Nov. 18, 2009
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH
By Christopher Worth
The needle falls. A skipping sound. A readjusting scratch. The peeling sound of a female voice shatters a summer afternoon in Orange, Connecticut. I’m in my second foster home. I’m six years old and cannot now remember the voice that broke the humdrum sound of summer. All I knew at that moment and what I can remember to this day is the rush of excitement at the sound of the crackling record and the tempo that followed. First, a fascination with the machine that would create such a sound…and then, a recognition that the sound is telling a story, a story that moves me beyond the fenced in back yard I am forced to be contained/contented with and in. This box, with its turning vinyl, shiny as though it were wet against the flash of sunbeam, took me away from a place and into my mind. But even outside of that all this happened instantaneously in consecutive rhythm. The power of music.
My mother and her soon-to-be sister-in-law stand in the mud in a forest of people. They think to themselves, as I imagine it, “It’s all happening.” Revolution. Evolution. The breaking of age-old dogma. Life seemed to have no impossible boundary. All boundaries could and would be broken and this mantra was being carried on the raspy tongue of artist Joe Cocker: Need a little help from a friend? Boundaries could be broken. Chains could crumble under the weight of voices on this day in this forest of people called Woodstock.
That is what I’m looking for. That is what I’m hoping for. My Woodstock. Not as a physical place. We can debate what happened in that field in upstate New York and it’s validity as an earth shattering event all day long. But what cannot be shaken (at least from my imagination) is the possibilities that such a concentration of people stood for. Not physically, but intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically tear away at everything we think we understand about cultural movements. We are left with those things. We are left with psychological reverberation, emotional reverberation, and intellectual reverberation so that where these things came from (by things, I mean new ideas) matter little. What matters is that now they are on the minds of the mass culture, and things ever so slowly begin to change. Old ideas make way for new ones. Old perceptions fall away to reveal truths where at one time a lie stood. I am looking and I bet you are looking, reader, for that open door. Even if you think you are fine with your life right now, you will at one point (or as it happens so many times) at many points you will ask, “Is this the way it needs to be?” And by “it” you will mean your life. But the real key is understanding that your life is the only place where you can start to make change. You must be the key to your own revolution. You must carry your own song and, in that, enact your own change.
The Doors got their name from the name of a book, The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. One of my eye opening experiences within the past few years was to have read a book about Jim Morrison where I learned that he was an avid reader of social theory and he enacted this social theory in his stage performances. He wanted to move into a deeply personal place with his audience, to move them beyond their realities and into a greater awareness. Where is that greater awareness? The question is not what it is, it is an awareness of self which we are sorely lacking. It is a sad day when our institutions of higher learning grind like machines only concerned with the dollar. Our young people only prepare to respond to rule books which lay out their responsibilities in a black and white reality. Meanwhile, our college administrators and coaches get paid the kind of money that would only be rivaled by Enron. They are perfectly satisfied, passively watching as the door to perception goes slamming shut in every institution of higher learning in America. In fact, many of these administrators would gladly slide the bolts tight to seal the fate of America’s youth and out of the sides of their mouths cry “We don’t know where the brain drain is coming from! All our tests can’t track it! It can’t be quantified!” With these words, not only are we leaving behind K-12 students, but we are surely leaving behind our college students with back room deals and even front row bartering. The ability to think abstractly is slipping away into a femoral nothingness.
Until next week, there’s something happening here. What it is isn’t exactly clear…For what it’s worth.
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It’s a spring morning. The room is drafty with the chill of a slowly disappearing winter. The servants move like ants scattered across the floor in rhythmic preparation. At first glance, all seems chaotic…and then slowly down the corridor a name rises up in whispers. van Eyck is here. The artist briskly enters the wedding chamber of Arnolfini, a Flemish merchant. van Eyck has been called to literally mark an occasion that signifies the merging of two powerful Flemish families. The portrait to come out of this event is not just something attractive as a point of commemoration. van Eyck’s painting literally documents the wedding of these two individuals and will stand as legally binding, with all the symbolism of the time that is to be shared between a couple. This wedding did not occur in a grand chapel. It did not require the blessing of an esteemed pope. All that was required to bond these two individuals in legal matrimony was a third party- a witness- and in this case, his signed documentation which is the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait. The year was 1434, and the country was the Netherlands.
Now, in the present day, there are groups of people (groups identified by their gender and sexuality) that are being denied the happiness of marriage that we see in the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait. What is gender? The Oxford English Dictionary says that gender, “In mod[ern] (esp. feminist) use, [is] a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.” Furthermore, what is sex? The OED has this to say: “Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.” To call myself gay is to signify yet another subculture that I don’t so neatly fit into. The questions that fuel this response have more to do with social rights; though I am gay, does one who calls him or herself “gay” have the right to legally join in matrimony? My initial, gut response would be, “Who would ever want to get married?” Of course, I’m being humorous. I believe that everyone should have the right to marry no matter what subculture they belong to. There was a time even here in America, in fact, that my primary physical identification as a person with a physical challenge would have discouraged anyone from encouraging me to reproduce due to the facts of my physical challenges. The overwhelming assumption by so many is that marriage is tied directly to reproduction. In my mind, that is a heinous and archaic association. Can you imagine what Arnolfini’s wife was thinking as the artist skilfully plumped her out, giving the illusion that she was already pregnant to signify her fertility in his recording? The role of any woman at that time was seen as being that of baby maker and housewife. So is the modern woman’s position the same as it once was?
There have been homosexuals in the historical record from time immemorial. The identifying labels given to my community have changed over time to become more discriminatory. One is not an artist, a son, a daughter, but is instead their identifying gender/sexuality. This pigeonholes the subculture and, from my perspective, has caused many young men and women to pigeonhole themselves into the extremes of whatever their gender or sexuality identifier calls for. They are responding, as we all are responding, as though gender and sexuality are brands- as if we can label ourselves as Abercrombie and Fitch or Gucci. When pushed to extremes, people respond in the extreme, and although the “character” of homosexuality is more widely accepted in mass culture than ever before, I equate it to the singing and dancing of the African American during one of their highest points of exploitation: the 1920’s and 30’s, with the advent of jazz and the wide use of blackface in entertainment. So the question is, “Where is the shackle the tightest around the body of this subculture and what will break this shackle?” A place to begin is giving my people legal rights possessed by all other people in the United States.
Questions about what legally binds two individuals are alive with fervor in the halls of wherever Americans gather. On their lips is conversation about gay marriage. The idea of this kind of union is close to my heart in that I am a part of this community being discussed. Being questioned is the validity of marriage within constitutional right. Homosexual unions are not recognized by the majority of states in this country. This past week, in fact, voters have overturned the right for gay marriage in Maine. For what it’s worth, this article is my two cents on the matter. For those who argue that marriage is a sacrament governed by the church, I simply say that it isn’t exactly true. In this day and age, as it hasn’t always been true even in the most dogmatically Catholic countries of the past, one does not have to be in a church to be considered married. There has long been the fact that one can get married in the eyes of the state, in front of the justice of the peace, and even legally be considered married after the passing of time in many states in the Union. So, the sanctity of marriage is bound only by a single very thin thread of truth. I encourage all people to support our forefathers at the foundation of this country when they said “Separation of Church and State.” One cannot govern the other, but of course we all know it does. That brings me to the story of my friend Madison Reed.
Madison Reed and his partner deserve the same legal rights as any other American. Tragically, these two men are separated by oceans of distance and culture. I have known Madison for 7 years. We met while I was a student at Marshall University here in Huntington. Madison immediately opened up to me and became a mentor in a time when I was defining so many things about myself. He is a proud man. This pride has to do with the fact that he has seen oppression and has come out on top. He has taught me to look for the building blocks of my pride in an ability to show understanding to all people, even those who may not even try to understand me. Madison has run a business, been a mentor, and in this way a positive force in Huntington. He deserves to be united with his partner, Dzmitry, not through just some political or economic union. For Madison, relationships have nothing to do with those two things, but they have everything to do with the spiritual landscape of our society; and for him, Dzmitry is a unifying force and when they are finally brought together, it will be adding fuel to an already dynamic spirit in Madison Reed.
The problem is this: Under current federal law, gay or lesbian American citizens or permanent residents like Madison who have foreign same-gender life partners or spouses are given no legal mechanism to bring their partners to the United States to live together as a family unit, since they cannot marry, and cannot therefore meet the overriding federal definition of marriage, which states that a marriage must be between “one man and one woman.” Under U.S. immigration law it is only an American who is legally MARRIED to a foreign spouse according to the federal definition, or intends to marry within 90 days after the arrival on U.S. soil of the fiancé, who can petition to the U.S. Immigration authorities on behalf of his relative, for the issuance of a family-based visa for his spouse or fiancé to enter the United States. Since the family-based immigration visa benefit is tied to whether a marriage or family relationship exists between the American applicant and his foreign beneficiary, bi-national couples of the same gender fail to meet this qualification, and cannot receive a family uniting immigration visa. Being married in a state that has legal same-sex marriage will not help, because to receive the federally conveyed immigration benefit, the couple must meet the federal, not state, definition of marriage. So Gays and Lesbians are left out in the cold with absolutely no possible way to live in the United States with their legal spouses or life partners. Even if they are legally married, the foreign spouses must leave the United States after their student visas or tourist visas expire. Their relationships are invisible, non-existent, to the federal government. These Americans are hopelessly barred from any means to sponsor their partners to receive an immigration visa. They are forced to spend their lives apart in two countries, go into exile into a third country, or give up and abandon their relationships. This has never been true for heterosexuals. Federal immigration law has always allowed any straight American citizen or permanent resident to sponsor his foreign partner to move to the United States, get a green card, and get married and live happily as a couple.
The Uniting American Families Act of 2009 (H.R. 1024, S. 424) is a bill in Congress that makes an exception in U.S. immigration law to allow Americans in same-gender bi-national relationships to bring their foreign partners to the United States to live with them as heterosexual Americans can do for their foreign spouses or fiancees. Americans like Madison, in bi-national relationships with their foreign partners, need our U.S. representatives in Congress to throw their support behind The Uniting American Families Act. The bill currently has 137 sponsors in the House, and 95 in the Senate. To date, there are no sponsors of the bill from West Virginia.
Comparatively, we have made great strides when weighed against times past, except that we are living in the now and we have so much opportunity within the fabric of our changing American landscape to make swift, strong, historical changes which will reunite what at one time made people breathless with wonder when they took in the great experiment called America. The homosexual community is not going away. We are here to stay and stand strong, and in our community we still hear Liberty as she cries “Bring us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free…” Until next week!
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The glow, bright white against my glasses. To the left, a bucket of brushes. I pull one from its sheath like a sword. I feel the bristles against my hand and then quickly dip it into a pool of cerulean blue. From there, my hand swiftly moves across the white field of paper; the quick, almost silent sound of brush against the table, and the blue lights up against the white. A world begins to unfold. In moments to come, there will begin an almost painful pushing and pulling of visual elements to bring the characters into play on the figure ground of this canvas.
My mind has drifted back to the very first encounter I had with art making and art materials. I was seven years old, maybe even six, when my biological mother scraped up enough money to get me my own set of water colours and papers, and as I opened the neatly wrapped package with the set of water colours on top and the paper in its own packaging, I could not have realised how much that moment would replay in my head from then until now. So, too, does the action of applying water to the paints and then brush to the paper replay over and over again. Even my mother’s reaction when I used all the paper in one sitting in a manic fit of watching colour dance…let’s just say she was not happy. But I can say that even her negative reaction was enough of a response that I wanted to dig deeper into the arts and play with human reaction.
That’s what we are all playing with. We seek reinforcement in any way possible. We are all bending and twisting with the rules of life to create our own landscape. Some of us are more disconnected to the need for individual reaction and look more for societal reaction. Nevertheless, it’s all about the explosion of cerulean blue or crimson red against the snow white canvas that we are looking to. Now, we add our own physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries to what can happen on a canvas. But the truth is that when stripped away from those limitations, the colours and rhythms of life are ours to begin to create and/or understand. In a moment, one can decide that they are too stupid to perceive a concept or too weak to win a race. Those are consciously unconscious decisions that are reinforced by our environment. The thing is, Americans wear the brand seared to the forehead. Too often we cannot operate outside of the idea of ourselves that someone else creates for us.
You are the master painter. You choose the brush, which for this article we will call “destiny.” You make the strokes on the canvas. Now, one may not have control over how the strokes interact with each other, but we choose the colour. Last October, I talked to my adopted mother (who hasn’t always been my mother but has known me since I set foot on West Virginia soil at the age of 11). I asked her to get me some water colours, and from my hospital bed I began dipping brushes into paint and running bristles across papers. My mom probably doesn’t know the significance for me of her bringing me this water colour set, but for what it’s worth that action marked a new beginning. We all have a chance at new beginnings with every metaphoric brush stroke. Just choose your colours wisely. Until next week!
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FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH: A Call for Strategic Action
By Christopher Worth
Special to Huntingtonnews.net
Appalachia: Awakened. The call to action has come. We can no longer sit on our laurels and wait for change. The bureaucratic system has failed the common people from the eastern shores to the California coast, but none more-so than the geographical location called Appalachia. Nationally, the call is spreading. Our president used that bugle call to get elected. The resounding word is change. As a thinking person, I almost regret penning that word, because the word itself means nothing without action. But then again, the action itself means nothing without the word to give body to strategy. So this week, my call is not simply for “simple change,” but I call for strategic action. Last week’s article was resoundingly reflecting on ideas of escapism for me. Everyone needs a moment like that from time to time, but this week, in reflection, I realised that the only true escape is via engagement.
Let’s talk about two ways to galvanize. One is through strategy. Strategy, as I understand it, is a laying out of plans to enhance resources; through the enhancement of resources, finding ways to engage in physically enacting change. The underlying foundation for setting a strategy is to somehow record it, make it tangible, and have all members involved able to invest in it. The second focus for true engagement is action. Now, be careful, because we’ve used this word several times in this article, but here I will flesh it out more fully.
Action, when thinking about engagement, is understood by many people as a physical reaction against something or a physical reaction embracing something. I am thinking of the sit ins during the civil rights movement and marches against mountaintop removal. These physical acts are important. They leave a mark on the emotional and intellectual landscape. It is my belief that physical action can impact a situation to the point of changing the situations paradigm. With that said, I’m going to talk about two events that have happened within the past two weeks here in Huntington, WV.
One is CreateWV. An intellectual deluge of great ideas, and lots of talk, with buzzwords like “change,” and “renewable energy,” yet it was sadly too expensive for many to be involved with. For West Virginia, change has never come out of the bureaucratic system. It has barely been supported by an intellectual class of intelligencia, but the real class who has forced change in this great state are the workers. You must understand that I am not downing intellectualism, but I think America has learned that you must share ideas…you cannot SELL ideas. If a concept is for sale, it will soon be abandoned, because the true engagement is in the hands and the feet and the voices of workers, artisans, and students. CreateWV was out of reach for so many that whatever idea they proposed will not be able to find its feet because there isn’t any physical engagement. There isn’t any true application of CreateWV’s ideas.
Not that I have to point this out (or that I haven’t already), but the element that is missing within ideas of what CreateWV is or could be is an idea of application. Now, that’s not to say that local groups like Create Huntington aren’t doing their part, but I think as an overall state movement, CreateWV has to rethink who they want to engage, and they have to engage them on the physical level. The idea has to move beyond the drawing board. Now, I acknowledge that this is easier said than done, but that’s why this column is called “For What It’s Worth.”
The second gathering that happened here in Huntington happened just this past weekend, hence why I am writing this article later in the week. I needed time to digest what Power Shift is about. As I said in the beginning of the article, there is a call for change, and Power Shift as a nation-wide movement is trying to respond to what is not just a national crisis, but also is an international one. The same buzzwords that I listed before were alive and well in the halls of Power Shift, but the difference was that Power Shift Appalachia’s organisers said “Everyone come. Share what you have to bring to the dialogue and we’ll feed you three meals a day.” They didn’t only feed the participants, they were sensitive to the vegans and the vegetarians. That says a lot to me as I am a vegetarian.
Now, before you close down this article because you think “Oh, the hippies are crawling out of the woodwork…” understand that as I observed the conversations, I did not see any one subculture. I saw instead leaders; I’m not going to call them future leaders. I think to call them future leaders is to isolate them from the power that they have. The voices coming out of Appalachia Power Shift (both the young and old) are defining our structure, and they’re doing it NOW. We are Obama’s architects for America’s new age.
There are holes even in this group, though. Nothing is perfect. So many of these individuals have been pushed to the point of extremism. Their vocabulary is action first, strategy a very distant second thought. So as I became hoarse screaming about strategy this past weekend and many of the participants looked on me like I was trying to stifle their action, I thought of CreateWV and how loaded with language/strategy they are and not with action. With this, I realised that many factions in Power Shift here in Appalachia were ready to blow up the Parliament and pick up the pieces later. For what it’s worth, I ask “Where are those pieces going to fall?”
There are voices like mine within Power Shift Appalachia calling for strategy, and those voices need to be magnified because they will be heard. In conclusion, the time is now to bring strategy and action together. We can no longer keep the language of strategy within the hands of the elite, and we cannot continue to jump from one action to another as the foot soldiers and the architects for truly applicable chang
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Oct. 17, 2009
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH: Thinking About Moving
By Christopher Worth
Special to Huntingtonnews.net
Sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of Huntington’s center of urban renewal, I have to tell you that I have started this article half a dozen times this week. I’ve had one lofty idea after another about a topic which I will not address at this moment. Instead, I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind…moving.
I have lived in Huntington for about 12 years now. As I’ve pushed my own way to see this place become the place that I knew and still know it could potentially be, my philosophy has always been that a place is not your physical surroundings alone, but more importantly, a place is what you make of it intellectually. I still believe that. I believe you can build worlds using the inspiration of the mind. So when I began to get the itch to move out of Huntington, I began to try to push it out of my psyche.
I love Huntington. In fact, I love the whole of West Virginia, but that love can only take me so far. Sometimes it feels as though I’m holding my understanding of this land and our people over my head like Atlas held the world. The weight of my understanding of West Virginia, and specifically Huntington, is not evenly distributed. We must begin to respect ourselves. We must begin to see the gifts that West Virginia has brought to a nation that forgets it, and it cannot be just in lip service. And we cannot simply build this state pride within our borders. We must share it with the whole of the world in order to eradicate stereotypes promulgated by outsiders. I’ve said this before and I mean it: being a young mind and trying to stay in this state is kind of like being a saturated sponge that Thor is wringing dry. And I’m not just saying this because of lack of jobs. I believe that jobs can be generated anywhere there are human beings. So I, for one, think that the excuse of “lack of jobs” in this state for low retention of young people is crap.
By the way, I will acknowledge that there are great changes happening in Huntington. I am a part of them. But this change cannot be held by a few. If it is, as I think it’s starting to look like it is, then we’re no better off than when the coal barons ran the city and it was called the city with the gold streets. Where did that go? It went the way of most things that are controlled by greed and self centeredness. So when I wake up, wanting to move, I ask myself, “Where?” and realize that the place where I am is always where I’ll be because I am real. And the reality is I want to feel real. No person should be a symbol of anything, and if we make that person into a symbol, he or she should be aware that they must share with the community, foster new growth through the community, and live for ALL people (not just the few with social, economic, and political power).
It has been said that revolution isn’t headed by the millions, but by the few. And to borrow from Phil Ochs, “The bells of change are ringing.” And the few that rise up are not going to be of the class that has been privileged before. The first will be last and the last will be first, some book says, and I second that, for what it’s worth.
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