Poppies and Prop 8

(These are my disorganized thoughts today. Sorry I don’t have time to polish this up.)

I want a poppy for my lapel today. When I lived in Canada as a child, just about everyone wore a poppy on their lapel to honor vets on Veteran’s Day. Every school child had to memorize the poem “In Flanders Fields”. (Aside: Do kids still memorize a new poem every week? Probably not.) Anyway, I always found that to be very moving poem and I know that actual vets wore their Veteran’s Day poppy with pride, and knew that every person they saw on the street wearing a poppy pin was doing it to thank and honor them. It’s a beautiful tradition.


My grandfather was a lawyer, inventor and “lefty” politician who fought for freedom in his own way. He was a fire-breathing Prairie Populist, a former Lt Governor of Kansas and a Third Party VP candidate just before the turn of the 20th century. When his Populist Party faded away he devoted the rest of his life to promoting Good Causes. Actually, he spent more than 20 years campaigning for one of the great radical causes of his time. While on the lecture circuit he was often belittled as a socialist and laughed at for his wild ideas. What was this radical, left-wing cause that he fought for? Women’s Suffrage. Yes, Votes for Women was once considered a left-wing, radical cause!

So this is how I link the poppy to Prop 8 on this Veteran’s Day: When John McCrae wrote and died in Flanders fields he was fighting for a Cause. His country’s freedom, his personal freedom, and his freedom to live as he was-unconquered by foreign peoples and laws. (Well, the Great War was fought for a lot of reasons, but Freedom was one I’m sure McCrae might have articulated.) Anyway – he died and won. We all won, and freedom has since marched ever forward, growing stronger and more inclusive with each passing year. Our freedoms, our civil rights grow and expand and become more inclusive with time and focused effort. This is wonderful! A former radical cause like the one my grandfather fought for becomes a mainstream right that people cannot imagine living without.

The way I see it, Prop 8 is another step in this long process of defining and ensuring basic Human Rights. It’s is about me too, not just gay people. *I* will be enriched when Prop 8 type rights are universal in this country. You will be enriched. We will all be better off when people are not defined and limited by their color, or their gender, or their “abilities” or their sexual preference or by whatever the next Good Cause is.

It is my hope that this left-wing, radical cause embodied by California’s Prop 8 will one day pass, and Gay Rights will become just another human right like Women’s Suffrage. One we can’t imagine living without. What a great day that will be! . I just fear that it will be a long journey, that Prop 8 rights may not come quickly and easily. Emancipation and Women’s Suffrage were long and hard-fought battles. The 19th amendment (women’s right to vote) was passed in 1920, and women began to vote. But the Equal Rights Amendment for women was first introduced just a year or two later, and has not been ratified to this day.

See, when I throw my support behind issues of gay rights like Prop 8 I am doing it for me, for my grandfather, for John McCrae, and for every vet who has ever fought and/or died for my right to live in a world where We The People can define ourselves in all our infinite diversity!

Oh! I just talked to Mr Swami, and he said they sell poppy pins in the skyways in St Paul. He’s going to bring one home for me!