Courage

“To be yourself in a world which does its best, night and day, to make you just like everybody else is the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” – e.e. cummings

             Call me twisted but whenever I see out-and-out gays and lesbians, I see embodiments of courage. You see, these brethren of ours could have just hidden in the closet; but, no, they would rather suffer ostracism and indignation for being who they really are rather than nestle in their zones of comfort and safety.They could have just as easily acted out a different persona or pass themselves off as what they are not (magkunwari) in order to be easily assimilated into our intolerant society and be just like everybody else. But then again, they chose to “walk proudly in the light than die a slow death”. That’s courage.

                Courage is the link to our eventual progress and success as a species—quite a grandiose claim but I believe it is true.

Remember the many instances of courage in history and in our society without which we wouldn’t have propelled forward.

               Galileo and Nicolaus Copernicus had courage. They espoused ideas at a time when the prevailing mindset would have considered their ideas crazy and heretic. Without them we would still have maintained our paradigm of celestial hegemony—that is, that we are at the center of the vast universe. What humbugs we could all have been! Without them, we would have limited our desire for discovery to, literally, the corners of our world. We would not have acknowledged that we are just a tiny speck of dust and that there is so much more to see, explore and discover out there.

              

                    Fighting for your ideas not knowing if you are right, and despite colossal opposition—that’s courage. Einstein, too, had courage.He shook the scientific community when he challenged the then prevailing Newtonian physics as a way to explain the expanding universe. His idea of a time-space continuum, as opposed to Newton’s law of gravitation, is much better at explaining the celestial workings of the universe.

               

                Columbus was also the epitome of courage. When everybody else believed that the world was flat and unimaginable monsters inhabited the oceans, he went out to circumnavigate the world and discovered the New World.

                    Rosa Parks had courage. At a time when Blacks were discriminated and considered “slave material”, she didn’t give up her bus seat for a white man asserting that everybody should be treated equally. For a Black, and a woman at that, that was courage personified! Without her and all the others that came after her (e.g. Martin Luther King), we would all still be slaves (pun intended) to the idea that slavery is acceptable and that some groups of people are bound to be subservient to others.

                   So how are the above examples related to my assertion that out-and-out gays and lesbians are courage personified?

                    

                    The inference could not be missed. They (the gender-benders) are examples of people who refused to be shackled by societal norms, expectations and conventions. So do Galileo, Copernicus, Einstein, Columbus, and Parks.

                   

                   Okay, the comparison is a little bit forced.

                But we don’t really know the roots of lesbianism or homosexuality, so why would we be quick to judge it and dismiss it as something that has to be curtailed?

                     Conversely, the presence of fear is what courage is not: fear of the unknown, fear of the “different”, fear of the unconventional, “fear” of people who may not necessarily be like you or me in terms of color, orientation, sexuality, beliefs, etc. This kind of fear breeds intolerance; intolerance breeds disrespect; disrespect breeds subjugation.

                   Courage is two sides of the same coin. Courage makes people assert their diversity. That same courage can also make us accept that diversity.

So next time you see gays and lesbians, have the courage (and tolerance) to accept such difference and diversity. Just like those courageous people in history who were originally seen as “different”, they might just lead us to positive surprises just around the corner in the byways of our development and progress as a species. You’ll never know.

(This piece was written November 25, 2004. I found it in my journal)