Approaching a writing milestone, one wants to write something terribly profound. This is my 501st article for OpEdNews. It's late, I know. Actually, it's been a long time in coming, but so much of the usual crap got in the way, that profundity is virtually extinct in this author: last week Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Uganda, homelessness, Billionaire Jesus, and rape-hangings numbed the creative writing process (as well as normative thinking).*
Readers of progressive sites like OpEdNews, however, are aware of the effect the real world has on writers (much of the Right lives in its own 1% - or 1% wannabe - world), excusing the numbness and exhaustion, patient for the writer to revive himself.
The Last 500
Writing is always liberating: putting words out, crafting phrases to fit thoughts is freeing to the mind in a way few other mediums can begin to approach. Other art forms may come close: painting, for example, places emotions on canvas, but no matter how explicit, detailed the painting may be, no matter how vividly it displays emotion, it may not always achieve exactly what the painter feels.
And being allowed to write on many people and incidents is even more liberating. That's what OpEdNews has enabled me to do. It has permitted me to peruse headlines and pick up kernels of religion and politics (and the fusion of the two), investigate them and formulate ideas to throw out. It liberates me in being opinionated, as long as I back up my opinions with salient points and supporting links. In the last 6 years, it has allowed me to liberate my opinions - 500 times!
Sideline In The Forefront - The Last 6 Years
Let's get one thing straight as far as my writing is concerned: I'm not exactly a gay activist. I wish I were. I was at the forefront of the AIDS epidemic many years ago and experienced burn out by the late 90's. I now do things on the sidelines as it were. Writing as I do is definitely a sideline kind of deal.
Sideline in the struggle for equality, but forefront in my life. Writing about the inequalities, the absurdities and the atrocities of our real world sustained me through the last 6 years: taking care of a dying partner, struggling for housing, restructuring my life, finding a new love, getting married were all accompanied by the sense of liberation and completeness that goes with writing.
The Armageddon Of Billionaire Jesus - It's About Equality
My last series - Billionaire Jesus - has been about the major concern of the real world: economic inequality, as it relates to the country's 1% and it's religious proponents. Billionaire Jesus, you see, is greed personified and made holy, and it's a greed that lacks any form of "true" compassion**
The difference between the Scriptural Jesus and Billionaire Jesus is that Billionaire will not return after Armageddon. At least, humanity hopes he won't, for in Billionaire Jesus are the seeds of his own undoing: unfettered greed (unregulated capitalism) cannot hold it's own weight.
When will Armageddon commence? Probably when all progressive writers have their say, for progressive writers as a whole are against Billionaire Jesus. Probably when the 99% realize that they've had enough of the 1% who think that greed is good and that Billionaire Jesus is the answer to everything. Probably when certain forms of "freedom" (e.g. restrictive religious freedom - only for certain Christians, as Judge Roy Moore proclaimed) are exposed as tyranny.
Probably when equality gains momentum: equality in pay for both sexes, equality in education, equality in opportunity and even equality in marriage.
Armageddon will be sweet.
*Add Sarah Palin, Religious Right Persecution, Elliot Rodgers and Gay Marriage, Disney's Public Displays of Perversion ...
** True compassion having unequivocal acceptance.
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