Are You Guys Brothers?

     To say these are rough times financially is like saying that Representative Barney Frank is the hero of the year in Washington for guiding Congress and the nation through the financial rescue minefield. Both are statements of the obvious. We’re in trouble. I love Barney.

     I just got back from the Grand Union grocery store in Provincetown where several of my buddies who work there said that everyone on the staff was in tears yesterday. It was announced that the GU in Bourne, MA, is being closed, so the local employees expect to lose their union seniority when the Bourne employees are sent here. Some of them will lose their jobs and their means of supporting their families in a town that shrinks from 40,000 to less than 3,700 people in the winter.

     Ray and I, and many of our friends, lost a lot of money with the collapse of Wall Street and we’ll survive. But my Jamaican cab driver in Toronto this week, who borrowed $180,000 to buy his livery license, is terrified that he won’t be able to support his three youngsters and wife if the collapse of the U.S. economy sends a tidal wave of cutbacks his way. People who trim expenses like going on vacation or even to the theater no longer need a cab to get them around.

     But, darn it, if Sarah Palin and John McCain get elected in a few weeks by this country’s “soccer moms and Joe six-packs” to lead us as a nation in the next four to eight years, well, God bless ya’, we’ll be just fine, according to Sarah.

     “Please don’t let that happen,” pleaded my driver from the airport in Montreal just four days ago. “I have lived in Canada for twenty years but I was born in Iraq. Everyone I know there wishes that Saddam was back, even those he put in jail. George Bush has destroyed our country. McCain will keep doing the same.”

     “What is with this Palin woman?” asked the horrified Australian woman across the aisle from me on the flight into Canada. “Will Americans really vote her in?”

     “We’re watching your election closer than we are watching ours,” said the French Canadian Executive Vice President who opened my session with her peers. “We’re holding our breath,” said another. “The U.S. used to be a country that we admired.”

     “Whenever I travel today,” explained my driver back in Boston, “I get a very bad reaction to my U.S. passport. It used to be something I handed over proudly and it was received with smiles. Now people hate us. Everywhere. They see my passport and they scowl.”

     I warned the Canadian bankers that Ray and I, and everyone we know, are planning on moving to Canada if McCain and Palin get elected, but then I acknowledged that in truth I’ve been threatening to do that since Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew were in the White House. “It’s cold up here,” warned an executive.

    The United States as a country will survive, I’m sure, if Palin and McCain get elected but the lives of nearly all Americans and millions of people throughout the world will be dramatically impacted for the worse.

     Sometimes I want to cry, I get so frustrated with inept politicians and the stupid people in the U.S. who vote them into office, like gay Republicans who say they are “fiscal conservatives,” or women who have had abortions but now feel that no one else should have one, or people who want to reward John McCain for his suffering as a POW in Vietnam forty years ago or Sarah Palin because she has a young child with Down Syndrome.

     Though it has been strongly recommended that I do so, I won’t be calling and writing family members and childhood friends this time around. I did that in the past two elections and got so angry and hurt by their lack of response that I don’t want to walk into that victimization trap again. (Most of them are not talking to me anyway because of my most recent book.) I figure, if people are so stupid to vote Palin into the vice-presidency and McCain into the presidency, they deserve to have them as their leaders and they deserve all of the destruction they will bring to the quality of their lives.

     But, I suspect that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are going to win the election despite some of my former childhood friends and family members. Some people think it may even be a landslide but I’m not counting on that. One vote difference is enough for me. And I don’t imagine that if they win that suddenly all of our lives are going to change back to the way they were before George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were elected president and vice-president eight years ago when the price of a gallon of gas was one dollar. The country will remain for a long while in financial uncertainty. Some of my friends at the GU grocery store will still lose their jobs and not know how to put food on the table for their families. The cab driver in Toronto will feel the impact of our recession on his life. But, the majority of this country and of the world will face the future with a lot more hope and confidence that better days are ahead, especially those of us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. It will become more likely that we all will be able to hand over our U.S. passports to people who will smile and say “We like your president.” Fewer people will feel depressed.

     I look forward to November 4 and the opportunity to help turn this wonderful country of ours around. It will be fun to be proud to be American again. Hang on everyone. The U.S. is coming back.