Un-Civil Rights

Watching an episode of Ken Burns' "The Civil War" reminds me about how important the fight for a cause can be. The South insisted on states' rights superceding the federal governments'. The North didn’t have a consensus in the state vs. federal power issue (and still don't), but they wanted to keep the Union intact.

Slaves were freed along the way, but that had little to do with the war.

A conflict of ideas fueled the bloodiest war ever fought in the western hemisphere. Also, the most deadly in American history.

Our worst war was spent fighting among ourselves.

It also reminds me that nothing's much changed. We don't use guns as often; we are divided still, but along other lines. "North and South" has become "Republican and Democrat". And there are no easy geographic boundaries to separate the two.

The Mason-Dickson is no longer relevant.

We are as divided as we have ever been, but now on social issues, not political ones. Social issues masquerade as political ones, but they're not. They often boil down to nothing more than rabble-rousing.

The Stonewall riots of 1969 illustrate this well. The NYPD decided to raid a gay bar on Christopher St. in Greenwich Village. What they didn't take into account was that Judy Garland had died that day. They were met with a bunch of angry queens whose icon was dead and were sick and tired of being harassed.

They fought back. It was the birth of the gay rights movement. One that continues today. You can only push someone so much before they get pissed off.

The movement has become the focus of political groups on both the right and the left. It’s either demonized or lauded. They don’t seem to realize that real people are involved.

They argue about ideas while real people are affected by their actions. And none of them seem to realize that.

Civil rights are not a political issue and never have been. They're a matter of social justice.

But civil rights are still a political issue, practically speaking, years after Stonewall and over a century after Mr. Lincoln unilaterally proclaimed social justice to be the law of the land.

I sometimes wonder if we'll ever learn anything as a nation from the past. I'm not sure that we'll ever, as a body, separate political concerns from social justice. We've had any number of chances, but have done little to nothing to address the issue, except listen to politicians using the issue as a political hot-button.

We've come far, but not far enough. Not yet.

And I’m not giving up.