By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
History gives us moments; crossroads in the timeline of our lives that force a direction one way or another.
The decisions we make when presented with these moments define our character, our intentions and, in some cases, our world. In these instances, we can choose to define the moment, or let it define us.
History doesn’t celebrate those who stand aside as human rights erode. History doesn’t lionize the facilitators, the capitulators, the ones who bend to pressure because it was the easy path. History hates a coward.
History remembers the ones who stand up, the ones who fight, the ones who feel the prevailing winds of bigotry and refuse to take shelter, refuse to bend or break. After all, do we celebrate the Jim Crow segregation laws that plagued the South for generations, or people like Rosa Parks who defied them?
We’re having a moment like that now in the U.S. The checks and balances that have (mostly) held our greatest ambitions and worst inclinations at bay for the past 250 years have rarely been tested as much as in the past decade.
Some institutions are standing up against this pressure, but most aren’t. CEOs parade into the Oval Office seemingly every day to pay tribute to our president with gifts and banal praise in exchange for favors that help their bottom line. National news outlets water down and, in many cases, overtly omit statements and actions that are blatantly un-American and, in many other cases illegal, just to appease the seat of power.
The facilitators applaud while the ship founders, nobody wanting to be the first to mention the danger ahead.
The pendulum will swing back someday. It always does. It might be years, it might be decades; but, at some point in the future, Americans will look back on this era and shake their heads, asking, “How did they let it happen?”
Fear, that’s how. It pushes people to the brink, where they feel they have no other choice.
Fear creates others and others are safe to hate because they aren’t “us.”
The Litehouse YMCA employee who started this whole kerfuffle about transgender bathroom usage had such a moment that day in November. She could have minded her own business and went about her day, but instead she blasted this manufactured story onto Facebook and all the bottom-feeders like Scott Herndon — who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking and talking about other people’s genitals and reproductive organs — turned this into a political football they can run with, like red meat tossed into a pit of hungry beasts, eager for their next two minutes of hate.
Expect to see the Idaho Legislature introduce all kinds of bills that will further erode the rights of people who don’t fit into their Christian Nationalist order of society. Then, the bigots can sit back and feel satisfied that they passed yet another series of laws that discriminate against a population that represents fewer than 2% of the people in our nation, and even less of our state. The irony remains, of course, that those who are in support of such legislation are usually the same ones who constantly bemoan about “freedom.”
I don’t give a tin shit whether someone feels like they are a man or a woman, who they choose to love, what they decide to do with their lives or who they worship. Live and let live.
When the fearful, closed-minded ones attempt to pass laws and criminalize a marginalized population because they’re too ignorant to understand it, we’ve lost something inherently good inside of us all.
Facts are facts, no matter how much they are conflated by the present cultural miasma. This YMCA story is such a foul ball to me because those who claim to want to “protect our women and children” assume that anyone who is transgender is likely to commit crime while using a public restroom — which is yet another attempt to dehumanize and demonize trans people. This “debate” has been had in the U.S. over and over. Not long ago, Black people weren’t allowed in public pools and locker rooms for the exact reasons cited by those gripped by the current trans panic. Jews, Hispanics, Asians, even the Irish have been segregated in public accommodations at various times and places in the U.S. on the grounds that their mere presence was “dangerous” or “degenerate” or an “abomination.” Substitute “trans” for any of those other groups, and much of the testimony offered before the City Council on Nov. 19 could be fairly argued as hate speech.
The truth is, despite being less than 2% of the U.S. adult population, transgender individuals are four times as likely to be victims of crime, while it’s the right-wing extremists and cisgender white males who are responsible for an uptick in terrorist attacks and political violence in America. Google it if you don’t believe me.
It’s convenient for many to hate the transgender community because they can safely stand on the other side of it, knowing they’ll likely never be targeted. Similar to how many white Americans feel about ICE snatching citizens off the street to inquire about their immigration status. “It will never affect me, so why do I care?” seems to be the prevailing opinion.
Cowards, all of them.
What happens when all the others have been depopulated and the homogenous society that white nationalists and bigots laud as the answer is achieved? Well, for an ethos that survives on hate toward others, they would eventually start henpecking their own. It’s only a matter of time until they come for you, too.
Sandpoint had a moment 14 years ago when we passed a non-discrimination ordinance that protected people from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. We had another moment Nov. 19 when three of our city councilors — Joel Aispuro, Justin Dick and Rick Howarth — voted along with Mayor Jeremy Grimm to amend the ordinance. They chose the easy route, the meek path. They bent to the pressure of bigotry and now want to be patted on the back for it.
Instead of defining the moment, they let it define them, and, as a result, all of us, too.
