I’m not a part of a redneck agenda

It’s 1:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. I took personal leave from work this afternoon to take care of some business. In about two hours, I will have a conference with my son’s math teacher, and then we will go to vote against the nightmare travesty that is Proposition 2.

We will go to vote. Call my son Sancho Panza. I’ll drag him along, I’ll make him watch me tilt at this particular windmill in this last and most desperate civil rights battle. He should see what it looks like to do the right thing, to back up your friends and support the legions of Americans who have become the last untouchables, through no fault of their own and by no choice that they made.

There’s a Straw Man in the corner. He’s wearing a red and blue Lacoste and that self-righteous Regressive sneer. Oh, he sneers, you’re going to take your twelve-year-old son to the polls? Are you going to discuss the issue with him? Will you address his concerns? Will you be a sensitive, enlightened parent? And he laughs that Regressive laugh.

Yeah, I say, and we’re gonna crank Green Day’s American Idiot all the way there. The Straw Man gasps.

He carries a still of Wally and the Beav in his wallet, and he thinks kids should be sheltered from realities like gay people, and bad words on a Parental-Advisory-stamped CD, and especially gay people. But that train left the station a long time ago; it’s simply impossible to shelter kids in this world. I once knew some parents who tried. Their adult children were without exception the most difficult, self-absorbed, judgmental, medicated, disappointed, trendy-disorder-diagnosed and addicted people I knew.

My son and I listen to American Idiot together because we like the music, but also because the CD gives me a forum to discuss my values with my son. Green Day portrays the new “subliminal mind fuck America,” filled with the “sound(s) of hysteria,” paranoia, and propaganda; a “city of the damned,” with a “hurricane of lies”; where the “representative of California” shouts “zieg heil,” demands that the “Eiffel Towers” be “pulverize[d],” and wants to “kill all the fags who don’t agree.” Inappropriate for a twelve-year-old? Whatever, Strawman. You created this world, you and your hysterical, paranoid, propagandizing kind. You’re the ones who put people’s sex lives on the ballot, and you expect me to shut up and not explain to my kid why that’s wrong?

That’s right. I’d be more than happy to keep all this stuff private and let my son go back to his skateboarding, his guitar, his homework, and his cartoons. Prodigal Son and I have been friends for almost three decades and I can’t remember ever discussing our sex lives. You think I want other friends’ sex lives plastered across a polling place just because they have the DNA that causes them to be attracted to people of the same gender? You think I want to discuss this issue with them, or with you, or with my son, or anyone? I don’t. Some things are between my fiancée and me; some things are between Prodigal and Mrs. Prodigal; some things are between Strawman and the Significant Other Straw; and some things are between the people you snicker and point at and call “Adam and Steve.”

You know what? I want you to leave my friends alone. You think they’re perverse? Who’s sniffing his Straw nose around their bedrooms demanding to know what they’re doing in there?

Green Day envisions a future where we who are now “outlaws . . . beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies,” when “this is the dawning of the rest of our lives.” Those are the values I want to pass on. Billie Joe Armstrong sings that he doesn’t want to be an “American idiot.” Neither do I, and neither should my son. So, until you chill out, we’ll be standing as far from you as possible.

SPACEDARK