America’s expiration date

Holly Zadra writes about the LGBT community in February’s Tributary:

“If we don’t pay attention and focus on the right discussions and the right issues, America will create an expiration date for itself,” [Hemsath] continued. “This democratic experiment will come to an unfortunate conclusion. And the hypothesis for liberty and peace and freedom will be nullified because we failed to set that example for ourselves, and we failed to set that example for the rest of the world… The time to change the tone has come. As a society and as a culture, we’ve come to an impasse. We’re 21st Century. We’ve gotten past the Industrial Revolution, Women’s Votes, Civil Rights. Now we’re again trying to find out what it means to be a nation.”

How we determine that identity depends upon the questions we ask, the issues we decide are worth our efforts and the ramifications of doing things as they’ve always been done. The individuals willing to talk with me for this story, although for the most part unnamed, are individuals asking sound questions, acting responsibly within the space they occupy in the world and seriously shifting the status quo.

Because I can’t say it better than Out Words did in quoting Cornell West, professor of religion at Princeton, “…I’m a blues man. A blues man is a prisoner of hope, and hope is a qualitatively different category than optimism…hope wrestles with despair, but it doesn’t generate optimism. It just generates this energy to be courageous, to bear witness, to see what the end is going to be. No guarantee, unfinished, open-ended…” If only we were all as courageous and conscious as the people who talked with me for this story.

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