Oh, Keith. Too many tears this past week. Tears of joy, mostly, yes. But frustration and sorrow, too. And tonight, as your eyes welled up, mine spilled over. I do have gay friends--lots of them. Some are actually married now (thank you, Sweden, Canada and Massachusetts). And plenty of my colleagues and neighbors here in Vermont are CU’d--civil unioned. We may even get around to doing the right thing here in the Green Mountains this year and finally pass a gay marriage bill, now that we’ve figured out the sky isn’t going to fall and there will be no big rush to marry goats and geese.
But that’s not what made my tears fall. And gay marriage isn’t exactly the subject of this diary. “They want what you want--a chance to be a little less alone in the world.” This is what we all want. Solitude, loneliness, even isolation, are sometimes inescapable parts of the human experience, never more so than in our hyperconnected technological era, ironically.
The chance to be less alone draws many of us to dKos, I believe. Those magical tubes allow us, sitting at home alone in front of our glowing screens, to preach and rant at each other, pat each other on the backs, LOL together and post silly pootie pics. I’ve been wrestling recently with something very difficult. “Life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness.” Yes, Keith, it damn well does, and the redness in your eyes tells me you know the truth of this as intimately as I do. But when I can come here and make The Termite laugh, or play in a JeffLieber diary, or be aghast with fellow Kossacks at the thought of Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the day is not so bad. And the loneliness is easier to bear.
A sad thing, over the past few days, has been to watch dissension and blame erupt here over Prop 8. I don’t know exactly what the horrible ad campaign was like, but I expect the strategy was to overwhelm the electorate with negativity and misinformation. When really, as Keith said, the message should have been simple. Are you for or against love? It is not easy to get a simple message through all the clutter. In fact, we should revel in the miracle that the simple message of Hope and Change triumphed last Tuesday over the litany of evil messages thrown up against its quiet song.
I am so moved, Keith, that you said what many of us must realize on some level, but fear to speak: the world does feel very barren these days. And it is indeed “stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward.” I haven’t been to many weddings lately, but I wept quietly during the vows (from joy!) this September when two amazing friends tied the knot. It seems like a rare thing these days--true love.
Haven’t found it myself.
I wonder--and this is just speculation--if some of those who voted against allowing their gay grocer or mailman or barber or policewoman to marry the person he or she loves lack the “ember of love” in their own lives. I wonder if bitterness about their own loneliness and isolation drove them to veto happiness for others, and merely use a twisted religious justification as a convenient excuse. If I’m honest with myself, I know sometimes when I’m feeling really blue, it’s hard to stomach what feels like the perfect happiness of everyone else around me. Did the initial ebullient wave of gay weddings stir dissatisfaction about some voters’ distinctly non-ebullient lives?
I don’t know. But I do know this: my heart aches tonight. For all of us are diminished by anything that increases the unhappiness of another human heart.
Read Keith Olbermann's entire Special Comment here.