The Balkan fuse

Not to overgeneralize, but my experience with people from the Balkans has led me inevitably to conclude that their tempers flare at the slightest provocation. I don't think I'm immune, either. Today we got into a discussion over gay marriage, and my parents managed to push all my buttons. By the end, I was frothing at the mouth and screaming at the top of my lungs.

I can tolerate baseless bigotry from my grandparents; after all, they were raised in a situation I know nothing about, but my parents are always eager to point out the thread of continuity between their childhood and mine. So when they say things to the effect that "they [homosexuals] have been burned and beaten throughout history, and that's how it's supposed to be" I have no recourse to rational argument. Maybe I've seen one too many internet flamewars, but I really don't know how to respond to that. And then they pull out the "you have to accept that other people have opinions different from your own" speech, as if that makes me obligated to bowl over and respect their point of view. There is some shit I will not eat. Some opinions are so stupid in retrospect that one wonders how supposedly rational human beings ever justified it to themsleves. I am rapidly losing faith with the collective human ability to solve any problem through discussion. I can't even get through my lunch without having to put up with obstructively ignorant views. I realize this last paragraph is nothing but an insubstantial ad hominem attack, but when it comes to the issue of gay marriage, I don't see what the controversy is.

There is an even more complicating factor: I have no idea what marriage is supposed to mean to people in this day and age (in an extralegal sense). With liberal divorce laws, marriage vows literally mean nothing; they are non-binding and have the force of two people in a long-term relationsip saying "barring any unforeseen developments, I will stay with you".

Over a year has passed since the gay marriage "controversy" started, and I have not seen one persuasive argument against it. All the letters in the papers and pundits appeal to "traditional values" or "nature". What? Tradition, as in the ones where a hundred years ago women couldn't vote and being homosexual was a crime and interracial couples couldn't marry, or the one where white folk threw rocks at little black children trying to enter a recently desegregated school? What? Nature? By that logic, we should all give up or computers and homes and gas lines and go back to wandering the savannahs of Africa. Not to mention that there is homosex in nature and the annying little fact that notning like marriage exists in nature.

Well, at least in this case, death is on the side of the "progressive" element. Old fogies will die and the survivors will be relegated to the minority, just as most of Jim Crow's buddies are now in the cold, hard ground (in contrast to the aerial burials they gave to many blacks). God, some people disgust me. And the sad thing is that they considered themsleves good people; most of them probably were good in other aspects of their lives. But I would still unapologetically throw them in jail. Not that anyone's letting me.

Maybe tomorrow I will try to change my parents' views. Then the day after that, I'll stop racial profiling. And then, after my last exam, maybe I can get the Pope to slam-dance with an intersex godless Arab terrorist. By the end of the week, there should be a diamond statue of me in Gaza City and dancing children bearing palm leaves to lay on my path as I enter Jeruasalem on a donkey.

Consider: "[they] let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy; [they] wallowed on the grass of public parks, scattering their semen to whoever come who may..." (not that anyone has read this far)