I admit I didn’t expect much. After all, the whole snafu was partially my fault for not noticing things for months at a time, and for not clarifying things with the kiddo & the dad regarding what was sent back when. And yes, I did delegate the canceling in a way that caused it to be rather frustratingly sort-of-but-not-really taken care of. And I know this is confusing, but it’s nowhere near as confusing as the plaintive email I sent to GameFly after all this had gotten itself into such a sorry state.

Sigh.

So in the process of looking up their Customer Service phone number, I found any number of wankers wanking about how GameFly was teh suck, etc etc. I even imagined how, if they kept sending me emails, I’d unsubscribe with one of those snarky “why I unsubscribed” messages. Yes, sometimes I get mad in advance of having a reason, just so I’ll be good and ready. Well, either the wankers were just being wanky (as wankers often are), or, GameFly has changed.

The plaintive, confusing email was sent yesterday evening, ending with a whine about how it sure would be nice to talk to them about the whole mess but oh well.

And today, I got the nicest call. They’re going to clear the account of games that we didn’t report missing for months (we meant to, we just … you know … and then another month went by …). And, they’re refunding two months’ charges. Which isn’t fair — it’s way, way beyond fair.

Meaning that at some point, we will probably re-subscribe, if for no other reason than they just impressed the hell out of me. We do have numerous game systems, so a subscription would make sense, it’s just that we’re kind of over-gamed at the moment after the wildly Xbox-y Xmas.

So, GameFly, thank you for being very understanding about our “… and then another month went by … “. We appreciate the convenience.

It is never easy to adjust to the proliferation of a new communication technology. I’m old enough to remember when answering machines were new, and most of the messages recorded were something along the lines of “I … um … never know what to say to these things. Um? This is, this is me, uh, and … call me?” The invention of the printing press enabled all manner of unseemly pamphleteering that I’m sure was very upsetting to the establishment at the time. And imagine the conflicts that arose when people started using language and drawing pictures on walls instead of grunting and pointing.

The rise of citizen journalism — or more accurately, citizen reportage, has been sudden and meteoric, at least in evolutionary terms. Unlike our distant ancestors, we don’t have generations to adjust our way of thinking about how we process and share information. The pace of change has changed, and it is necessary for humans to adapt not only to the change, but the pace.

And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq.

Is it fair to call the tweeting of the Fort Hood shootings an atrocity, or to say that ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth? No, because individuals with camera phones and twitter accounts are not journalists, they are eyewitnesses with the ability to make actual recordings of events and share their raw, unfiltered observations in real time. Live-blogging these observations shouldn’t be referred to as citizen journalism either, unless we are using this term to criticize individuals who are not journalists for not following basic journalistic principles.

The urgency of the desire to share sensational and disturbing information isn’t new, or even particularly modern — it predates the internet, the telephone, the printing press, and probably even cave-paintings. Rumors have always spread with remarkable speed, because the possession of salacious information brings out the resourcefulness in humans, always has, always will. As Douglas Adams put it, “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own laws.” The desires to tell and to be told are usually mutual, but the decision to listen and accept at face value is always at the sole discretion of the listener.

2: Fort Hood is not the Iranian revolution

But my main objection is to the parallels drawn between the blogging of the Fort Hood shootings and the Twittering of the Iranian Revolution. Invoking the video of Neda Agha Soltan, then dragging out of the tired old “why didn’t you put down the camera and help” nonsense.

Even if you’ve seen the footage before, you should watch it again. But this time bear in mind the following: the cameraman was not a professional reporter, but rather an ordinary person, just like the victim. And what did he do when he saw a young girl bleeding to death? Did he run for help, or try to assist in stemming the bleeding? No he didn’t.

Unless you are the only person available to help, or you have specific qualifications to provide assistance in the role of a first responder, putting down the camera isn’t going to help anyone.  And in this particular case, not putting down the camera gave the revolution a voice, and a face, and a rallying point. That little bit of cell phone video is horrifying, yes, but it moved people, and changed things. I’d say that’s a pretty stellar bit of journalism, amateur or not.

Of course the rules that apply to an individual with regard to their role in an event are not suspended. If Ms. Moore was acting in an official capacity and had a duty to preserve medical or military confidentiality, she should be held accountable if she violated those rules. And media outlets should not run unfiltered eyewitness tweets as news. You’d think these things would go without saying, but you’d think that about a lot of things that end up needing to be said anyway.

Private citizens have the same role in unfolding tragedies as they always have – they are eyewitnesses, and as such, anything they are able to document during an incident has some value, even more so if they are the only ones available to do so. In the case of the Iranian revolution, the person holding the camera phone plays an important role in what they are recording, since they are preventing it from being suppressed and denied by those in power.

3: Missing the Point

Which brings me to Paul Carr’s cynical observation in the TechCrunch article:

“Despite how successful ten million actual voters marching through Washington, London and other major cities in 2003 were in stopping the invasion of Iraq, a bit of entirely virtual cyber-posturing by foreigners didn’t lead to real change in Iran.”

First of all, the Tweeting of the Iranian Revolution is more than just citizen journalism. Twitter has provided the good people of Iran a platform to share important information with each other as well as with the rest of the world, information which would never be reported by an official news outlet. Twitter access is limited, and dangerous, so a network of individuals both inside and outside the borders gathers and shares whatever information it can. To say that these efforts have failed is both mean-spirited and premature – and overlooks another aspect of this unprecedented worldwide access to the heart of revolution, which is (to me) a compelling and poignant argument in favor of it:

Whether or not the Iranian people succeed, this access has given the rest of us a meaningful and vivid perspective that has already changed the world for those of us who are listening. Political interactions with the leaders of Iran are fraught with posturing and rattling of sabers, and in years past, this would be a primary factor in shaping the perceptions the citizens of the countries involved. What if the only outside knowledge of the Iranian revolution came from their official media outlets?

Communication technology is changing the world, and the pace of this change is changing, gaining mass and momentum. The amount raw, unfiltered information available in real-time exceeds the ability to process it, which is why we have people complaining about reading live eyewitness accounts coming directly out of an intense situation as if this is supposed to be reliable information. That’s an unrealistic expectation.

“Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really.”

And finally, trivializing the personal connections between the Iranian people and the thousands of supporters “turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran” is missing … well, not the whole point, but the best part of it.

Having read Frank Schaeffer’s analysis, and the Political Carnival’s excellent summary, I think both are absolutely spot on, and am a little concerned with some of the commenters, who felt this point of view was unnecessarily extreme. It is always good to approach any kind of alarmist analysis/opinion with a healthy dose of skepticism, but, having met the progenitors of today’s movement about a quarter century ago, before the far Right Wing became a media sensation, back when they were hawking pamphlets and brochures from a folding table in the mall, I can tell you that there is ample reason to go ahead and be good and alarmed.

My encounter was at the height (or depth, if you prefer) of the Reagan-Bush era, when Greed was Good and tax cuts for the wealthy were sold to the masses as Trickle Down economics, supplemented with community activism (remember a thousand points of light?).  There we were in the midst of a very popular (at least in retrospect) G.O.P. administration, but these extremist Christians were in no way supportive of the conservative leadership in place at the time. They were not comforted by the Great Communicator or his commitment to free-market capitalism, because they were answering to a Higher Authority. Their intent was to … and I wish I was making this up … take over the government. The plan was to start small, with the local stuff – school boards, city councils, etc, and work their way up: political missionaries determined to see their particular ideology implemented as law. They had pamphlets and a grim assortment of passion, fear, and an absolute and unshakable belief in their own divine rights. Remember the Church Lady? Dana Carvey made it funny, but in real life, Church Ladies are plenty scary. Still, let’s take a minute to appreciate some fine, xenophobic humor from that bygone era:

Their plans, while ambitious, were rooted in rather archaic methodologies. These hardy pioneers were hardly professional operatives, and it’s questionable they’d have succeeded in their efforts unassisted. They were, however, ripe for recruitment, and they begat this current generation of embedded separatists. And gradually, during the peaceful and prosperous 90′s, they were absorbed into the the neo-conservative movement, the modern Republican “base”. Savvy political consultants identified them, along with the closely associated post-Confederate racists and combative, gun-totin’ nationalists, as ideal foot-soldiers, and crafted the rhetoric that now rules the neo-con airwaves to mobilize these troops to unwittingly accomplish the same corporate goals that their predecessors had no interest in back in the 80′s. And make no mistake, they have no interest in playing by the rules – the mall pamphleteers had every intention of manipulating the political system to their own ends, and their modern counterparts have this intention plus every advantage money and top-level political strategists can offer.

We might look at the cacophony of fragmented messages being chanted by the 9/12ers and shake our heads in bemusement and dismay, but we must never, ever underestimate them, or the lengths they will go to to take over the government, never realizing on whose behalf they are acting. So, while indulging in a little Rachel Maddow to clear the intellectual palate, never forget what we, as progressives are up against is not nearly so civilized:

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

isn’t that a great name for a Supreme Court case? i thought so.

what i thought even more amazing was this text, from the decision:

Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

and with that, in 1964, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was overturned, once and for all. the anti-miscegenation laws are now far behind us, but do you know that until 1991, we would not have had a voting majority to agree. i’m very glad that interracial couples did not have to wait until 1991 for the general public (who are notorious assholes, as a group) to agree that it was ok for them to have this ‘basic civil right’.

quote, and Supreme Court case, discovered reading Robot Monkey Pants.

i used to be just a personal blog. i used to be allll about me & occasionally about my computer, and for some reason it feels a little odd to shift focus like this, especially to a single issue, social &/or political. demonstrating this, i start this post out talking more about me, me, me. yeah, it’s all about … to change. well, not all. but this is change. i’m a lizard, i kick the habit, shed my skin.

trying to figure out why it is i’ve attached myself to the cause of marriage equality. best excuse reason i can come up with is, this is my civil rights movement. i was approximately 2.5 years of age when Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in the march on Washington. although i did (in my own, elementary school periphery) follow the civil rights movement, i did not live in an atmosphere that encouraged that. my parents would never, not in a bazillion years attended a protest, let alone taken me to one. but in my own, ADD-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye-distracted-daydreamy type of way, i did follow. i did also spectate the summer of love, at age six & living just across the bay from San Francisco, watching the hippies on the news and … daydreaming. & as soon as i was old enough to think up reasonable reasons to do so, i would take the bus down Bancroft Avenue & end up in Berkeley in People’s Park hanging out with vagrants & students (& chemists, ok? they had some talent there in the seventies, let me tell you). i have always been a counterculture wannabe.

& that part of me that always wanted to be is both delighted & honored to find my self, at my age, with a cause that is every bit as important as the struggles of the 60′s and 70′s, & (having had a life of major fuckup-related stress distractions in the interim), excited to finally be able to join a movement about something important & have that matter, even if only in the most infinitesimal way. because, what we have here before us today is an era in which the grassroots movement has been proven, in a decisive & undeniable way, to be the absolute perfect way to get shit done. we put an African-American in the White House because he was the right (electable) person for the job, how hard does that rock? in a less imperfect world, that wouldn’t have been a big deal but in this one? yeah. “Congratulations on being a part of the decision that made this nation move well and with style.” oh you betcha. this is the new stuff, i go dancing in …

so in this new nation in which we can move with such style, well, what now? nothing rhetorical about that question, seriously, i’m asking … what next? i’ve joined some groups & signed up for some things. i’ve been to the first protest of my life, and i brought my kids (including my 11 year old’s friend who was over for the day & we all agreed we didn’t need to mention this to his mom because she over-reacts). yeah, i snuck a tweenager over to a gay marriage rally because he personally believed in it & i want to encourage that kind of rebellion. also, i’ve always been the ‘cool mom’, the one that would rather be talked to than lied to. and in my daughter’s adolescence that also made me the one that got the calls from VPD at one in the morning, & i held my counsel, & continued to be the one that wasn’t lied to, & that’s another story entirely. i digress, but i always digress, so … deal with it.

i’ll repeat the question, what’s next? i do not require answers but appreciate them where applicable. i myself will continue to do what i do best, ping things & join things & make what noise i have time to make, which might not be all that much, considering. my point, if a rambling thing like this blog post has such a thing, is that i have found my cause, my civil rights movement, my larger thing in which i might be a very small part & have that matter, no matter how much.

i have to digress one more time, i would apologize but i’m not particularly sorry. you know who would make a great Secretary of State? John McCain. you know who would make a great Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare? Hillary Clinton. feel free to yell at me about that, or about digressing in such a completely random & less-than-sensical fashion. make some noise!

i missed most of it. and for this, i suffered the loss of the full experience, and i regret it. however, considering i was up most of the night before with the heat & the winds & the allergies that felt like a flu, i accept that i did what i could. got up, got some Zyrtec (amazing stuff, fixed me right up), cleaned the car (it was bad), packed it with me & some kids, headed down to Mission Park right around the time the main protest was supposed to be ending.

it did not end then, nor had it ended by the time i left, an hour & a half after that. a core group of energetic anti-haters stayed and stayed and chanted and chanted and passers-by either honked & waved & thumbs-upped, or (and there were less of these) averted their eyes & pretended we were not there.

but we were there, we will be here, and we will not go away. ever. so get used to it.

we found this sign, adopted it, waved it, and passed it on to others when we left.

i missed so much, but i still came away with such a feeling of love and pride. my two sons came with me, along with their friends. we waved signs, we chanted chants, we talked to some amazing people. and do you know what? there were more straight people there than not. there was such an amazing variety of right-thinking humans there making their voices heard for what is right. there were families, kids, grandmas, teenagers, and a drag queen or two in full regalia (assuring his friend that he was indeed wearing panties under his short skirt). there was a pretty young dark-haired girl who did not appear to know anyone there, with a small homemade sign saying Prop 8 was unfair & wrong. she did not wave it, nor chant; she stood off to the side with her sign, alone, not interacting with anyone, just being there for the cause. i refrained from taking her picture, it would have been intrusive i think, for she radiated shyness.  and i might respect her most of all, just for getting out, just for showing up, just for standing up for what is right even though she was doing this, in her own world, all by herself.

because as i, and my children, and everyone who attended this rally today know, there is only one right thing, and that is our rights. civil rights, human rights. anything that everyone but a select few can do, is a right. anything that any minority is excluded from based solely on their status as a member of that miniroty, is a right that is unfairly granted to all who enjoy it. it’s in the California constitution, still: “A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens.” they didn’t amend that with Prop 8. they can’t. the fight is not over, yet. but there is no doubt in my mind that right will prevail.

you know, i don’t usually do memes, but this one … resistance is futile, i have been assimilated.

a while back, i was tagged by the incandescent Tangerine, aka CitizenX, and most recently, by the lovely Kara Sheridan, and i adore both of these ladies quite a lot. i have known Tangerine since when, she’s a major geek, and though i’ve only known Kara since the Plurk era, i have come to admire her spirit quite a lot.

so that was step #1, link back the ones who linked you. the purpose of this, of course, is to do some excellent blog networking, and it is about time i was more social with the old blog thing.

Step #2 – write five fun/interesting facts about yourself. five things? and they all have to be interesting? sigh. let’s see how this goes:

1. i am a rabid domain junkie, and own at this point 20 domain names, including but not limited to: lizard.tv, lizard.be, lizard.name, offtoseethelizard.com, olizard.com (matches my lic pl8s), and eight, count them eight, versions of my son’s first name (kurtwood .com .net .org .tv .me .name .us .mobi — i may not be able to pay for a great college, but my child will have his digital brand). there are others, of course. there are always more domains, and more i want.

2. i am not much into watching tv, but when left to my own devices i tend to watch nicktoons. i’m kind of an expert on the nicktoons. i own two entire tv series on DVD — Due South, and Invader Zim.

3. there are a lot of things that might actuallly be *really* interesting i could list here, but i could not do that without the backstory — and there is always so much of that. suffice to say that almost everything about me is a very, very long story.

4. in 2003 i started writing this thing that was like a novel, but not really. i built it its own content management system, the database of which i tweaked so that it is shared by my “poetry” site, through some seriously amateur MySQLing. i built database driven websites way before i was actually qualified to do so. the CMS i wrote counts words. the thing that’s not a novel is over 50,000 of them that i will most likely never show to anyone.

5. wow i’m up to five already! that wasn’t as bad as i thought it would be. ok, let’s see, hmm, five. there is no fifth thing? nobody expects the spanish inquisition? ok how about this: i try really hard to be open minded and respect everyone’s right to their freely expressed opinions, and as such maintain a few conservative social network friends. it is very, very difficult for me not to flame them silly. but i am open minded. i am open minded dammit! and there’s no point in flaming. really. at least i keep telling myself that.

Step #3: Tag six other people. Then let them know you’ve tagged them by twittering them or leaving a comment on their blog. Now you know what’s hard about that? i’m late in this game here, so many of the potential tag targets have already been hit. i do, however, highly recommend:

Linkmeister - an old, dear blog friend from back when. one of the more observant folks out there, always an enjoyable read.
Two Words: Not Always So – my friend and spiritual advisor, Daigan.
Puntiglio – excellent words and … well, general excellence.
LaLa FuFu – the inimitable Tim Moore, a rabble rouser of sorts, and a serious geek with a serious gadget thing. dude has an iFamily.
CeeDubb – another rabble rouserish sort, seriously into the bike thang
ex-lion tamer - what is it with me and rabble rousers? the ever-progresive r@d@r, one of my best old blogfriends from back in the day.

well there you go. a meme. don’t expect to see a lot of that sort of thing here.

you know, i love it when i hear someone joking that they approve of gay marriage because ‘everyone should be just as miserable as i am’. it acknowledges the inherent rightness of equality, while using humor to dispel any lingering discomfort with the concept of gay marriage, which is fairly recent, at least in this iteration of civilization. i choose to see humor as progress.

today i had many conversations in several venues, and in order to make my point and get my facts straight, i did a lot of research, and i learned many things. in case this helps, here are some rational, fact-based responses if you are ever up against these misconceptions:

MYTH: marriage is a religious concept and has always been between a man and a woman.
FACT: marriage predates recorded history, but the earliest known traditions in Greco-Roman times were intended to define who got the dowry, who inherited what, and who was the boss of who. and yes, there were same-sex unions. they followed more or less the same patterns, with one partner (the male, in a male/female marriage) would be older, and the younger partner (usually the woman) would be passed from the control of father, to that of the spouse.

so, marriage then, as now, was a very similar and mostly practical arrangement. it was about property rights, social position, defining the shift from being your parents’ child to forming your own family, and how many goats that was gonna cost one of your dads. and of course commitment and love. and if not for love, at least for some sort of strategic alliance. religion got involved much later on and acted like it invented the concept, but no.

MYTH: civil unions are just as good as marriage.
FACT: only a handful of states offer civil unions. many who do, specifically refuse to recognize the civil unions of other states. civil unions do not convey the same rights to pensions and security benefits and do not establish “kinship”, which marriage does. marriage creates familial relation between unrelated people, and this kinship is recognized across state and international borders. why can’t we extend this to civil unions? well, that it would have to be enacted at the federal level, which violates state’s rights – and states still decide who marries. it would certainly be a daunting legal challenge, and it would still carry the ‘separate but equal’ stigma.

MYTH: the majority in California has spoken, and they have rejected gay marriage
FACT: there are serious constitutional issues surrounding the passage of Proposition 8. it was put on the ballot as an amendment, rather than a revision, to the constitution. by law, an amendment is a simple change to one section of the constitution, while a revision is a more complex and far-reaching change, sometimes to multiple sections at once. even though Proposition 8 only added 14 words to one section, it revokes the rights of a “suspect class”, which is a legally recognized minority. by law, matters pertaining to suspect classes must fall under the “strictest scrutiny”, and (as the lawyers are now arguing), this makes Prop 8 a revision, which would need a 2/3 vote in the House and then a majority of citizen votes.

a little history: in 2000, the voters approved a ban on gay marriage. the Supreme Court overturned this ban (after ruling that gays are a suspect class), and that the ban unconstitutionally discriminated against them under section 7(b), which states, “A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens.” this is why proposition 8 was placed on the ballot as an amendment. they couldn’t pass an unconstitutional law, so they changed the constitution. and there’s a good chance they did that in an unconstitutional fashion.

MYTH: without Proposition 8, churches would be forced to marry gays, or face sanctions
FACT: the state’s role in marriage is very limited: they issue the license which is necessary to create a legal and binding contract out of a ceremony of the couple’s choice. they also enforce the legal provisions to the contract, and decide who gets the house, the kids, and the goats, should the parties decide they want out of the contract. it’s this contract that same-sex couples are denied the right to, there’s nothing sacred about it. there is no stipulation that requires that the contract be blessed by a religious institution – yes it’s true, atheists are allowed to marry. the couple can choose to be married by a judge, a magistrate, a ‘marriage commissioner’, or of course a member of the clergy. some California counties even have a “deputy for a day” program that allows non-clergy friends and relatives to officiate at a wedding. your pet psychic could be ordained by the Universal Life Church and marry you while channeling your dearly departed cat. tom cruise could marry you on his yacht, where he achieves the highest possible operating thetan level. the possibilities are endless. the sacredness, or lack thereof, is up to the individuals involved.

the bottom line is, no church could be forced to perform a gay marriage. that would be unconstitutional.

ok, that’s enough for now. there will be more, oh yes.

a wise woman once advised me that to get a message across, it is necessary to repeat it again and again until people hear it in their sleep. so here it is: “A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens.”

i will confess i suffered a rather painful shock, last tuesday, when i clicked over from the transcendent presidential election victories to check the returns on the the fight against prop 8 to find it up by a good 10 points in the early returns. i could not imagine why it was doing so well, in an election where liberal candidates and causes were prevailing by a decisive margin. we came out to vote for hope, what the hell happened to hope?

i thought we would beat it. i really did. it’s simple logic! the arguments for it made little sense, and were universally untrue. there was no threat to marriage, to children, to churches. nothing bad was going to suddenly start happening, the only possible result was that nothing would change, that people who had civil rights in california would continue having those rights. simple! logic! the thought that the electorate would come out in favor of writing discrimination into the constitution seemed surreal, especially in the context this historic election.

and then i clicked over to the exit polls and suffered a second shock, looking at the demographics – the highest percentages (in the early exit polls) of yes votes cast against the civil rights of their fellow citizens were people of color, the african-american and latino voters. this made the least sense of anything (to me, at least). why would people who knew firsthand the pain of discrimination and the struggle to be granted the same rights as everyone else suddenly decide that, while civil rights are nice and all, that they’re just not for everybody? now, we know that even if these percentages were reversed, that it would not have changed the outcome, it just … it did not make sense to me.

so i asked this question on Plurk, and what resulted was a very long and very educational thread, the gist of which i shall attempt to convey here, in hopes it somehow helps:

what we had, was a failure to communicate. “…the commercials that were EVERYWHERE kept talking about how this was going to be taught in schools, how it was going to take 501C status from churches etc. And they kept saying it over and over. Those people KNEW what they were doing. Nothing is more sacred to black people (I’m one) than children and church.They didn’t say . . . look if you talk about HIV at school you have to SIGN a WAIVER, if you talk about puberty at school you have to SIGN a WAIVER of permission. So, there is NO WAY they will teach this “gay marriage” without YOU the parent knowing about it . . . cause we don’t do that here. This is for CIVIL marriages . . . if a church does not want to do the marriage they are PROTECTED and NOTHING will happen to them. And you have to say it over and over and over and over again. Like Obama had to do with the message of cutting taxes for 95% of Americans. He said it over and over again until we could hear it in our sleep.”

and you know, Telemill, who i’m quoting here, is absolutely right, although it took me awhile to catch on. i argued that yes we had said those things! and i went back and i looked at the commercials. and you know what? we actually kind of did say them, only … well, not really. the other side told their lies with precisely engineered emotional propaganda, like a wide-eyed, innocent child, “mommy, today i learned a prince can marry a prince.” we, on the other hand, got some politicians to dryly explain the facts, who listens? and then we had samuel l. jackson on repeat for the last few days before the election, talking about the wrongness of denying rights in terms of internment camps, interracial marriage, armenian home ownershsip. why did this message not ring true to those who had shared that pain, those struggles? what would cause them to come out heavily in favor of changing the constitution to revoke the rights of a minority, based solely on their status as a member of that minority?

it’s so simple: family. church. the important things, the things that sustain you when the society you live in treats you like a lesser human. and the other side, they knew this. as Telemill explains it, “You WERE up against them . . . conservatives I mean . . . but they knew they couldn’t do it themselves so they said, what would get the minority vote against them? Hmmm. . . I know . . . children. Let’s say that it will affect their children (you have the black vote and Latino vote with that one). OK, and then let’s say it will affect their church! (Catholic Latinos and Devote Christian Blacks will go nuts). They knew EXACTLY what message to through out there. And gay citizens were ignorant of that technique. Black people know it well . . . we’re just used to the conservatives pushing it OUR way, it’s different when on the other side of the coin.”

Mark Morford put it this way: “And I must say — and you might not want to hear this — a big chunk of blame for 8′s passage has to go to the No on 8 campaign’s initial arrogance, followed by their utterly limp reaction when the Yes campaign started attacking and gaining real steam. As one of my politically savvy Chronicle colleagues put it, ‘No on 8 was a bad campaign. Bad bad bad. Inept, amateurish, incompetent and, above all, guilty of committing the first and worst sin of politics: taking the voters for granted.’”

i admit it: i am guilty of complacency and naiveté, and of astonishing ignorance to the factors that ultimately motivated the voters. i am guilty of not knowing the enemy, and not seeing how well the enemy knew me and mine. and evidence suggests i was nowhere near alone in these failings. i know these are harsh words, and how dare i criticize the good people who fought a fair fight and got beaten by cheaters? yes. i have a lot of nerve, especially when you consider this is not my cause, in that i am a straight, white, middle-aged geek, fully endowed with all my inalienables: life, liberty, the pursuit, all that. but since this ridiculous travesty in which out of state religious interests have succeeded in imposing their bullshit on the constitution of my state, causing immeasurable harm to so many of my fellow californians, to my friends … well, forgive me if i’m so pissed off i’ve decided to barge on in and see if maybe i can help figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

it is possible i have no business opining these opinions. feel free to point this out, i’ll listen. meanwhile, i remain hopeful that these harsh lessons will serve us well as we continue this fight. as Telemill tells it, “…you must look at it this way. You lost for fight by a very SLIM margin when the enemy used LIES and dirty tactics. That means that people didn’t ACTUALLY turn their back on you. It means YOUR COMMUNITY didn’t fight HARD ENOUGH, didn’t push back enough You can never let up. You have to push back. Power never secedes . . . remember that. The small margin loss means the dawn is there . . . you are almost there.”

ok. so, what’s next?