Why I Didn't Go Rainbow

 Our country has taken a huge step in equality this week, (It could be argued as either forward or backward depending on you view history) and I fully support the change.  I also love the flood of support I have seen from the majority of people and I haven't been overly vocal. I feel like my friends, particularly my LGBT friends deserve to know why my response has been so reserved. The answer is I've never really thought it should be a big deal.  I've put a lot of thought in how to say this and what I've come up with is:

All discrimination should die quietly and without acknowledgement for its existence.

I firmly believe that statement.

In photography, before the digitalization, almost all pictures were developed from a negative. When that began to change, the change was celebrated, but no one threw a huge party celebrating the death of the negative. Instead it was relegated down to the place it needed to be, where it was still relevant while the positive change was focused on and improved.

That is how I feel it should be with social change as well. Now, the photography metaphor is not perfect, you can blow a lot of holes in it. I am aware. But the spirit of it works.

I look at the history of discrimination and I see these big rallies, these big protests, this huge media presence and I see where change has been made on the surface of society and in the law books but not in the actual roots of the people.  I can't help but wonder if maybe part of the reason it hasn't died is because we have so sensationalized the death of it. Why should anyone give up their bigotry when they can stand on an age old prejudice and get so much attention. Not all of it damning.

In my personal experience, the changes that stick, the ones that really happen are changes I have made without fanfare or announcements. I have quietly killed the negative parts of my life and moved on to a better and happier existence. And I suppose it could be wishful thinking that quiet change could take hold on a massive scale, but I've seen what can happen when friends, neighbors and families have open dialogue, intelligent discourse and compassionate exchanges. Real change happens communities pull tog ether this way.

Real change happens quietly.

Being quiet does not mean ignoring the problem. Just to be clear.

But celebrating the death of discrimination and other negative aspects of society with so much pomp and circumstance seems to me to be feeding the problem instead of actually solving it.

Think of it as good sportsmanship. If you need anything to make it more palatable for you. Or just ignore me, after all this is simply my opinion and my stance.

Just understand that my quiet celebration is a way for me to pay the highest respect to the change that I so desperately wanted. But it is fight that never should have happened, it should not have been necessary and the sooner we start treating it as the norm and making changes in our social circles, changes that do not require glaring announcements ect. the sooner we can have the norm that we should have had all along.