Little buttons, churches and things

A very popular social custom for American liberals nowadays is to wear
these little buttons pinned to their clothes that have an inverted
pink triangle on it. As most people know, this currently means "gay
and lesbian friendly". Here is one of my latest experiences with said
buttons. I'm a white heterosexual woman in her thirties, currently
unmarried, in search of a male partner and so I try to go to socials
and meet different groups of people as much as I can stand
it. Regarding US American politics, I cannot be labeled either
conservative or liberal, since I think both the Republicans and the Democrats
have serious mental problems to deal with. But in my attempt to meet
people not too long ago, I went to one more Singles meeting, this one
from a Unitarian Universalist Church, a flaky, "progressive"
middle-class American religious invention which I knew little about.

So there we were in a nice little restaurant, and the coordinator of
the small group, a nice heterosexual man in his 50's, the only man in
the group, wore one of these little pins. He was surrounded by 4 or 5
women, some of whom were certainly lesbians. In the US nowadays, in
big cities, one can no longer go to Singles groups in search of
heterosexual friends and dates, because so many of these groups have
been taken over by gays and lesbians for their purposes. Given that I
enjoy heterosexual social relations with other humans, it was not the
group for me, definitely. Anyways, I asked him about his pin, and some
of the women stared back at me in a way that said we don't really like
your question. The man answered in a slightly uneasy way that he was
being "gay and lesbian friendly". Because he was quite polite, I
refrained from asking several questions on the topic of pins and
churches and friendliness. It did cross my mind to ask the group
though, "Why don't you wear a pin that says "homeless friendly"? Is
it not fashionable enough? Doesn't it give you the same feeling of
paternalistic superiority towards people who don't care for homo- and
bisexuality in the way that little triangle works for you?

The few times I've been to this posh fluffy Unitarian Universalist
church I didn't see a single homeless person. Now I'm not a policy
maker who knows statistics about everything, but the metropolis I live
in certainly has its share of brutalized homeless people. You don't
need numbers on papers to prove anything because you see them every
day on the streets. And I've been down to a church in a not so good a
part of town that serves meals to very homeless people. That is quite a
picture of human suffering. Most people there were in urgent need of
food, health care, therapy, shelter, and just the very minimum of
basic humanity in their lives. Obviously, living in the wealthiest
nation in the world, they had none of it. Needless to say, the
majority of the homeless people there were black. And most of the
volunteers giving out the Band-Aid meals were comfortable American
middle class white folks. But that's another essay.

Getting back to the "homeless friendly" pin, I wondered if there is no
such button in the current American cultural landscape because the UU
church and its "gay and lesbian friendly" liberals didn't seem like a
very homeless friendly environment if you ask me. All these
goody-good people were dressed in fashionable outfits and "imported
flowery dresses". You know the kind sewn by homeless 15 year olds working 18
hours a day in some part of the Southern hemisphere for a pittance and
then sold for gold by our lovely American liberal corporate sector.

I also noticed during another brunch at the UU church that they had a
lot of coffee. Americans usually buy the kind of coffee produced in
vicious feudal conditions somewhere south of the border, but hey, it's
packaged and flavored in such a hip way by those people on Madison
Avenue in New York, how could liberals resist? And the Styrofoam cups,
paper napkins, air conditioning, the gasoline that fuels the liberals'
new cars? Who has the mental space to feel the pain of environmental
destruction, sweat shops, brutal dictatorships, and vicious working
conditions for millions of people abroad when American liberals are
blessed with the issue of homosexuality friendliness?

Furthermore, if I were black and homeless, I don't know if I would
feel that I fit in such a nicety-nice place such as the liberal UU
church. I didn't see any people of color in the church, homeless or
not. In all fairness, this church is located in a practically
all-white well-off neighborhood in the city, so it's not so unexpected
that people of color who live outside the neighborhood don't go
there. We can't condemn the liberals in the neighborhood, it's not
like it's an apartheid neighborhood in itself, it's just part of the
larger "white-only" section of the area.

But I refrained from talking further to the UU group. Not that I
didn't have other questions on buttons and friendliness to explore
with them. For example, speaking of buttons, why don't they have a
button that says "black people friendly?" Is that not politically
correct nowadays? How about "African-American friendly?" Is it more
progressive that way? "People of color different than mine friendly?"
or "Survivors of the American-Anglo-European 500 year genocide
friendly?" or how about "Survivors of the mass rape, torture, slavery,
lynching that is so bad but that we don't really have to apologize
for, some other time perhaps, friendly?" Or even, "Survivors of the
Rwandan genocide that the Clintons and their liberal supporters
ensured happened once again in the history of humankind and then sent
over their president for a glib apology and photo-op friendly?" What
about, "Survivors of every brutal dictatorship in existence that
American liberals along with their government support and perpetuate
for global strategic objectives while trampling on every conceivable
human right friendly?"

No, no, I guess little pink triangles is what makes American liberals
feel good at the moment. When you think about it, it's not such a surprise,
since genocide could never compete with dysfunctional sex in its
appeal to fluffy white liberals in cute JC Penneys outfits. Just ask
the Clintons, ABC television, Larry Flynt, and their little
supporters.