"I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you... And you... And you... Gotta give em hope." - Harvey Milk
I watched The Times of Harvey Milk today. The documentary ended with the above quote, and all I could think was ... hope isn't the right word. Hope is just this ephemeral bit of nothing that people use as an excuse to deny reality and comfort themselves. Harvey Milk and the gay activists of his time and all civil rights activists of all times did so much more than "give hope": they built bridges that we might walk across them; they built doors into the walls that we might come out of the closet; they built words into the constitution that we might vote.
People of every kind have died building these bridges. Are the bridges still in good use, and maintained? On the one hand, we have a multi-racial president with a black wife. On the other hand, 500 grams of powder cocaine (racial majority of offenders are white) carries the same sentence (mandatory minimum of 5 years) as 5 grams of crack cocaine (racial majority of offenders are black).
"The first step is always hostility, and after that you can sit down and talk about it." - Harvey Milk
That quote is something I'm very much thinking about today.
I watched The Times of Harvey Milk today. The documentary ended with the above quote, and all I could think was ... hope isn't the right word. Hope is just this ephemeral bit of nothing that people use as an excuse to deny reality and comfort themselves. Harvey Milk and the gay activists of his time and all civil rights activists of all times did so much more than "give hope": they built bridges that we might walk across them; they built doors into the walls that we might come out of the closet; they built words into the constitution that we might vote.
People of every kind have died building these bridges. Are the bridges still in good use, and maintained? On the one hand, we have a multi-racial president with a black wife. On the other hand, 500 grams of powder cocaine (racial majority of offenders are white) carries the same sentence (mandatory minimum of 5 years) as 5 grams of crack cocaine (racial majority of offenders are black).
"The first step is always hostility, and after that you can sit down and talk about it." - Harvey Milk
That quote is something I'm very much thinking about today.
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