Civic Duty: All People Should...

Note: This is a WAY longer post than I was originally intending, and for that I say I'm SORRY, and also good luck.

Ah, this is a tricky question. I think everybody has various ideas of what all people should do or should not do, and it varies from the idea that everybody should help those less fortunate than themselves, to the idea that everybody should be working from 9 to 5, to the outdated and inherently misogynistic idea of "chivalry". Whether or not people's expectations of others or of themselves in society are reasonable is another question. 

I thought about what my response to this blog was going to be for a long time (we're talking more than the usual 30 seconds), and it was hard for me to pinpoint some "civic duty" that I think all people should follow. At first I thought, well, everybody should obey laws. But there are a lot of laws that I think are outdated, or discriminatory, and would support civil disobedience in those cases. I also thought about manners in public, like not taking up three seats on the bus with all your shopping bags and forcing people to stand there next to you. This didn't really seem very urgent though, or like it qualified as "civics". That's just more about meeting the basic standards of being a decent human being. 

Later in the day, I was scrolling through facebook, and seeing all the red equal signs that people had changed their profile pictures too in an effort to show their support for marriage equality. Now, obviously the rights of gender/sexual minorities is super important to me because, you know, I am one, and everything. But I have a bone to pick with those equal signs. Because I have an even bigger bone (is that a thing that people say, it is now) to pick with the Human Rights Campaign, which is who is behind all of this. 

The HRC fits in nicely with the tradition of people claiming that they are supporting LGBTQ+ rights, and then promptly ignoring anything in that acronym except for the G, and MAYBE the L. This is apparent even in the fact that most people just refer to same sex marriage as "gay marriage", of the rights of the whole community as "gay rights". The HRC is run by awful transphobes, and racists. And people don't seem to realize this when they stick a blue and yellow equal sign on their backpack, or change their profile picture to a little red graphic, and then go "Well! I've done my part for the gays!"

And now, the point of all of this, which you are probably wondering about by now. People have a duty to society to educate themselves. To ask questions. To take a step back and think about what's going on in the world around them, and do their research, before blindly following leaders. I didn't mean to go all angry radical feminist queer on everyone but this is a pretty good example of what i'm talking about. We can only do so much to educate others, at some point people have to take initiative and figure out the meaning behind the information they receive, and what to do with it once it's in their heads.

That said, here's a link if you want to read more about what I was talking about in this post. Educate yourselves!