Weekend bonus shot, 10.25.08
Published October 25th, 2008 in Mostly a picture, Weekend bonus shot.
The long shadow of the Baba, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA.
It was a few weeks ago, and we were walking back from a delightful visit to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, the tremendous new aquarium/planetarium/natural history museum/indoor rainforest, eight years in the making. Our visit there was a deliberate gesture of familial morale boosting in the face of the unrelenting Anschluss of hate that has been the Proposition 8 campaign. Exaggerating. Only just a bit.
All day at the aquarium, I thought, wistfully: Perhaps we’re doing Good Works for the campaign just being here, amidst the teeming masses at the aquarium. A visible for instance, making the abstractions of the proposition concrete.
En route back to the car, the little peanut was asleep in the stroller. We had no cover for him from the megawatt glare of the sun, so for the entire 15-minute walk back to the car, I not only pushed him, but variously maneuvered myself so as to shade him. This is something that I — like many parents — always do, without a thought.
Except on this day. With so much on the line, I couldn’t help but wonder, as each family passed us: Are they noticing this? Can they really see how much and how well we love our children? Will a memory of this ordinary moment of parental care come back to them, in that extraodinary moment in the voting booth when they contemplate writing our family out of the state’s constitution?
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Show California and the nation that we will not tolerate unfairness and inequality.
No on 8 has just rolled out an online GET OUT THE VOTE / visibility sign up. From October 30 through election day, during the morning and evening commutes, and all day election day. Form a team, or join one.
We are so, so ready to win this.
Lesbian Dad is written by a parent who answers to the name "Baba" and works toward a world in which amor does indeed vincit omnia. 
I didn’t reply to the previous posts, because I honestly didn’t know what to say.
However …
>>>With so much on the line, I couldn’t help but wonder, as each family passed us: Are they noticing this? Can they really see how much and how well we love our children? Will a memory of this ordinary moment of parental care come back to them, in that extraodinary moment in the voting booth when they contemplate writing our family out of the state’s constitution?
The answer is yes. I wish you’d hang onto that a little more tightly.
I see the change, even if change doesn’t always seem to move fast enough on human timescale.
(((LD)))
Thank you, pe_in_pa. My confidence in love/understanding’s ability to override hate/fear is definitely shaky. Wish it were stronger.
In the pantheon of “Two kinds of people…” one of the most storied is “loves rollercoaster rides” and the other is “detests them with a passion usually reserved for automated junk mail phone calls.” I hate a roller coaster ride. And I hate the notion that fear mongerers can actually use someone like me as the thing to fear. Really. We have a lot to worry about if I’m a threat to anything other than efficiency.