Troy Davis and Jamey Rodemeyer: By A Jury Of Our Peers

JCF points us at this essay about the deaths our society sanctions:

Troy and Jamey may not stand in line together in heaven, but they stand together in history; tried, convicted, and ultimately bullied and betrayed.

Bullying is about entitlement; who belongs and who doesn’t, who can be “othered.” I was ganged up on that day in 4th grade because I was new to the school; I didn’t belong. The image of Troy and Jamey stays in my mind, and begs the question: Who is the face of America? One of the reasons that Michelle Bachmann can be so smug, despite what was once considered the fringe politics of the Tea Party, is that in her whiteness and privilege, her belief is unshakeable that she is America. She owns; blacks and gays are renting. The only way out of this hell is for those of us who have been marginalized to insist on visibility, to find solidarity and stand together....

Troy Davis and Jamey Rodemeyer are dead, both killed at the hands of the State, and the sad news, beyond the fact that no one saved them, is that no one is going to save us, either. And as horrifying as it is to consider, we all know: Troy Davis will not be the last person executed on Death Row who may be innocent, Jamey Rodemeyer won’t be the last gay child to take his life. And the bullies will thrive, and will continue to thrive until gay white men and women will say, “I am Troy Davis”; and blacks — rich and poor, Christian and secular — step out front and say, “We won’t allow you to bully our gay children anymore. I am Jamey Rodemeyer”....

Everyone is essential. There is no one who can be thrown away. And we who are called different will not be “othered” any longer. We stand together. We are America. And the day will come when we all realize there is no “Them”; there never was. It always is, and always will be, “Us.”

Last words

We interred his ashes in his family's plot under a Victorian angel statue that is dusted with lichen and worn by well over a century of rain, in a Roman Catholic cemetery about an hour away from where I grew up. On the drive up there with my oldest brother, BP and I sat on either side of the plain oak box holding his ashes, and rested our hands on its smooth surface. The day was clear, and sunny, and beautiful, and we gathered in the shade of an immense old oak.

He rests next to his grandparents, his great grandparents, his aunt, and his great-aunt. As well as his immediate family, his sisters and some of my cousins also came. After we finished, and the taciturn gravedigger had tamped the dirt back down over the grave site, my mother dropped a bouquet on the scarred ground. It was roses, and lilies of the valley: recapitulating her wedding bouquet, but with the addition of forget-me-nots picked from her own garden that morning. We lingered, hesitant to go. The kindly Irish priest from the nearby parish said, "I have had over 100 funerals here, yet have never been in this old part of the cemetery. I will look over here in the future, and think of him and all of you nice people."

Then we went home, and BP and I thought the back seat seemed empty without the box between us. The family spent the evening eating, drinking his favorite wine, and telling familiar stories of his 83 years, washing our grief with tears but also celebrating his life with our laughter.

During the run-up to Prop8, my Dad went to his Rotary Club and told his fellows, "You will oblige me by voting against this. My daughter is a lesbian and getting married." He was so pleased to show me his huge "No on Prop8" yard sign. And he walked me down the aisle with a huge grin, and we danced at my wedding.

I love you, Dad. Rest in peace.

Community

A few weeks ago, the Episcopal Café posted a study that showed that religious people are healthier. This is not a surprise.

People do better connected to other people. We are social creatures. And if you are connected, you can’t do “them vs us”, because you know Them. If you aren’t connected, it’s easy to segregate, balkanize, fractionate. And it’s stressful to do that.

A book published a few years ago, called Bowling Alone decried the loss of community in modern American society. It used to be that you Belonged to something. Not just church, but your Club, or your Bowling League, or something else that took you out from the cocoon of your life and echo chamber of your social class. That doesn’t happen now much, outside of church.

SO why are religious people healthier? I posit it is because of the effects of community—and the old bowling leagues, or neighborhood groups, would have showed the same effect.

One thing I’ve noticed since I started going to church with BP is the community effect. BP describes getting to know me as “dragging you out from under a rock” because I am by nature compulsively private and unwilling to reach out. My background is stiff-upper-lip English and German —emotion is weakness. I told her that one of the things I notice about going to church every week is how vulnerable it makes you. The carefully constructed shell that I have built, chips away. I’m not easy with that, but I’m getting better.

Think about it. The clergy know what’s going on with you in a deeply personal way. You don’t have a mask with someone who may have advised you through something very private and whom you still see every week. Like the obligatory counseling we went through for our Blessing: the wonderful priest who led that, knows a lot that is very personal about us and might make me blush! But I look forward to seeing her on Sunday nonetheless. During the Prayers of the People, you hear who’s asking for prayers, and you think “Oh, dear. I didn’t know H’s mom died” or “that’s bad. I wonder if M’s cancer is back” and at coffee you look for them for a hug, or an informal casserole committee. BP grew up with this everyone-knows kind of thing, and finds the community family to be a warm, supportive blanket. She gives me a quizzical look that I’m still getting used to this openness and exposure.

As you know, my Dad died on Tuesday. You, my internet church friends, have sent your prayers and virtual hugs, which are very welcome as an expression of your love. Dad would have appreciated that; he still identified as a Roman Catholic (although he didn't really practice). We’ll be with mom this weekend, 500 miles away from our home, when they read his name out at St Paul’s in the prayers for the dead. Our real life church friends will look for us at coffee to give us a hug. They will join us and you in that essential aspect of mourning even at a distance. It’s the community aspect that I have learned to value from you all. Thank you.

Words do hurt: living and dying while gay in America (updated)

Grandmere Mimi has been keeping grim count of the horrible spate of suicides of gay youth recently. Writer and Activist Dan Savage is trying to provide hope for gay youth, especially those who may lack real-life role models, with his It gets better project.

Responding to the suicide of musician and college student Tyler Clementi, whose roommate filmed him having sex with another man and then streamed it on the internet, John Aravosis writes:

Gay civil rights isn't a "social issue." It's our lives. A lot of us, myself included, grew up thinking we'd never see the age of 30 because we'd have to kill ourselves once people found out we were gay. A lot of people have no idea how hard it is to grow up being gay. To grow up thinking God made you wrong. Thinking you will never find love. Thinking your own family and friends will disown you once they know who you really are. And hearing the President of the United States - one of the "good" guys - say that you don't deserve the right to marry the person you love.

This brought to my mind the damage that the haters do.

You may recall our discussion of evangelical Andrew Marin, and his Marin Foundation. He claims to be a friend to gay people, and got noticed by apologizing at a gay pride parade. This is what Andrew Marin says when his audience is other evangelicals:

Because you have to understand, you have to think big picture. And the funny thing is if you bring up --- because I'll tell you, a lot of fifteen year olds don't think about what their life is going to be like when it's thirty-five. Especially for a kid who's like, 'hey I'm fifteen and I'm a gay Christian' -- I don't think that quite resonates with what that's going to be when you're thirty-five years old and you can't be married and you can't have kids and, you know, it's a lot different of a life than at that point fifteen year olds can grasp, you know? And so, even if you throw something like that out there, about, well this is for the long haul and you have to think about the big picture and thirty-five and you know with all of this other stuff happening, the great part is, if they're willing to come to you and say something like that, you can provide that hope in Christ [and] take away the whole sexuality issue. Take it away, you know?

You see, Marin (who claims he loves gay people) works by trying to create hopelessness and fear in the young. That's bad. That's dangerous.

As an op ed writer said in the Houston Chronicle, in response to the suicide of Asher Brown,

[T]here’s an even broader and more insidious force at work in our country when it comes to gay teen suicide. Granted, gay rights may be inching slowly forward in the court system, but that progress has contributed greatly to unprecedented levels of self-esteem battering rhetoric in the media and from the pulpit. ....

Yes, the bullies and their despicable behavior are responsible for Asher’s death. But so is the toxic, virulently anti-gay environment that continues to swirl around all of our children.

NOM, Andrew Marin, the "intrinsic disorder" preached by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the anti-gay pro-bully policies of the Focus on the Family....all of them contribute to facilitate an environment of fear and despair. It's long past time for people to stand up against that environment, and to remind everyone that every life is precious, and a child most of all.


Update:

Suicide by train: a tale from the rails

Someone died early this morning on the rail line near Anaheim CA. He stepped into a crossing in front of a Metrolink commuter train around 6am, stretched out his arms and waited for the train to hit him. The engineer couldn't stop in time.

Nearly 100 miles away, when I was getting on the first northbound Amtrak of the day, I read a message crawling across the information sign that the first southbound service was delayed due to a "passenger train trespassing incident". I didn't really think much about it; it wasn't my train, it was miles away. Maybe someone had gotten obstreperous with the conductor, or someone had been seen along the track. It didn't even cross my mind that those words were railway code for a fatality.

But as we left Oceanside at 7am, the man behind me got a call on his cellphone. "Well, then I'm screwed," he said, sounding annoyed. Then I got a call from a colleague who takes Metrolink from Irvine, the midway point. He told me that both lines, southbound and northbound, were blocked north of Anaheim. My colleague expected a prolonged delay, so he turned around and went home to telecommute. The man behind me said his caller told him authorities were waiting for the coroner up in Anaheim.

No one had any internet (or thought to use it). There is internet on some trains, but the low speed connection is spotty and unreliable even if you sit on top of it. I don't have a mobile wireless plan so I'm blind on the train, with my only resource scavenging off any open networks I find with my laptop as we stop in the stations. The little FM radio on my iPod nano couldn't pick up any news stations --coastal Orange County is a notorious dead zone for public radio (figures). And at some level, what did it matter what happened? All that mattered to the passengers, was what would happen to our train, and in regrettably typical Amtrak fashion, they said absolutely nothing at all.

For me, by the time I learned this, choices were few. If the lines were closed, there would be no southbound Amtrak back to San Diego: they'd all be stuck north of Anaheim. So even if I got off at an intermediate station, there's nothing to get on going south, at least nothing that would go all the way. And I'm sitting on the first northbound train, so there's no Amtrak ahead of me to be turned around. Besides, I had meetings in LA today. So I sat it out, and my train kept going north.

The lines reopened after about 3 hours, after the business of death swarmed around the tracks: policemen with yellow tape, railway workers in hard hats, the cleanup crew with bins and tarps. Once north of Anaheim, my train inched its way along with frequent long, sighing stops. Even so, we got to LA with only a 45 minute delay. Much faster than usual, said my Irvine colleague, who has more grim experience than I.

This is the 2nd death that I know of on the LA-San Diego corridor this summer; in June, a man was killed by an overnight freight train near San Clemente under rather creepy circumstances (at 2am, it appears that a group of teenagers watched him get hit). Other lines in the region have also had a number of deaths; sometimes suicide, sometimes stupidity (like walking along the line, or trying to beat the gates). They are depressingly common. I wonder why anyone would choose such a horrible way to die.

I sorrow for the victim today who suffered such despair, and for his family. And I feel for the engineer, at the controls of his massive machine, who was made an unwilling accomplice and saw it all. I hope that help is available to him.

One of my other commute friends told me that in the 4 or 5 years she's been doing this trip, her train has killed 6 people, most of them suicides. I find that quite shocking. So I know that it is inevitable that one day I too will be an accomplice of sorts, a few hundred feet away from death, a passenger on a train that kills a person.


First train through after tracks re-open. Photo: Orange County Register


Cross posted at Friends of Jake, Surfliner stories, Daily Kos, and StreetProphets

A meditation on violence, death, and loss

This Lent has seen too many friends and friends-of-friends die, as reported by James at TTLS, MadPriest, Lisa, and others. While some of these have been the passing of the old, there have been more than a few losses of young folks in their prime.

Tragic as any death may be, there has also been a spate of violent deaths that gives me pause. Counterlight reflects on the run of gun violence in the US with over 30 people killed in mass shootings of one form or another over the last week, some of them children. The reason for it is unclear (in at least two cases the killer himself died.)

And, in an example of how fundamentalism can contribute to violence, News from Iraq

Two gay men were killed in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, a local official said on Saturday, and police said they had found the bodies of four more after clerics urged a crackdown on a perceived spread of homosexuality.....

Sermons condemning homosexuality were read at the last two Friday prayer gatherings in Sadr City, a sprawling Baghdad slum of some 2 million people.

Too many deaths. And in the comments to this post, Ann tells us of Aaron, a young man savagely beaten in Denver for the sin of being gay and hanging by a thread; let us hope that he does not add to this number.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, wrote Dr Donne, and on this day, I feel diminished, and so very, very tired of the antagonism and the battles and the arguments that pass for discourse and cheap points scored at the cost of another. I am longing for some peace and security, with a fleeting hope that we can find what unites us, rather than constantly dividing into the "Us" and "Them". Gay vs Straight. Blue vs Red. Christian vs. Atheist.

Instead, I feel much the same grimness expressed by Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach . This poem is speaking to me these days far too much, with the noise and stink of those armies far too close.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.