We are the other people, we are the other people, you’re the other people, too…
Frank Zappa

…saw that new Star Trek movie a year or so ago…younger, hipper, less boring…liked it…and was reminded that the first…or, at least, most famous…interracial kiss on American TV was between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, in 1968…though, of course it had to happen way off in the future…and on another planet…and as the result of some kinda alien mind control….baby steps, no doubt…

 All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin’ everybody ’til they’re all the same color.
Warren Beatty, Bulworth

…at that time, a year after anti-miscegenation laws were struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the appropriately named Loving vs. Virginia decision, Gallup polls showed that 70% of the population was still opposed to interracial marriage…a considerably higher figure than current…or recent…levels of opposition to gay marriage…

…indicating that people like Mike Huckabee just might live to regret some of the incredibly stupid crap they say…

 I support gay marriage because I believe they have a right to be just as miserable as the rest of us.
Kinky Friedman

 …had some friends in Arizona…mix of college students and drop-outs…some planning on dropping back in, some not so much…living in this ramshackle house next to a scuzzy bar…narrow front porch butting up to the sidewalk…a cool place to sit and watch people pass by…two real bedrooms, as I remember, and a kind of walk-in closet just big enough for a bed…often a person or two residing temporarily on the couch or living room floor, as well…a likely place to find weed, beer, and loud music at any hour…

…one day there was this new guy on the porch…turned out he’d moved in with the girl in the walk-in closet room…which meant he wouldn’t be there long…but that’s another story…longish hair, dark sunglasses, big smile…into Kerouac and Vonnegut, Nirvana and P. J. Harvey, hiking and dogs…got us tickets to see Johnny Cash in Phoenix, just before he got sick and stopped touring…we became friends immediately…

…a couple weeks later, were walking down the sidewalk and ran into a friend of his, with a dog…said he’d gotten kicked out of a pizza place because he took the dog in with him….my friend, grinning, snorted, I’m sure the dog’s cleaner than the Mexicans they got working in the kitchen…

…which, I told myself, must’ve been meant ironically…or something…though it didn’t really sound like it…and, soon, heard more…about blacks, gays, women, Jews, people who didn’t respect his right to smoke cigarettes wherever he wanted…and, most of all, as this was northern Arizona, Indians and Mexicans…soon ended up in a big ugly argument with him every time we met…and, as gradually became clear, he liked it that way…fed off of the reactions his words elicited…and I decided our friendship had to end…

Of all dangers to our nation that exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.
Walt Whitman

*a very different…(and, let’s face it, not nearly as good)…version of this article appeared a while ago at Yoga for Cynics*