Yesterday I went to the studio I’m using in Newark, but on my way there and back I got to see a very happy New York. For about two days now gay couples have become very visible and yesterday Penn station was filled with folks coming into town for the Gay Pride Parade. (I am not one for massive crowds so I decided to forego and just admire from a distance.)
It's fascinating to see so many gay couples on the streets -- male and female representing a such range of attractiveness and attire. What was touching were the number of older couples holding hands, particularly women, with gigantic smiles on their faces. You know they have been waiting years for this moment – all their lives for this moment.
One day we won't remember that there was a time before this - not really. It will be like the vote for women or black people. It seems so natural it's hard to remember there was an archaic time when society thought it natural to withhold these rights. This time of forgetting will be a good time.
These are the things that move us incrementally ever forward to a destination we can never reach. It must be an ethic which drives this movement, a conscious sentry on our hearts. We know quite well from the lessons of Hitler’s Germany, Rwanda, and Serbia … how easily thinking can betray us and allow us to believe in some conception of good which makes us blind to the suffering of others.
For the people, one ethic only, of hospitality – true politesse – if this guides and it is the criteria against which we measure our thinking and doing then we will move infinitely closer to that place we want.
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