it, because back then it was just a chance to go to a major convention, because first of all I was a child and couldn’t vote. Second of all, George H.W. Bush grew to love both Clintons, so I think he’d forgive me for voting for them.

In terms of the way I was raised, I didn’t really know anything about my parents or grandparents’ political leanings until I was older, because they didn’t wear hats like they were pitching for either party. The only thing I remember from being a young kid is that my grandfather did not like LBJ, because of the Viet Nam war.

Fair.

But if you do a little digging, you find that it’s not the whole story. The thing that people are most known for isn’t necessarily what is going to do the most good or the most damage from a historical perspective. I agree with my grandfather that LBJ made some terrible calls during Viet Nam, but we also wouldn’t have gotten Great Society passed without him.

It is controversial to the general public, but not in political science circles to say that Lyndon Johnson was objectively a better president than John Kennedy. That when you take away the mythology of Camelot, Kennedy was wonderful for the American image and Johnson was more effective legislatively because he knew how to whip. I do think that John Kennedy deserved to be president, and that he was good at it- most political science students agree that it would be easier and more fair to compare both of them at full term, but we’ll never get that chance.

What I do not think is that we’ve managed to capture the fever behind one idea like “Great Society” that will get us elected….. and The New Deal before it. We need people on the extreme fringe of the party to come up with the new and better ideas, so that the more conservative members of the party can red team them. It’s not “shooting everything down,” but it seems that way because a red team’s job is to take you to the mat before you’re in front of the Republicans.

When I think about red teaming now, I think about Molly Ivins, who was not afraid to call out hypocrisy or bullshit on either side of the aisle, and was in fact more mystified by Texas politics than anything else. She thought it was wilder and weirder, and proved it every day in her columns.

I am not standing outside looking in, I am definitely a Democrat. But at the same time, I do not discount conservative ideas. I discount bigotry, and that has become 99% of the Republican platform. How we got here is not really a mystery. If you’ve studied the rise of Hitler, you know that what is happening now is what happened in Germany- the people were starving for a leader, and they chose the most racist asshole they could find because he parroted all their shitty beliefs.

Trump is not Hitler in his later years, but we’re ignoring the signs of fascism nonetheless. Here are two things that you really need to take in about this, and they’re important:

  • Trump discredited CIA on day one. He went into their house and told them point blank that he trusted the Russians more than them. So, the message from day one was “don’t believe the intelligence experts that have historically been the best in the world, and only pay attention to me.”
  • Trump discredited the journalists. So, not only should you not believe the raw data coming out of CIA (filtered for publication through State and the committees on intelligence in Congress), you should not believe any stories written about it.

Trump has the same outlook on domestic policy. Don’t read any stories about me, only look at me. Meanwhile, he’s not really running the country because he doesn’t know fuck all. Getting his whole family security clearances was downright offensive to the spies I’ve met, because that is not a community you join easily or lightly. You have to be trusted beyond a reasonable doubt to carry that kind of information, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Jared Kushner is not one of those people, and neither is Donald Trump.

The president of the United States WAS NOT QUALIFIED to see the documents he saw, and managed to show other world leaders things that he should have had in his possession because he’s the president and should have had enough sense he was actively harming American interests.

But that doesn’t matter, because he’s a Russian UI.

Putin’s revenge for Khrushchev’s treatment by Kennedy was to make us implode, and I believe it worked. There are people who still believe with a passion that the election was stolen due to Russian interference that Trump welcomed. Trump didn’t want to be president. He wanted to have been president. I believe that he sincerely thought he was going to lose, and 2016 was a bid to get more people into his DC hotel, not a legitimate presidential campaign. Hillary and Donald have known each other too damn long for either one of them not to see through the other’s bullshit, and I don’t think that Trump really thought he had a chance, which is why he was such a total asshole the entire campaign. I honestly think he was wondering “what do I have to do to lose?” By the end.

But we elected him anyway, and the rank and file judges and State employee jobs stayed open for months because there was no one to direct presidential appointments.

People, the damn president of the United States didn’t know he was president of Puerto Rico, and that’s just okay because people in the US don’t know that, either. Do you think that the president is less the president to our territories?

The president also commands lots of people overseas being Commander in Chief and American representative in global affairs. Honestly, the fact that Trump got to be that for us is alarming, and other heads of state noticed. Do you really think that Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Barrett, and especially Sauli Niinistö (president of Finland- rake the forests? Get out of here with that bullshit.) and Kim Kielsen (premier of Greenland- I’m sorry. You want to buy WHAT now?) were in any way impressed with us at all? The only reason we didn’t lose the plot with the UK is that they’re experiencing the same wave of conservatism that we are.

If there’s any way in which my political views have changed, it’s by leaving the Democratic and Republican parties alone and just doing my own thing by studying world systems. I’m looking at the forest, not the trees. I love dating someone who works in intelligence, because I am with someone who also has the ability to look at global systems and not get stuck in the minutiae of daily life. The world looks different when you’re talking about countries at war and humanitarian aid and everything that comes with it, vs. the fact that Chuy’s is too far away for my liking and Whole Foods continues to be out of the veggie dogs I like.

Perspective.

Years ago, I was on IM with Supergrover and I was telling her that I was having a really crappy day….. and that one of my cases to call back didn’t have a name at the top, so I dialed the number and the woman answered “Doctors Without Borders.” I died for a second because absolutely anything I was thinking about that day melted away with perspective. There’s never going to be a day in my life more stressful than being a doctor in a war torn country.

It’s like working for NASA and actually being an astronaut. Not the person on the ground that has every resource available to them at a moment’s notice. No, the guy who’s stuck in a tin can having only what they brought with them. IF MSF doesn’t bring a medication with them, it may be unlikely to get a local supply. We’re not talking total health here- we’re talking HIV vaccinations and TB tests.

So, again, if we’re talking about politics, then I’m probably not the person to ask how to fix the party.

But I think the first step is leaving your heart and mind out of it, and committing not to elect someone who tells you that what you’re seeing and hearing is the truth, when he’s just the mouthpiece.

In this case, you should absolutely pay attention to the people behind the curtain. They’ll be the ones trying to save us from ourselves.

The United States: A Primer on What’s Wrong with It and Why

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I wonder a lot about the future, which is why I was so glad I got to write out my thoughts about it. I’m not a scientific genius, but I do have enough smarts to predict what’s going to happen if we can’t live above ground, or the ground is ruined by radiation. Unlike Fallout 3, there is a brighter future underground, because we don’t have to live socially any different than we do now. It’s our physical limitations as humans that bind us to a huge problem, a lot of whom don’t see there being one and won’t do what’s necessary until their house explodes or there’s a food shortage because our farmland has been nuked.

A lot has been written about our dystopian futures, but it’s all fiction. We’ve never stopped to think about what would happen if we were faced with nuclear war or natural devastation. If the United States is attacked with a nuclear bomb, it would take the ground around it a hundred years to be fertile again. Nuclear treaties keep the world safe for a number of reasons, mostly because world leaders are not able to starve their own people or others if NATO is any threat at all. The immediacy of nuclear war would kill people right away. No one thinks about the fact that their grandchildren and great grandchildren may not get enough to eat because there’s not enough soil unaffected by radiation.

It’s not just bombs. Nuclear power is a wonderful thing right up until it’s not. Things go wrong at plants with the best laid plans. We can’t ignore these things, we have to find a way to successfully live around it. Leaders who wrestle with nuclear war are only thinking in the moment, and I cannot fathom what that discussion was like during WWII, particularly among the Japanese after they didn’t know what hit them.

By the same token, they’re responsible for their own radiation leaks with plants like Fukushima. That’s not to say that nuclear plants are bad and we should get rid of them. Just that for now the technology and chemistry is not capable of defeating human error.

People aren’t capable of acting as smart as they are under the best of circumstances, and the level of intelligence in the room goes down the more people are in it. Groupthink is a powerful drug, as evidenced by the former president’s lovely mugshot. We cannot defeat global warming with anti-vaxxers. It cannot be done if they can’t be convinced that science is real, vaccines are real, and global warming is not a hoax just to fuck with them.

Scientists are not saying that the globe is heating up and will get warmer consistently. They are saying that as the planet heats up, the swings in temperature, air currents, and water level will create chaos. We are not slowly getting warmer at a rate where everything happens concurrently. We are adjusting to a new reality…….. poorly.

The worst part is feeling the politics of all this. Other countries are so much more aware than we are, and so much money goes into making sure we’re as environmentally disastrous as we can possibly be for way longer than we can afford. The oil and gas industry own the United States and we cannot pretend it doesn’t. All climate change policy has to pass based on interest, and they buy out all the votes they want. If you want to grease the wheel, you will. who cares whether it’s legal or not?

We are not the only ones in the world that have a corrupt government, but we’re one of the countries that can do something about it because we aren’t beholden to a monarchy or a despot (anymore). We are also not the only country leaning toward the fascist right, which generally leads to deregulation of all sorts of things. We cannot afford to move backwards, and currently not enough of us are voting forwards. It’s not just the presidency. It’s the congress and local politicians down to the school board. The entire country is centered around who believes facts and who doesn’t. We found out who would justify civil war and who wouldn’t….. and what we found is “more than you might think.” Are we really going to wait until there’s a section of the military that’s on board with a coup? Because this is how you get a coup de etat. It’s not the difference between supporters and non-supporters of the orange gelatinous shitbag, it’s between the people who pick a side and who don’t. If we don’t vote out fascism, we’re going to get it.

I cannot live under that regime. No person of color or queer can. So far, we have no way in some states to advance representation to the smallest degree. The state of Arkansas just passed a ban that high school students cannot take African American history in high school to count for college credit because it might be some sort of indoctrination. “Heather Has Two Mommies” is not welcome in any Florida classroom. I would suggest, before people ban books about persons of color or minority sexual orientation/gender, that they go back to Emett Till. This covers both bases. People can still be killed for whistling at a woman for being black or same sex. Violence against lesbians is very real, although men are more likely to rape us than hit us.

Emett’s story encapsulates everything that’s wrong with our society, as well as what is right in terms of what his legacy has created. I just think it needs to create more by white people recognizing that this country is very much not what they think it is. That’s because all communication in telling the majority they’re wrong is being banned as well. Voting rights in Georgia come to mind.

Perhaps it would be easier to work together on future problems if we weren’t so busy actively trying to destroy each other. The environment is not just physical. Safety doesn’t always correspond to the physical structure you’re in. Sometimes, it’s a feeling. Safety in our society is falling by the wayside. Even the cops are in on it.

Those who study history are desperate for those who don’t to get a clue, but politicians have no idea how to get ahead in the system while also changing it. The government is not built for quick change, and I think that’s mostly good because too much change with this large a population would break most people trying to keep up. That being said, it’s time for more than what we’ve been getting. The planet is getting sicker and only one party cares. Other countries care so much more than we do that we’re an embarrassment.

That’s probably because we don’t have Eisenhower taxes coming in anymore. Government research is not being funded to the level it could be thanks to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Yes, Bill Gates has a foundation, but it’s not exclusively working on American infrastructure like the country would be able to if the same money came to us in the form of tax. We could spend more on climate change because we have money. But, of course, going to space on a vacation is much more important than funding grants for science and technology research.

We don’t even have government-funded health care, and even with our population we have the money to get it done…. we just won’t. Yet prescription drugs are lower in cost everywhere in the world because buying in bulk for the whole nation makes it where drug companies are only getting a set amount of money for them and not jacking up the price in different areas. There is a marked difference between drug prices even doing the research at home on your own. If you call three different pharmacies, you’re going to get three different answers…. except on over the counter meds. They seem to be about the same price no matter where you go because there’s only so much you can charge for paracetamol.

The question becomes which problem to work on first? It’s people. Nothing happens without buy-in, and we are lost to figure out how to create it.

Meanwhile, we make movies to highlight all the hypocrisy. The reason it’s not getting through is that people either think it doesn’t apply to them or the message is being written off as leftist propaganda.

We had a good thing going in the 50s in terms of the space race and figuring out how to adapt society to move forward. The thing that didn’t is the people. All the racism is still here. All the homophobia is still here. Everything that needs to be weeded out never left, it just went dormant.

You can fix the technology, but you can’t defeat stupid.

As the National Park Service says, “it’s hard to make containers to keep bears out. There is considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist.”

I think that’s a lesson from which we can all learn.

Stability

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are you most excited about for the future?

The immediate future is the most exciting. My sister and I are going through a thing (together, not fighting) and I asked her if I could write about it. She said “write whatever you want” and I said “you never have to get me a present for anything ever again.” This is not that entry. We’ve decided to hold off for a little while because OTHER FACTORS AT PLAY. The point is that my next words were “but if you were going to get me a present, it would be cool if you came up for my birthday this year or next year.” I go about my day thinking it’s a pie in the sky hope and in a few hours we have tickets for Charlotte Cardin on October 24th.

I realize that Lindsay is my sister, but she’s such a badass that it kind of rattles me when she wants to spend time together because I am so insecure at times. You’d just have to know how powerful she is to even begin to understand why I feel that way. She eats Republicans for breakfast and doesn’t waste time on ketchup. I have problems with prioritizing two tasks at once. I constantly have to keep a picture of her as a teen in my mind, because Lindsay’s professional persona is intimidating, but the baby isn’t.

I don’t worry about the lobbyist, but I’m the last woman alive that changed her diapers every damn day. The baby’s needs will always wake me up. The baby’s needs will always come before mine. Nothing in my life is more important than making sure her slap bracelet never comes off.

In December of 1990, the parsonage in Naples burned to the ground. My sister heard a fireman say that the fire started in the attic, and it was lucky that no one was sleeping in that bedroom (hers), because the attic rafters would have fallen on the bed and crushed whoever was sleeping. She internalized it, and things might have been different if we’d gotten another house in Naples. But no, we were moved to Houston before the committee even formed to rebuild. The stress of the fire and the culture shock affected us differently. I got sucked into band at school, choir at home, and “my first marriage.” Lindsay developed a phobia around going to school (now does it make a little more sense why that relationship knocked me on my ass? I met her six months after the fire.).

My mother was a stay at home mom. I think Lindsay thought that if she wasn’t home to protect my mother, that something would happen to her while she was gone. A trauma therapist told my dad to have a routine with her, and to get her a slap bracelet (I don’t remember whether she said that specifically, or just something Lindsay could keep on her) so that she had something to keep the routine going in her mind.

Every day, my dad would drive Lindsay to school, and he’d say:

Lucky day…. Gonna get an E today…. Like I say…. Wave to me…..

So, touching that slap bracelet made her remember what my dad said, and we were all with her when she touched her wrist. The therapist got an E that day, because it really was excellence on her part.

So, when I think of Lindsay walking into the Texas Legislature to protect queer kids, it’s me who needs the slap bracelet.

I can’t breathe when I think of how hard her job must be and how much stress she’s under…. And how none of it is her fault. God is not making her life more difficult. People are. People who think The Bible is an authority in the lives of American politicians are trying to make the rest of the country believe it as well. It’s maddening because we supposedly have separation of church and state, but Texas doesn’t believe in it so they just live around it.

As my friend Rev. Chuck Currie has pointed out, “Jesus said ‘let all the little children come unto me.’ He did not say ‘let all the little children come unto me….. except trans kids.’” My sister has to tell the Texas and federal government why trans kids need their medication. Their medication. She’s not fighting them on their wants and desires. She’s fighting conservatives for trans kids’ basic needs.

Meanwhile, Lindsay and I are both the preacher’s kid from “Saved.”

When it comes to Texas Republicans, I want to crash a van into their Jesus, and my Jesus would let me.

Their Jesus is about power over, and is a reflection of white supremacy. The church universal has wasted too much time worshipping whiteness. It’s not just an American problem. Desmond Tutu crashed a van into South African apartheid Jesus long ago.

It makes me laugh talking about my sister crashing her van into Jesus because over the years we’ve both loved Mandy Moore.

Ok, I’m going to take a second. We’ve got to talk about this. Mandy Moore didn’t win nearly enough awards for “This is Us.” Her craft was simply outstanding. OUTSTANDING. Every actor should watch her, because watching Rebecca Pearson is a master class, particularly when time jumps back and forth so that she’s playing different ages in the same episode. It’s a tour de force performance, and she kept it up for YEARS.

I needed to take a break and focus on Mandy Moore for a second, because I started flooding out at “slap bracelet.” There are tears and snot all up in here.

To keep it light for another moment while I collect myself, I think Coca Cola needs to start sending thank you cards to all the Diet Coke drinkers. This is because everyone likes soda, for the most part. Diet Coke drinkers are straight up addicts, and because of the world I inhabit, most of them are musicians. I have never met anyone who drinks Diet Coke that doesn’t drink a hell of a lot of it.

I’m not sure whether it’s the caffeine or the aspartame or whatever, but it does make you crave it with unusual intensity. I used to drink six a day, and I was a rookie. Every soprano I know carries it around like a water bottle. Diet Coke has even made it into a music joke.

How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to hold the Diet Coke and one to go get her accompanist to do it.

It’s a riff on “how many SMU sorority sisters does it take to change a light bulb?” “Two. One to mix drinks and one to call daddy.” I’m betting that the capitalization of daddy varies by age.

Quitting Diet Coke is relentless, and part of it is the carbonation. It’s hard to give up fizzy water altogether when you’re not used to still. Now add caffeine on top and quitting becomes even more useless.

The only thing that helped me was thinking that even if I was rich, $10 for 12 cans would still seem ridiculous.

Now I’m addicted to drink mix. It doesn’t even have to have caffeine in it because I’ve found that the reason I needed so much of it is that I wasn’t sleeping. Now, I take medication for that because especially during hypomania, I won’t sleep for several nights in a row. That doesn’t happen very often, but my sister is a lobbyist trying to get health care for trans kids and if I was going to stay up thinking about a problem, this is a good one.

My daughter is trans. I hate qualifying it, but I did not birth her. It was better than that. I told her dad in not so many words that he was being an absolute dick to her and to get his shit together. She responded……………. Positively. When we met, she was going to be my stepdaughter. Her dad is out of the picture, but we’re still going strong. So, whether The War Daniel and I get married or not, I have a child adopted through the rainbow flag. I’m here for it, and it’s a lot. But to be clear, Cora is not the problem. Cora is the recipient of the problem.

I still want to marry Daniel, but I have reservations that will never go away, and he hasn’t talked reconciliation. To me, that’s that. But you leave a relationship with an *adult.* Cora is now an adult, but the power dynamic is the same. I don’t talk to her about my feelings for Daniel and she wouldn’t know anything if I wasn’t a writer. I feel that it’s okay for her to read my thoughts, because they aren’t directed at her. In writing, I can make it more clear than I could in person that she’s not the monkey in the middle. Daniel doesn’t think of her that way, either.

To my beautiful girl, I have only found out that the dog is named after a heavy metal star. So, I just have the names Virginia Woof and Sidney Brisdog in my back pocket, as well as a name I picked up for a cat on “Will and Grace.” Jack’s cat was named “Chairman Meow” and I’m still not over it.

That’s because Cora is free to talk about her dad, but I do not have an opinion on him. I can’t. He is making his own choices, and I don’t have to like them. I just have to respect them. Also, whether it’s my own echo chamber telling me this or whether it’s my intuition, I think Daniel got tired of my patois reading as male and started competing with me to see who was the bigger asshole. Unsurprisingly, I “won.”

You can’t win against someone who was raised in NE Texas and has bought in to Republican fodder. He thought I was trying to reprogram him and I was trying to impress the seriousness of what his idiocy has caused because he didn’t bother to get educated when Cora came out.

It’s not inexcusable to be uneducated. It’s inexcusable not to believe your child when they come out. Disbelief is relative. Daniel thought of himself as having to put up with us, and not because he’s a bad person. It’s that he’s a self centered alcoholic, but I repeat myself.

Self-centered alcoholic is almost tautology.

If someone is trying to tell you that you’re hurting them and you react as if it’s all about you, it’s best to walk away. Do whatever it is you need to get yourself together, because the world is not going to think of you as the protagonist in every damn story. If you have been raised male, you think a lot about this.

That’s kind of the debate between cis and trans women…. That trans women tend to step all over cis women’s asses because they were socialized as men when they were young. This is the hashtag “not all trans women,” and yet it is not untrue, either. Their voices are loud because they’ve been told they deserve it. Cis women have been property for hundreds of years. Chaos ensues.

I would also say that cis women generally don’t stand up for themselves and trans women don’t realize there’s a problem. There is a big damn problem, but it is not one that will last forever. The bitch of it is that cis women need trans women because they don’t assume other men deserve shit and act as such. Cis women, not so much.

It’s especially the debate between cis lesbians and trans women, because they have even less political power. Trans women don’t always see cis women’s complaints as real. That they’re being misogynistic and their ire is invalid.

Cis women don’t give a rat’s ass most of the time. We only react to being ignored. I am of the mind that trans women are women. Period. I also don’t think trans women acknowledge how being socialized as a man as a child affects how they walk in the world as adults. That there ARE differences even though with puberty blockers, trans kids are being socialized at a very young age in their true gender.

Cis women also need to deal with their imposter syndrome and learn to kick men’s asses the way trans women do.

My only gripe is with trans women who think it’s all about them. They don’t think that, but I see the dark side. I see the devastation it causes when trans women tell the people who care about them that they’re not doing enough. How fast do you think things are going to change in the South? What is your deal? Instead of bitching all the time, send flowers.

Notice I didn’t say stop bitching all the time. Just recognize that you’re putting a lot of your injury on the same people who are trying to solve the problem. In other words, take out your anger on someone who deserves it and stop biting the hand that’s feeding you.

I’m not sure I’ve earned the right to have an opinion here, but I’m 45 years old and people have been all over my ass since 1990. I couldn’t be my authentic self, either, and in some parts of the country my internalized homophobia still kicks in hardcore. I cannot walk into just any bar, either. I wish trans women, especially young ones, would read up on Matthew Shepard. It wasn’t that long ago. The queer community as a whole is being thrown under the bus, and I realize that trans women’s plights are bad, but I don’t think they’re worse than they were for me 25 years ago. NONE of this is getting better.

I also don’t think there’s too much difference between coming out as a trans child now and coming out as a gay kid then. Back then, gays were the last acceptable minority to hate, and they’ve passed the savings on to you. But don’t think it’s worse for you. You just aren’t looking at the problem from the same perspective, because you’re in hell and no one knows it better than me.

Cora and I have actually had this conversation, and it led to one of the biggest moments in my life. I explained some of the queer history she doesn’t know, and asked her to have empathy. She took the note and made me cry so hard I couldn’t breathe.

When I said that my middle name bothered me she said, “I have a name I’m not using. Would you like to have it?”

And that’s when I knew that there would never be another Cora, and there would never be another Lindsay, either.

I am just glad that I have them in my future. I wish everyone could.

The Leadership Breakfast

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Barbara Bush died, which really isn’t that sad if you think about it. She lived to the ripe old age of 92. I think that’s about as much as anyone should expect in terms of time on earth, and her kids were lucky to have her that long. I mean, when someone dies it’s always sad for their families in terms of not being able to communicate anymore, but 92 is close to immortal in today’s terms of longevity. No one is going to say, “dear God, they took her too soon.” As a fellow Texan, I would like to be able to regale you with a story about how we met, but unfortunately, that never happened. We did go to the same church when I was in college, so I have met her husband. That will have to do.

So, it’s Easter Sunday in about 1999 or 2000 (I am really bad with dates). The men’s group was serving breakfast before service, and the president was going around with a pitcher of coffee for warm-ups. The Secret Service guys were stationed strategically around the room, constantly talking into their wrists.

The president comes over to me and fills my cup, and when I realized exactly who I was talking to, I began gulping down my coffee as fast as I could so he would have to come to my table multiple times, early and often. I am sure he knew my game, but didn’t seem to mind. We had very good, very short talks. I wish my memory was flawless, because I’d love to tell you what they were about. I do remember telling him that I was a political science student at University of Houston, and he told me he used to be a professor at Rice (like I didn’t know that. Didn’t tell him, though……).

I don’t think I’ve disagreed politically with many presidents besides him, although I definitely have a list. I was too young to care what was going on with Reagan, and I love Clinton & Obama. It was just exciting to meet anyone who’d been leader of the free world, as well as being Director of Central Intelligence the year I was born (1977), although he left in January and I wasn’t born until September. Close enough for government work. I don’t know how you get to be DCI if you don’t have any experience with espionage, so my guess is that he was OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the modern CIA) during World War II, and as a cook, I pretend that anyone who was OSS during that time was Julia Child’s best friend.

I was a spazzbasket of excitement, information, and caffeine. At this point, I have conservatively had, like, five cups of coffee trying to talk to him. I debate going over to talk to the Secret Service as well. However, they are designed to look absolutely unapproachable. They definitely pull it off.

What I hope I didn’t pull off was being desperately impressed, because no one that well-known wants to be “on” all the time. He was just there to be part of the men’s group, and I hope I respected that. But so many of my questions just swirled in my head. Did he like Helen Thomas? What’s it like being a wartime pilot? Was he ever under cover? Did he actually know Julia Child, or is that just wishful thinking?

There are so many things I would ask him now that I didn’t think of then, like what was it like for your wife and kids while you were president? It can’t have been easy to be in the public eye, whether there were things you liked about it or not. Also, what was it like to be president when the wall in Berlin fell? Was Ronald Reagan just as funny in private life as he was on television? At the time, all that was swirling in my head was about treating him like a regular human being.

….just like he is right now, dealing with the death of his wife.

When You Have to Take a Step Back

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am so tired of 2018.

I’m tired of people saying they’re SO liberal on LGBTQIA issues and then saying things like (paraphrasing), I don’t think this woman should have mentioned her wife in class because it’s a conversation I would like to have privately with my children at home…. but I belong to a liberal open and affirming church so I can’t2018-04-08 13_27_52-tired - Google Search possibly be construed as a bigot. In 2018, why is homosexuality something that has to be explained privately as if children don’t have enough agency to understand basic family constructs on their own? They’ve probably had classmates with same-sex parents since they were in kindergarten. By the time the asshat father I paraphrased got to his kids, they were probably eye-rolling because OMG. Gay people. I have to be prepared to see them out in the world. It’s not as if when queer people move into your neighborhood that spaceships land and little burritos walk out. For the love of Christ, literally.

I’m tired of Assad and his chemical attacks and his bombing of the people he’s supposed to serve. I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way, but the best rulers lead from the back. I’m tired of wondering if our military, our diplomats, and our intel operatives and their friendlies are safe or fighting for their lives as equally hard as Syrian citizens. I’m tired of American attitudes that our people’s lives are worth more than theirs.

I’m tired of Donald Trump and his Twitter foreign and domestic policy, but I’ll bet I’m way less tired than the people trying to reign him in.

I’m tired of journalists, bloggers, and media influencers being put on a list, not knowing what the information is for, but know that nothing good can come of this. I’m tired that every single story President Trump reads is deemed fake, as if “The Fourth Estate” isn’t supposed to do their damn jobs. I’m exhausted thinking that both Helen Thomas and Molly Ivins are dead and there’s no one being as loud as they would be if they knew what was happening. I am happiest picturing Helen Thomas flipping the bird.

I am tired of black people dying for absolutely no reason, and the chutzpah cops have in shooting someone eight times in the back, because they know there’s no penalty. Not all cops are bad, but the ones that are aren’t being punished nearly enough.

I am tired of children having to ask for help with gun control and it being this huge debate, as if adults aren’t the ones in charge of keeping them safe. I am sure that for gun freedom advocates, it will take their own child being shot in math class to change those hearts and minds. It is not, however, something I would wish on them. No parent should ever have to bury a child. It is only an observation that it takes a truly earth-shattering realization to change someone vehemently entrenched in the position that all people should be able to own firearms in which the Founding Brothers never could have conceived.

I’m tired of angry rants on Facebook that come up in my feed whether I’m looking for negativity or not…. that even discourse that starts off as civil ends up being monstrous. I will engage in politics, but at the first sign of an ad hominem attack, I’m out. This is both because I don’t need that temperature in my life, and second because when I play “Let’s Be an Asshole,” I am in it to win it. I am just not interested in seeing that version of myself, because it’s egocentric and therefore, absolutely toxic. There is no exhaustion worse than being tired of listening to yourself.

I am tired of having to be this version of me, the one that has to stand up for all the little people, because the majority doesn’t understand that they don’t get to dictate to the minority what hurts and what doesn’t.

I am tired of thinking that it will be this way my entire life, because society won’t progress far enough to accept everyone by the time I die…. but, I hope so.

2045: Martians are so eloquent…… I want to touch their skin just to see what it feels like….

I wish we could all step back and take a breath, but it seems as if when we do, it’s not a matter of learning to listen to each other, but thinking about what we’re going to say next. I am certainly not immune to this…. but in a lot of ways, I can’t breathe under the best of circumstances. One of my tribe was just fired for simply showing a photograph of her family. It’s just not possible for me to contain rage over it, although I try to put a smile on my face even when I want to scream, as I often do when I wake up to news that transgendered people have been shot, most of them to death.

And some of the time, it’s by people who claim they live and let live.

I’m tired of the marijuana debate, and not because I’m all excited about smoking it. I don’t. I’m tired of violence at the border and inequality in sentencing when minorities get caught smoking and/or selling. White boys will be boys, but scary black men are going to prison for life.

I’m tired of the immigration debate, the back and forth between enjoying cheap tomatoes and the gate should have closed after I came in. You don’t want to give minimum wage and health care benefits to full-time farm workers, but you don’t want to welcome people that will do the job for peanuts, either…. surprised that after immigrants have been deported that fruits and vegetables are withering on the vine.

I’m tired of people still harping on Hillary Clinton as if she’s been elected to anything or even has a public life anymore. I mean, she’ll always be well-known, but she’s not influencing public policy. She doesn’t even have an advice column. Have a Coke™ and a smile and shut it.

I’m tired of people going bankrupt over medical bills, especially when they’re shot or otherwise injured through no fault of their own. I am sure there are people who were gunned down at the Pulse night club (and lots of schools) who now have to pay for the “privilege.” We are one of the richest nations in the world, yet most of us tied to jobs with golden handcuffs as not to lose insurance. Other countries have so much more freedom than we do because their people are allowed to move freely and take any job they want because insurance is not dictated privately or state-by-state.

Most of all, I’m tired that we claim all people are created equally, but some are just a little more equal than others.