broke

Watched the first hour and a half of Brokeback Mountain tonight. I can't watch any more until there's someone around to watch with. It's the impending in the movie that I can't stand. I know some bad is coming to those two men and I can't bear to watch it alone.

My life is so full of people who think like me, people who believe in justice and in peacefulness and in care for the world and each other, that it always hits me really hard when I realize not everyone is like this, that some people not only make huge judgments but act violently on them. I have had the privilege of having all my partners be accepted by my society. Sometimes I am convinced that the only reason I don't act on (or even, except in very private circumstances, talk about) my feelings about women is my fear of what people might think. That sounds awfully cowardly. Even while I am writing this I worry.

I recognise the ferocity of these two characters, reuniting over and over. I have felt that--love so immediate, so broken, so breaking, so breakable, so fierce, so in danger and on edge that something kin to violence is its end expression. Here, the time, the situation must have to do with it. Of course.

But what is this, my country? In my body I don't understand people being made to live in fear. Oh, god! It's like seeing the photos of the freedom riders and sit-in-ers getting spit on, getting ketchup poured on their heads. I can't stand the debasement of the human figure. I don't know what I can do, except continue in my small way. If anything, I hope that people who love can be exemplary in that love. And then maybe things can begin to change. Everything spirals out from this--who should be allowed their civil rights, who should go to war, who deserves to live--and it is so large I feel completely hopeless and powerless.

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Maybe it's appropriate, in some general way, that St. Thérèse of Lisieux comes to mind as I write. She wrote, "Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love." She's the patron of AIDS patients, among other people.