What Will You Remember of 2010?

A wonderful thing about writing a blog is that I have an instant notepad available to me to help me remember what did happen this year. And there were a lot of things. Some, like the passage of the Leon County Human Rights Ordinance and the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the adoption ban for gay and lesbian couples in Florida were very good pieces of news. As a lesbian, I began to feel parts of me becoming more whole as artificial hetrosexist barriers were knocked down. In Los Angeles, not only did we in the Episcopal Church gain two women in the episcopate, one of the suffragans, Mary Glasspool, is a partnered lesbian. Finally, +Gene would not be alone! There is still more room for improvement, but at least we are getting better. Just in the same way that columnist Dan Savage promises young suicidal LGBT teens who face bullying and intimidation by their classmates: "It Gets Better" so don't let the difficulties you are facing as a teenager cause you to take your life. You won't enjoy the good stuff unless you stick around.

But with the good stuff that has come to the LGBT community, there is much in the world that needs to be healed. And that begins with the Gulf of Mexico... and the other water ways fouled by our greedy need for oil. British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon geyser, as I called it, was devasting and unspeakably awful. Many of us living near the Gulf could only watch as BP tried one way to plug the oil geyser. And then another. And then another. The whole time, birds and fish were getting coated in crude, and those who make their living on the sea were desperate. There were attempts in Florida to ban forever any notion of off-shore oil drilling. But the state legislature, a body in recent decades not known for its environmental awareness, refused to go that route. Meanwhile, many of the BP branded gas stations are now boarded up. Ironic that the greeting on the now defunct pump station pictured above reads: BP Invigorate.

Along with the man-made disasters are the natural ones: the earthquake in Haiti, the flooding in Pakistan and Australia, and the crazy weather patterns that produce stronger storms like the Christmas blizzard. Some folks still maintain what is happening has nothing to do with that issue mentioned above about greed and oil and global warming. That's just Al Gore poppycock! Ask any member of the Tea Party, and they'll tell you global warming isn't happening. Drill, baby, drill.

Yes, that mantra isn't going to go away... especially after the 2010 election. Many of us in Florida are scratching our heads (which we know sit on our necks) wondering what happened at the polls this time?! Why is our new Governor the crook who rooked the federal government out of 1.3-billion dollars in the largest medicare fraud ever?!

On the church front, there's the ongoing debate about the Anglican Covenant. A document heralded to be "the best way forward" for this communion of squabbling Anglicans seems to be doing nothing more than pouring salt on the open wound. I have enjoyed mocking the mockery of the Covenant with my Bishop Yellowbelly video shorts. And I have thrown my hat in with the No Anglican Covenant Coalition, a group of bloggers in various provinces throughout the Communion who are gathering resources and talking points to put in the hands of all people interested in and concerned with the direction we seem to be moving. To put it simply, the only covenant that matters to me is the one we repeat with each baptism. To me, there is nothing "Anglican" about putting on paper a vague idea that if a particular church (with headquarters in New York City) does something that another church (in Africa or Asia) doesn't like, then they get dragged in front of the Star Chamber and kicked off Anglican Communion Island. And yet, from all that is being said and done in the Communion right now, that appears to be the sole intention of this document. And I blow a big ol' raspberry for that one!

2011 is just around the corner and with it, I hope, will bring all of you new dreams and seeing old wishes come to fruition. I will continue to post my thoughts and musings although I may change the look of this blog at some point. I haven't decided. December 2010 marks the official third year of "Wake Up and LIVE" and I continue to do that each day finding new challenges to push me along my spiritual growth and plenty of pockets of joy to remind me that the journey has some valleys, but lots of peaks, too. Thanks, and at this hour, I toast you with my coffee cup. Be safe and enjoy the ride!