Weeding the garden brings more satisfaction than a tidy look. It has a mystical quality, an introspection of your mind that's transcendental. You think, one more bucket of weeds and I'll quit, drink a beer and come back later to finish. But you don't. You go on, filling the bucket with errant foliage and fishing your head for answers to questions other than, how in hell did these weeds get here in the first place.
Before weeding, I fixed a pot of tea and read the paper while sitting in the patio. Ask Amy is read before the comics on the following page. It's like dessert, the advice column and the comics bring a sweet to the sour news of a world gone berserk.
A concerned church-going sister wrote of her deliberate exclusion from a girls getaway that her, another sister and some cousins do every year. They go on a shopping spree, dinners and luncheons for the weekend. The younger sister, who is a single mom and not well off is not invited, but its for her own good that she doesn't invite her. She is not a regular church going woman and has no husband to support her in the fashion that she and the others have. She asked for advice on how to tell the younger sister that she should develop relationships more suited for her state in life. They're doing her a favor by not including her because it is so obvious that the wretch couldn't get away for a weekend much less afford the spree.
The younger sister confronted her at her home in tears. Feeling left out, she called her older sister a horrible person and the churchgoing husband threatened to call the police if she didn't leave. It scared the children to see all the distress and it upset the older sister enough to write, inquiring for an answer to the dysfunctional family.
Amy answered writing that she agreed with the younger sister, she is a horrible person and for all her church going, it didn't seem she learned much from it.
Inclusion is the answer. When we shut people out, things go sour and as I dug and pulled weeds around the apple tree, and crook-neck squash, I remembered what exclusion feels like. A family who once accepted me but when they found I was queer, well, there's nothing left to do but exclude. Religion gave them the reason to exclude, not only a reason but a satisfaction they did the right thing. I would change that way, being excluded from the family would make me see my error and I would give up my deviant way and join them as a heterosexual Christian.
It's like asking someone to change the color of their skin if they wanted to be accepted. If you can't, well, exclusion is the only answer. You don't fit in and need to find others of your own kind.
I remembered the signs on front lawns of neighbors to vote yes for Prop 8. The Catholic/Mormon backed initiative to bar gays from equality of marriage in California. Wally and I would be excluded from all the laws that protect people who love each other until death parts them. We would be excluded from rights that other people take for granted.
It's hard to say hello to horrible people in your neighborhood that want to exclude you, even when you don't know them that well. I never did anything to them. Never allowed our dog to poop on their lawn, never woke them with loud music or trashed their yard or park in front of their house, but yet they want to treat me as a second class citizen and why? Religion.
Religion allows people to think that somehow a god wants them to exclude others for their own good. It's not you that's horrible, you don't hate the sinner, just the sin. You're doing them a favor by excluding them. It's divine justice of a god that they must follow, nothing personal in it.
It's why, as I pulled and tugged another bucket of weeds, that the belief in gods make no sense at all. For all the gods that suppose to be governing earth, they're not doing much of a job. Confusion on which god is the right god. Ridiculous laws for people to follow, don't turn on the light switch, cut your hair, let a woman have an education, wear a veil, grow a beard, exclude others, even from your own family. How fucked up is that? How could there be a god that gives disastrous, dysfunctional reasons to coexist with others?
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