You Voted? Big deal.

We live in an era of entitlement.

I think people of my generation, those of us who came of age in the early to mid 1980′s, are the luckiest generation of gay people in US history. We came of age well after Stonewall and late enough in the age of HIV/AIDS to be aware of the risks of unprotected sex and better able to protect ourselves than the generation before ours. We were also the first generation to have a biological/medical imperative driving us towards monogamy and stable committed relationships. The current move towards forcing the government to recognize gay marriages is a direct result of this situation.

That being said, we were also given a pass on most of the fighting that our predecessors had to do. Like surfers magically transported to the sweet spot on the wave crest, we didn’t have to do all the paddling to get ourselves into position. Change may not be happening as fast as we’d like, but life for us is pretty easy. In most of the mid-to-large sized population centers in the US, a gay or lesbian couple renting an apartment or applying for a mortgage together doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. In much of the country, adoption is dropping off the radar screen as far as being a controversial issue. I’m nearly forty years old now, and I fully expect legalizing gay marriage to be a no-brainer issue by the time I die, if we work for it.

The problem with growing up the way many people my age did is that while we may have gone to the marches in DC, and signed petitions, we didn’t do the organizing of the marches or start the petitions. There are many who have stepped into those shoes as the older generation steps back, but there are many others who are just living their lives. Ideally, that is the goal, to reach a point where we don;t have to march or sign petitions. The problem is that for many of us, our complacency is premature. This is especially true for gays and lesbians in metropolitan (in every sense of the word) cities who don’t truly know what it s like for folks left behind to live in small towns.

We need to keep working to achieve the goals laid out by the people who started the process. This means we need to engage with the politcal process. We need to keep writing letters to the editor. We must blog, talk in forums, participate in open dialogs whenever possible. If you don’t show up at town hall meetings to support or oppose legislation you do not have the right to complain. The fact that someone sees the need for a book like Wait! Don’t Move to Canada: A Stay-And-Fight Strategy to Win Back America says a lot about the apathy that permeates our society. It’s important to note that the apathy is not uniformly spread throughout our culture and society.

There is no shortage of letters to fill the editorial pages of our newspapers. Many places have to limit the length of citizens are allowed to spend addressing city councils. If you want your views to be heard you need to take action. It’s not enough to sit back and wait for the "political types" who share your views to do the heavy lifting.

Many people complain that the consolidation of the mass media and news industry has made it harder for people with different views to get their voices heard. That is certainly true when you consider CNN or Fox News to be the only place to get your voice heard. Instead of getting discouraged, we need to make our voices heard in places where there is still a place at the table. City newspapers will take risks in printing a letter that the big players will not. City council or zoning board meetings are generally open to the public. We need to remember that there is still room in this country for movements for change to grow from the ground up if we approach it properly.  You have one vote of your own, but if you can change the mind or influence the vote of one city council member or one state or federal respresentative, you have just multiplied the power of your vote by many thousand,

Society, and by extension, laws and policies put in place by the government are geared towards minimal change. The legislation that passes easiest is legislation geared towards tweaking an existing condition to make it "good enough". At the level of individuals, it is very easy grow complacent and comfortable with the status quo. These two elements of life in the united states make driving change difficult and time consuming. In 2004 there was a massive push aimed strictly at getting people who opposed Bush’s policies to get off their collective asses for long enough to vote. That did not work as well as it could have because the inclusion of so many state referendums on gay marriage on the ballot, the religious right had just as strong of desire to get out the vote.

The problem is that for a great many Americans, liberal and conservative alike, the act of voting represented their one big political gesture of the year. (Sorry folks, but bitching to people who share your views about how awful the Bush administration is does not count as political action: it’s mental masturbation at best.) If any portion of society, of any political stripe, wants to see real change they need to make it clear to their fellow travelers that voting is not the answer. Voting is the absolute bare minimum you can do to support your beliefs and your society. The fact that people now see the act voting as a political gesture is the problem, not the solution.