You know, I don't know much about this whole same-sex marriage debate, but really it doesn't seem like it's something that has to be very thoroughly read into as it's pretty straightforward – we're all the damn same. Why is it so hard for people to understand that?
It's an equality debate all over again. Sexism and racism are in the past – well, idealistically. Women, indigenous people and African-Americans are just some of these cast-out groups of the past that we now wonder what we were even thinking degrading them, giving them less rights than ourselves.
I say "ourselves" even though I would have fallen into the "women" category had I been a part of that generation, but really "ourselves" would in this sense refer to those who are allowed to have the same rights as the greater public. By disallowing someone to have the same rights as everyone else, you're discriminating once again against the person that they are.
How many times do we have to be reminded that we're all human? I can just see an image of the future – once everyone figures it out – of same-sex marriage, and people wondering why we ever made such a fuss over it; in the same way we wonder now why women hadn't the same rights as men, or indigenous children were taken from their homes, or segregation happened because of the shade of someone's skin. Really, you're punishing someone for being who they are. Shouldn't we be free to love who we love and marry that person if we wish to?
To put it simply: this is stupid. There shouldn't even be debate over it. I believe people should continue to fight for what they want, and those standing in the way (who, by the way, are in no way even affected by it) should just give up because you're simply repeating the mistakes of the past. And having apologised for those mistakes in the past is all being taken back, because if you had been sorry for discrimination, you wouldn't be discriminating again.
I'm sorry about those who disagree with this post, but if you are one of those people, you and your closed mind can find the exit at the 'X'
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"I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it,
But I didn't, not really.
Only the smudgeness of it,
The pink-slippered, all containered,
Semi-precious, eagerness of it.
I didn't realise it would sometimes be more than whole,
That the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea.
Because it's the halves that halve you in half.
I didn't know, don't know, about the between bits,
The gory bits of you, and gory bits of me."
– Anna, Like Crazy
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I'm trying to grasp the concept of realness and people's perceptions of what realness is in films and stories. We get so accustomed to fiction and the forms that build up a structured story, but when this structure is formed upon the real, do we want to listen? Or do we expect it to end as a story would?
I hear so many critics (not necessarily the professional kind, just anyone with an opinion, so really just anyone) talk about the way films or books end in a way they didn't want them to when they're based on the real. This seems slightly ignorant when you consider an audience expecting the sick man to die, the unhappy couple to make up or the lost girl to find her way.
When we base stories on the real, we often structure them like stories, but they don't take the same course as one, they generally take their actual paths, albeit with tweaks. So we expect them to end like a story, often the way we want them to end. But the sick man surviving, the unhappy couple splitting up and the lost girl remaining lost, often is the real. We often feel it should be like what we expect in life - or prepare ourselves for in life - whether it be good or bad.
What I guess I'm trying to get at in my roundabout way, is that we cannot expect stories to just be stories, we have to not expect, just as we do in life. Often enough, stories are lives and our lives are stories.
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