I wish there were a moratorium on political discussion following tragedies like Orlando so that for one fucking, goddamn moment we would all just have to be with our grief and sadness together.
Yes, the things that contribute to this will need to be addressed: the hypermasculinity and homophobia, the cults that, regardless of religious or political faces, convince people to do horrendous things, the access to weapons and how we screen people seeking them or screen what people can obtain, and most importantly, the continued struggle for basic civil rights of oppressed people.
We cannot sit idly by, unresponsive to the rising mass violence or to the targeting of minorities, but we shouldn’t use our response to distance ourselves from our pain, to bury our wounds under a body-guard of anger, because they will only fester.
One thing I’ve learned about grief is that it makes it SOOOOOO hard to think rationally and make good decisions while it is still fresh. There’s so much anger at…literally everything in grief, and it doesn’t make sense and is so hard to control. Little annoyances, daily tasks, they just become daunting.
The LGBT community needs the safety and space to rage and cry and curse without having to be on guard for people exploiting us either financially or politically and without having to worry about whether our expression of that rage and grief is rational enough for a serious conversation.
Yet we are called on, by each other and the rest of the world with all their varying pet agendas, to set aside the purity of our emotions and enter into an immediate chaotic search for “solutions”–anything that will give a false sense of safety.
People want to use our own fear to divide us, inhibiting our ability to hear each other and see each other.
I wish we understood that first we need to mourn and come together as a community and as human beings. And the rest of the world needs to hold space for that. Mourn with us, sure, but more importantly guard our right to mourn. This should be a sacred time for us, separate from what is to come.
Then, after we’ve had time to let the rawness of our grief settle, that’s when we need to come together as activists, politicians, voters, and citizens to figure out what our next steps are.
I’m not saying don’t politicize what happened because that would be impossible. But I am saying to stop trying to exploit and co-opt the emotional process. We can all argue over the political meaning of this massacre later. Right now, let me fucking grieve for what has happened to my community.
sometimesmagical 