The phrase, “Our Apathy is Killing Us” has grown in popularity in the LGBTQI civil rights movement. Certainly apathy is a killer of action as it decreases the number of people who get involved to fight for their own rights. In a war, and this is a civil rights war, we need as many people involved as possible, developing and employing as many methods as are available to attack hate and discrimination. Apathy is a passive killer, but there are two other more active civil rights movement killers at work in the LGBTQI movement. They are egos and infighting.
Let’s start with egos. People do things for a variety of reasons, some good, some bad, and some self serving. When the scale begins to tip and a civil rights leader or a civil rights organization becomes less about the cause and more about the leader or the leader’s recognition, their usefulness begins to diminish. It begins to drift away from the cause and become deaf to the people it represents. In some cases, the leaders and the organizations start to resemble the bureaucracies that withhold rights and promote discrimination by broken promises and inaction. The leaders of these organizations become well known faces in political circles and garner a degree of power and acceptance.
We all enjoy being praised for our accomplishments, that is human nature, but when the praise, the power, and the recognition or acceptance into political or powerful social circles becomes the driving force behind the motives of LGBTQI civil rights leaders and the organizations they represent, they cease to look at the causes of LGBTQI inequality objectively. Their vision becomes clouded by self-perpetuating motives and actions. In doing so they choose to serve a different master and not the victims of discrimination. Many people have climbed over the backs of the oppressed they claim to represent to attain positions of political power and become part of the Washington elite. They cease to hear the voices of the community they represent and in some cases take the side of the oppressor happily settling for empty promises and small civil rights crumbs.
It’s disgusting to watch them justify an action that a President’s administration takes against their own civil rights in order to remain in good standing with that administration. In their communication with the LGBTQI community, when they choose to come to the table at all, they behave as though they know something we don’t and treat us as ignorant children whose opinions shouldn’t be seen or heard. The enemy of our equal rights courts the ego, and uses it against us making those leaders drunk with praise and position.
This brings us to infighting and its destructive force. Infighting is different than disagreement. Disagreement and debate are healthy exchanges of ideas between entities that have a common purpose. The entities are able to see the value in each others thinking and approaches. We need all the approaches and ideas out there, so in my view this strengthens what we are trying to do. It’s OK to agree to disagree on ideas and methods as long as we get to the goal of equality for LGBTQI people.
I think the problems start to occur when we think our approach or idea is the only valid one. This, by nature,negates the value of others ideas and approaches and fosters and environment for infighting. Infighting will fracture and splinter a movement, setting it back. It takes the energy away from the movement and directs it on the devaluing or destruction of our own. In the LGBTQI civil rights movement, infighting is due in large part to an attempt by established organizations to maintain power and influence while resisting the evolution of the movement. If the larger LGBTQI organizations were willing to enter the conversation, listen to the concerns of the community they represent in regard to standing by methods that have produced small results, our quest for full equality would be much further along. The history lesson of the revolutionary war’s British soldier comes to mind, marching rigidly in single file while American soldiers picked them off one by one. When the war changes, so must the battle plan. It makes little sense to not incorporate new weapons when the old ones are incapable of getting the job done or continuing to fight on a battle field of the enemy’s choosing and experience loss after painful loss.
In response to this deaf ear people splinter off and grassroots movements establish themselves with the mission of implementing the current thinking of the LGBTQI movement. This may be the only good to come of infighting. We are seeing that now with direct action and civil disobedience groups. While these methods are a new weapon for the LGBTQI civil rights movement, they are tried and true having been used effectively by other minority groups. They are by no means the only right method. If direct action and civil disobedience become the only method used, they too will fail. So instead of replacing old methods with new ones, they need to be employed in conjunction with the old ones until we find a combination that gets the job done. We would be a great force if all LGBTQI organizations both large and small could acknowledge the value of each other’s experience, thinking and methods as opposed to being critical of the current organizations and methods and trying to squash the new ones that the movement is birthing now. How refreshing it would be if the new valued the experienced, and the experienced helped the new to grow.
So why all this infighting? Clearly it is an attempt to maintain power and influence by larger organizations that have become too comfortable and are afraid of becoming irrelevant. On the part of grassroots groups it is an expression of anger and frustration over our inequality and the rigidity of those organizations that claim to represent us, some of which stopped listening to the community or working for us quite sometime ago.
While the reasons for ego driven leaders and infighting may differ,the results are the same. A movement is fractured and results are delayed. There is no common sense to it. If we are all truly in this to get LGBTQI equality in this lifetime, than it makes little sense to malign each other or hinder the growth of the movement’s evolution.
If you are an established leader in the LGBTQI movement and you feel threatened by the new grassroots groups, ask yourself why and what is most important to you. If the answer is maintaining your position and influence and not achieving full equality, you are useless to the civil rights movement.
If you are part of a new grassroots movement and you think the established organizations are the enemy and attempts should not be made to partner with them when appropriate, for the greater good, ask yourself what is most important to you. If it is proving their methods alone won’t get the job done and that they have made mistakes and it is not achieving your community’s equality, you too will be useless to the civil rights movement.
The common sense of it all is this, we are bound by our discrimination, and the true enemy are those who actively and or passively refuse us rights,diminishing our humanity. We must value and use every weapon in our arsenal to win this war. It’s ironic that in all likelihood, to win this battle, we must first stop fighting with ourselves.
MT
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