the sky is falling

It is time for us to acknowledge that our love is an act of war.

It seems distasteful to say. It feels wrong. Our love, our lives, our nurtured gardens and families, we say, these are not weapons. These are not acts of violence. To us, they are not.
Nonetheless, there are those who insist breathlessly, endlessly, that they are. That our families are destroying their way of life. That our existing in public shocks and harms them. That attending school, sitting in a restaurant, having to hear at all that we exist is an affront that threatens to annihilate them. And they gather their stormclouds over and over, they teach their children, they shout from the pedestals and rooftops and radio waves that we are, by virtue of drawing breath, destroying them. That we are at war, and that our heartbeats are a sword at their throats.
I think it is time to admit that they are right. Whoever started this, however much those of us who abhor war and all it means cannot go near the word, there it is: there are people, many, many people, who believe that by existing alone we wage war on them. And in response, they gather arms and preach daily that our threat must be removed by any means necessary. By their believing it, it is made so; bloodless though it may be for them, we are at war. And each of our acts of war, each exposed inch of brown skin, each held hand, each public footstep of an unacceptable body and each child raised in a home they abominate, each of our acts is met with a salvo of invective and violence, and our people die and die and die.

There is a war on, and the stakes are infinite, because the only outcome acceptable to the mustering many who believe that your breath or mine is an act of war is for us to be forever wiped clean from the face of the earth. We have to stop speaking where any of them can hear us. We have to stop being seen. We have to stop loving and conceiving and using precious resources stolen from their mouths. And in this world, as perhaps there has always been, there is the destructive power to achieve this. In this struggle, we have only two options: to prevail, or to find none of us in a position to care any more. Those who would annihilate will eventually find that they cannot exist much longer than we do, but it doesn't matter. They won't be in a position to care any more either.

There is a war on. All we can do is succeed, or find ourselves no longer in a position to care. Daring to continue living, let alone daring to speak, will be considered an act of war until there are no more battles to fight, and no one to fight them.

So let's admit it. Our lives? Our lives are an act of war. They are open defiance. They are invasion. They are insistent violation of the borders of a world that desperately pretends we do not exist. They are rude gestures and thrown rocks at the rumbling war machines of systems who choose to write us out of history, beginning only a moment ago and stretching back to the beginning of all things. By standing here and living, we defy the notion that we have no right to, and we scream out that no world where we are torn apart into nothingness can continue. Every seed we plant, lover we kiss, drum we beat is indeed a grave and mortal threat to the entire world as they know it, because our reality forces it to crash against us over and over only to find us still here. Even when we die of it, we are dead, but we are still here, we still are, we still were.

We can call it linking arms. We can call it embraces. We can call it a garden plot or a home or a marriage. We cannot concede that it is war. We cannot look at the arrows fired by our adoration of our loved ones and the mortars launched by our still-real, still-abhorrent bodies. We look into the furtive, fervent trenches dug by those who call our lives war and shake our heads, wondering what they're on about.

Here's what they're on about: they live in a world where we are monsters. They live in a world that trembles daily, because we snake our faultlines through its foundations and each time we move more crumbles and falls over the yawning edge of the flattened sea. In their world, once near us, their children can be lost to them, and just seeing us represented fills them with the rage of people struck in the face and deprived of their birthrights.
That world needs to end, and we know it. That world will end, and they know it.

There's a war on. Either we succeed, and their world ends; or they succeed, and ours does. Does it matter that we want them to go on living in our world, that our world has room for them to build cities and parks and futures? Not really. The very act of not getting to define everything for the rest of us is the end, for them. The fact that none of them would actually die, that their children would be fine and their blood unshed, is irrelevant. We can abhor and condemn violence and torture, and this too is an act of war. We can love them depthlessly as people and wish them no harm, but we cannot avoid the implications. If we are considered equals, their world is over. Our lives are the explosives that end it.

So, okay. Let's sit that knowledge down on our kitchen tables and give it a good look. There are two possible worlds: one where we prevail, and get to live side-by-side, and one where we do not, and are annihilated. And side-by-side looks like annihilation to the folks who have to live next door. There goes the neighborhood. We might think it's a really nice neighborhood to raise our kids; doesn't stop the neighbors from thinking their lives are over because we continue to exist yards away.

I say let's call down the thunders, then. Let's stand and fight. Let's own that our love is a matter of artillery, and fire salvo after salvo. Let's hold hands and kiss and fuck and dance while all over, rock shears from the cliff-faces of their shuddering world and it frays at the seams. Let's defiantly exist, exist hard, right next to them, public, brazen, beautiful. Let's drill and march and right on their doorsteps let's have unacceptable bodies and loud music and food whose aromas they find foreign and offensive. Let's fucking sing.

We can call it jubilation. They can call it war. Either way, the results are the same. We succeed, and walk hand in hand into a new world where our very existence is not considered a violation, or we do not--and are no longer in a position to care.