Girls on a Train

[lydy]

I've been contemplating the meme from Twitter a while back.  It's a picture of a drag queen and a woman in a burqa sitting in a subway car in NYC, apparently amiably ignoring one another, and captioned, "This is the future the liberals want."  Which then caused liberals to drag the conservatives in various creative and funny ways.  But I keep on circling back to two things.  The first is that someone pointed out that this isn't "the future" that liberals want, this is the present, that we built.  And the second is, what does it mean to share a country with people who are so horrified by something that they can see with their own eyes that they must assign it to some theoretical hell-scape future apocalypse?  And what does it mean that their idea of a nearly inconceivable hell is my aspiration for our nation?

The vision must, I think, be relegated to a fictional hell-scape of the future, because to admit that it is happening, right now, disproves their point.  They cannot envision a world where two such disjoint views of life co-exist without violence and destruction.  They cannot see how two such things can co-exist at all.  In a very real way, that image is an existential threat, it challenges their entire understanding of how people and societies work, and it cannot be allowed to stand, not just because they hate Muslims and queers, but because the possibility of those things not resulting in destruction is a complete repudiation of how they understand the world at a very fundamental level.

And I think about my Evangelical family, who claim to love me, but hate everything that is important about me.  Who, when challenged, would claim to love the sinner but hate the sin.  Which does not, and cannot work, when what they hate are my important relationships,, my chosen family, my philosophy, my politics, and pretty much every other thing about me which I chose or aspire to.  When you strip away all the "sin" there's nothing really left,  One could argue that I am, at core, my sins.  So what can it possibly mean to love me, but hate my sins?

What does it mean to share a society with people who find the mere fact of other people tootling along in their own way, managing life on terms that are happy and meaningful, to be an existential threat to you?  If they were just content to consign the lot of us to hell, and tootle along themselves, that would be one thing.  But our existence is perceived as a threat to theirs.  

I do not pretend to have any answers.  I haven't found any for my blood family, and so I can't imagine trying to heal the nation.  But I think it's important to understand that our actual existence is what they have a problem with.  

(I want to acknowledge that my problems are not nearly as life-threatening or acute as that which people of color and other marginalized communities face.  But I don't really know how to talk about that well, so I want to say I know it's there, and it's much worse.  Some of it though, may be part of the same problem.  The simple act of being black in this country appears to create an existential threat for white people.  However, there are a lot of nuances there I don't get.)