Zero to activist in 60 seconds. Why prop. 8 was my fault, and the road ahead.

I sat there alone on my couch the night of the election with my finger on refresh hitting it every minute or two watching one state turn red or blue, one after another with dispassionate curiosity. That outcome was not a surprise but I could feel the excitement just beyond the walls of my home from the horns and the music and sounds of jubilation and I could feel the weight of all of future history leaning on that moment.
And then there was another moment. The moment I realized there were no longer enough votes left uncounted to defeat prop. 8, and I felt another weight. In the span of about a minute a series of emotions spun around in my head like a compass needle trying to find true north. It started with shock, then loss and sadness, anger then a moment later it gravitated to determination. I was determined that I would not allow this. In that magnetic moment was an epiphany that I was complicit in what had just occurred. I had sat back and observed dispassionately while my own civil rights were being taken away. I knew the ad campaign against prop. 8 was impotent, putting all its weight on theoretical arguments about unfairness. I knew people needed to see the other people that were going to be hurt because that is how humans form empathy.
I had sat back and waited it out thinking the trajectory of history was set and that progress always won out over intolerance, safe in my assumption that there was no way California would turn its back on its own. Oh how was I wrong. The march of equality had just taken a U turn and rights that people had were just snatched away, because I was uninvolved when I had known what was right. I think a great many others felt the same way that night. I started designing protest signs before I even fell asleep that night.
Remarkably I was not surprised in the ensuing days about news reports of spontaneous protests all over the country. There was a change in the ether that everybody else could feel too. Our little state had been the nucleus on which an entire civil rights movement had crystallized in a matter of hours. Our brothers and sisters in hundreds of cities across this country and in many others rallied to our cause. They had looked to us in the hope of their own equality and now it was they who were supporting us. This is a debt we can never forget or ever fully repay. Equality will come to California, sooner than in many other states, but we cannot be content with merely setting an example. No person will be fully free as long as they can step into another state and loose their status as an equal.
This is a fight that cannot end until it has gone to every single state and been won in every state, and to Peurto Rico and to Guam and to American Samoa, until every human being under our flag is an equal. The counter-currents of progress have always been present and they run strong. Achieving equality is not an end unto itself as we have seen, it must be also maintained. It is a struggle that will never really be over.
In these few weeks since the election my experiences have paralleled those of many others. I attended my first rally, I confronted my first public official and I have planned. My determination has not decreased, it has just become familiar. It’s been broken in like a comfortable shoe. The road ahead is long but the course is set. All we need is a compass and a good pair of shoes.