(Title changed from: Is Hatred the New Love? Is Dumb the New Smart?) 

Very recently a line has been crossed in America. I can’t say I’m surprised, because the people marching to that line did not do it secretly in the dark of night. We all saw it coming, but most people thought they could wish it away. Faith or some supreme being would not allow it to happen here in America. But it did happen here and now we cannot take it back!

Let me explain what’s happening with my fingers on the keyboard before I go on. This is a train of thought. The kind that sits there for days or weeks, smoldering, then suddenly a strong wind whips it into a flame and it cannot be contained any longer. That wind came in the form of Keka’s “White Men With Guns--Reconstruction Redux” on Open Salon.

Before I go further I must mention God, because many people today hide behind that word to justify the unacceptable. I want to be perfectly clear, so it is important for you to understand that my God belongs to me alone. If you don’t like it or disagree, too bad. It’s my God, go get your own! My God whispers things in my ear, twists my stomach into knots and tears my heart apart when some undeniable truths are revealed.

It’s important to also understand that there are some things I absolutely will not debate. Love is good, hate is bad! Truth is not something that can be constructed, it just is. It’s all that’s left after all the constructed lies and deceptions are exposed. Motive is the great revealer of both truth and deception!

I am not a man of faith. I’ve read the definition of faith in the dictionary and see no logical reason to believe things I can neither prove nor experience. A quick look around at the current state of the world would support the dangers of relying too much on the concept of faith. Too many people hide behind it or cover themselves with it to avoid the harsh reality that is the temporal world. But please do not assume I do not understand spirit or spirituality. My trust and confidence are built upon the things I know. The things I know are mostly drawn from experiences I’ve had in my life. The rest are universal truths revealed when I am forced to listen to my God, when my stomach is twisted into knots and my heart is torn apart.

Silence has been a great coconspirator in all the historical parallels to where America finds itself today! Silence has been the enabling hand of every oppressive move to the extreme political right. Often it comes as a result of fear. Often the fear is stoked by controlling the flow of information, replacing it with misinformation. And always, there is an element of the population who do not believe that it is possible for IT to be happening HERE. Always, the final “takeover” is accomplished with the help of those who truly believe it is possible to negotiate with people who do not play fair, people with selfish motives that drive them to cheat.

In the summer of 1991, I sat in a tiny apartment in Weimar, East Germany listening to the stories of the grandmother of my friend Elke. At 85 years old, Kriemhild Pachal’s stories of surviving Hitler’s Third Reich opened a window to understanding the “Good Germans Who Said Nothing.” It was a revealing look into my own roots that begged the question: “What would I have done?”

Rob, Kriemhild and Bob 1991

THE SILENT VICTIMS

for Kriemhild Pachal

The half-century nightmare
Again I see the sunken eyes
The emaciated ghosts
Marching to Buchenwald
Death on my doorstep
I watch from behind my curtain
My forbidden act of courage
Struggling to free myself
From the fear which paralyzes me

I hear the footsteps in the hallway
Do they come for me this time?
I hear my friends, my neighbors cry
I remain silent in terror
The terror which I now breathe
It feeds me, it is familiar
Always there

I must survive to see the terror end
I will do anything to survive to see the terror end

But it never ends
We pass it on to our children
And they despise us
They say it will end when we die
They ask the question

Where were you, what did you do to stop it?
Again we remain silent
We must teach the vow of silence
The only way to end the terror

But in reality the terror lives
The ghosts are everywhere

We must never forget say the children!
No, we will never forget
Those of us who still breathe the terror
We will never forget
We scream the deafening silence
We are afraid to be proud
Afraid to speak the truth
We the despicable Germans
The good Germans who said nothing

If the world ever finds the courage to forgive us
We will find the courage to speak into the silence
And we the silent victims will say
“We forgive you too“

Now, nearly 20 years after my weekend with Kriemhild, I find myself challenged to speak into the silence about my own country. After my visit to Weimar I felt compelled to continue my quest to uncover my German roots. I set other German’s words into a kind of poetic dialog that now haunts me as I watch the country of my birth descend into a similar situation. The thing I heard repeated over and over again from German’s who lived through the Third Reich was this: “What if we had stood up in the beginning and said ENOUGH!, before it was too late?”

Now the Political Correctness Police will insist that I do not say the German “N” word, Nazi, when speaking of what is happening in America today. So I will go to the truth of my experiences in my own life. Whenever I would watch movies about the Holocaust, I would always see aspects of myself in the victims of the Nazi’s hatred. When I heard of the horrible tortures of Gay men in New York in the last week, there was no doubt in my mind that the structure that allowed it to happen was the same structure that allowed the Holocaust. And I am certain that the role of the Catholic Pope and the Glen Becks is exactly the same as their counterparts in the Third Reich! 

As the present world seems to explode with anti-Gay violence, I need to have witnesses to my own history. Like Keka, my life is filled with examples to draw from.

I have been the victim of homophobic policemen, beaten, intimidated, arrested, threatened and showered with anti-Gay epithets in the process. I have been physically injured, punished for who I am by a member of the teaching profession who was supposed to be there to protect me. I endured the fear of rednecks with two by fours and iron pipes in the parking lots of Gay clubs in Indianapolis in the late 60s, early 70s. We accepted broken windshields and broken headlights as the price for assuming we had the right to do what heterosexuals our age did on weekends! I was attacked by two homophobic suburban teens who came into DC’s Dupont Circle for an evening of Fag Bashing. They drove their car on the sidewalk trying to run down my partner Rob and I while we were walking our dog. I was threatened with arrest for assault with a deadly weapon for throwing a brick at their windshield in self defense. I was hit in the face with a glass coke bottle while standing at an intersection holding the hand of my boyfriend. My partner Rob and I were chased by a man with an iron pipe who was offended by our holding hands. Another time I was knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly in the head with one boot, while being held down with the other boot. While walking back to my hotel in Chicago, I was pinned against a wall while a man held a knife at my throat threatening to kill the Faggot. I managed to slide out of his control and run like Hell! And the sickest element to this part of my story is that I could go on to list more!

The political climate in the US today is scary, it’s sick and it’s dangerous! As a German American and a Gay man it is my turn to say ENOUGH! Enough of the hatred! Enough of the insanity!

Stop calling entertainment NEWS! Stop saying prejudice is OK, because it’s just another person’s opinion! Stop pretending Democracy is a good thing when it allows people to vote on taking away the human rights of other citizens! Stop pretending that organized religion is sacred and untouchable, when it is the source of many evil deeds! Stop enabling crazy people by giving them exposure while simultaneously denying rational people a voice! Stop enabling the idea that ignorance is a badge of honor! Stop saying those people standing beside you with overtly racist signs don't represent the group you are standing with! Stop making excuses for our broken political system by giving legitimacy to those who abuse it! Stop saying abusive speech is the price we pay for freedom! Stop saying tax breaks help the economy while simultaneously laying off teachers, firefighters, police and health workers as our roads and bridges and transportation systems crumble! Stop pretending opinions have the same weight as facts! Stop advocating for profit from life and death situations! Stop telling us the market will take care of it! Stop blaming the victims! Stop giving corporations rights that have been systematically denied to real people! Stop allowing money to influence politics! Stop saying we can't prove foreign entities are funding political campaigns when the donors are not required to be revealed! Stop saying our political system is the best in the world when it is absolutely incapable of functioning!