I’m not sure that’s possible.
I attended one event at this year’s Auckland Pride Festival. That was the Big Gay Out. I didn’t enjoy it much. Part freak show, part dance party, part concert, part excuse to be young and drunk in the middle of the day.
After four hours, I ended up positioned seemingly exactly between the Caluzzi dance tent and the main stage occupied byGoodshirt (sadly most people were too young to remember them but they had a good go). Suddenly I just had to go. As a young guy did the YouTube drunk stagger past me, I realised I had no idea why I was there.
Yesterday I posted a meme, which said, “Better to have lost in love than to live with a psycho for the rest of your life.”
I liked it of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have posted it. Eleven others did too, some commenting on Facebook, “Amen to that,” and “Definitely!!”
Then this…
Over the last couple of days, social media has shown its bitchy side, rather than outright bullying, but you have to ask which is worse. Blogs like these by Deborah Hill Cone and David Herkt (you might want to read to the end before you click those links) about Charlotte Dawson’s suicide have shown how easy it is to spit bile from your keyboard behind the anonymous veil of the internet.
Whaleoil had its comeuppance with its January headline, “Feral dies in Greymouth, did world a favour.”
The insidious side to nasty posts is that it’s nigh on impossible to voice dissent. In the virtual economy of click value, no matter what you may say on or about a post, be it positive or negative, you’ve already reinforced its writer or the site’s editor/owner by your mere presence on their site. You’re a “visit” and the more visits, the more popular the post and the higher their rating in the game of internet traffic.
It’s always something of a shock when well-known strangers like Charlotte Dawson kill themselves. I felt the same when Greg King suicided in November 2012.
They feel familiar and yet they’re not. You feel sad but there’s no relationship to mourn. Life goes on with nothing missing.
Perhaps there’s even a subconscious, yet obviously false, belief that someone so well-known would have something to live for. Everything even.
Most people would say they feel obligated as a result of someone else’s expectation(s) of them. That’s no surprise when you look at the dictionary definition…
Morality, legal binding, that’s pretty weighty stuff. Here’s another way of thinking about obligation that, for me, feels easier to swallow…
An article in this morning’s local rag gives me a perfect opportunity to begin to share with you some of the insights I gained at the retreat I attended last week on polarity, run by the superb Sue Davidoff and Allan Kaplan of the Proteus Initiative in South Africa (I’ve mentioned Allan and Sue, and the amazing insights I’ve had through their teaching, in other posts).
The retreat looked at the impact of polarity in its many forms. More common examples of polarity are light and dark/shadow, finite and infinite, growth and decay. Some of the less obvious aspects we worked with were detail and form, extensiveness and intensiveness, and our impact on the world and others’ impact on our world.
I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the rather ugly responses to Justin Bieber’s misdemeanours over the last few days. Sure, some of the reactions have been comical, like this YouTube video, and RuPaul’s tweet of his rather beautifully made-up mugshot (I’ve just been told it’s transphobic — no offence intended).
But a 100,000-signature petition to have him deported from the US, for doing something that a good many, if not most, teenage boys do, seems pretty mean-spirited and exaggerated to me. Particularly as Americans have, until now, been happy to claim him as their own (I didn’t even know he was Canadian until this hit the news).
As part of the Auckland Pride Festival 2014, Rainbow Youth is holding “a Pride Art Auction and Intergenerational Panel.” They are calling for art submissions themed around identity, which they say aligns “with the celebration of diverse identities that the Pride Festival focuses on.”
Ironically this youth led event is called “Old, New, Borrowed, Blue.”
New Zealand’s relatively small population, land mass and infrastructure creates so much opportunity to lead the world in recognising some fundamental changes that would improve society in general. Here’s my bucket list.
