Tuesday's Panorama and More

Did you say November? Is 2009 already about to be over? Well, it's last quarter and only about 8 weeks to go until 2010. Will this forum cross over? What lies ahead for Arkansas' LGBTQ community? Who will do the heavy lifting and why? So many questions and hopefully some answers will be revealed. In the meantime, we're going to ride it out and let the chips fall where they may...

They Kill Elephants-Don't They?: In past musings, I've mentioned that bell ringer advocates in this community give their all to raising awareness, issues, and consciousness concerning our sense of or lack of community in Little Rock. The task is an uphill battle wrought with trap doors that often leaves these diligent and committed individuals with raw nerve endings as they pursue the mission of activism. This is especially evident as funding cycles and grant proposal go into the deadline zone. In the Agenda for 2010 concerning Arkansas' LGBTQI as espoused by local NPO Living with/Affected By-Brotha & Sista's, I can sense the passionate frustration that is apart of the landscape of this type of work. As an "activist" in my own right, I too have embodied this frustration with what appears to be complacency and disconnect within our own body politic. Ms. DL's closer for that agenda speaks volumes and I believed that those words should be our lead for this posting. This forum has beat the drum slowly about how our lives are "full bodied" as we move through this journey. It's imperative that we embrace the "mind, body and soul," concept as a foundation to greater empowerment. The item is unedited and the opinion is owned by it's composer.

We are going into the second year of the re-emergence of Brothas & Sistas Incorporated. What was intended as HIV prevention has also become an assessment of the state of Arkansas’ LGBT community in and out of relation to HIV prevention. What we have found is “NEED”! We all need cultural competency to find out what we have in place so that we don’t re-invent the wheel. We need to know our own demographics because there is no need to ask for anything if we don’t know the amount we need. We need to have a working level of trust to be perceived as a unified front. We all need to see the bigger picture and what happens down the road if we do not do this now.
The LGBTQQ/SGL Youth are looking at us and if we don’t act appropriately they will be travelling down the same road of insanity to repeat this. The intergenerational gap must be filled! We must take on the opinion that a good leader makes more leaders. We have to realize that most of your revolutions are fought by the youth of that day. The leadership right now would simply be sending them to slaughter because we can’t even feed them. Some of us don’t even like them because they are different than we use to be. SO WHAT! We were different than our parents use to be. GET OVER IT!! If it’s not being ageist about the youth or visa- versa, it’s a race issue or a class issue. We seem to sit back and figure out every single way to separate each other. The only thing that should separate us at this moment is geography and Skype can take care of that.
Pick up your guns and kill all the rainbow elephants in the living room and let’s do something! The door is open to kill mine first.