Month: June 2018

Free Speech Comes With A Price These Days, Just Ask Roseanne Barr…

Roseanne Barr definitely committed a swift career suicide recently when she tweeted a racist statement during the wee hours one morning about Valerie Jarrett, an African-American woman who was a senior adviser to Barack Obama throughout his presidency and considered one of his most influential aids. Her tweet said that if “the Muslim brotherhood and the planet of the apes had a baby, it would be Valerie Jarrett.”

Ever since her tweet, her highly rated and well-watched revival series “Roseanne” got cancelled by ABC, her talent agency, ILM, separated ties with her, and all the television stations showing syndication of her original show made the decision to promptly remove it from the air.

While I’m all for free speech, I do believe it tends to come with a price these days, especially for those who hold some level of fame and notoriety in this world. So many people are on high alert and extremely sensitive right now with everything from racism to gender equality that it doesn’t take much to negatively sway the majority of the public’s opinion, which is precisely what’s happened with Roseanne ever since her offensive and insensitive tweet.

What’s even worse for Roseanne was her blaming her tweet on the effects of a drug she was taking to help her sleep, that being Ambien. I absolutely applauded the company behind Ambien when they promptly released a statement that said “Racism is not a known side effect of Ambien.”

In all honesty, it’s because of things like this that have frequently come out of Roseanne’s mouth, that I’ve never been one who really enjoyed watching her show. Her abrasive and judgmental personality both in real life and on the show itself has always bothered me. And even though my partner regularly watched the reruns and the revival series of her show in our home on many-a-days, I couldn’t’ stomach it because frankly, I don’t want to support anyone who’s going to make negative statements about someone or something that carries hurtful, racist, and segregating connotations.

With the amount of television programming available nowadays on so many stations, networks, and platforms, an actor or actress, no matter how good they are, or how great their shows are, or how high their ratings end up being, truly doesn’t have the freedom of speech like they might once have had not too long ago.

Nevertheless, with so many being on edge these days, it’s easy to quickly get turned off when a famous person has one of those moments where they spew out verbal diarrhea that’s hurtful towards anyone or anything. Roseanne Barr is just the latest causality of this in a long line of well-known individuals who’ve done something similar. Just ask Kathy Griffin, who not too long ago posted a fake picture on the internet of Donald’s Trump’s bloody head on a platter and watched her career swiftly go down the tubes. Luckily though, Griffin has been on the rebound with her career as of late, but I’m not sure Roseanne will be able to experience the same good fortune.

With Roseanne having been such a polarizing individual with astoundingly strong opinions, political views, and agenda, especially as of late, I judge that a large portion of her remaining fan base is going to be gone for good now, like my partner who agreed this was her final straw.

In the end, yes, we as a culture and a country, do have free speech like I do right here in my blog on a daily basis. But, unlike Barr, I look for the good in everyone and everything and do my best to unconditionally love and accept each and every individual in this world no matter what. And when I make a mistake, because I do, I always promptly make an amends from my heart, which doesn’t seem to be something Barr has gotten in touch with yet.

That’s why I believe Roseanne must face the consequences of her actions and realize she’s living in a world now where free speech comes with a price, a price that networks aren’t willing to carry and a price that people like me aren’t willing to support either.

So, while I believe Barr, like anyone, deserves forgiveness for her insensitive tweet, she and others who verbalize strong statements with racist tones need to learn the value of keeping those opinions off of social media and instead just keeping it all to themselves, as nothing good is ever going to come out of it these days other than a strong price to be paid by them…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

Grateful Heart Monday

Welcome to another Grateful Heart Monday! While today’s piece of gratitude may come as a shock to some of my readers, what I’m actually grateful for today is my sexuality. But, before I explain why, let me go back a little in time.

As a young teenager, I was mostly an average guy, living an average life, in an average middle-class family, residing in an average middle-class neighborhood with plenty of picket fences and other Caucasian families. My high school was filled with individuals who came from most of the same. To put it more bluntly, I lived in a bubble life that never had to deal with racism, discrimination, or anything of the sort.

But, by the time I reached the end of my high school years, I began to notice something was different with me. I was attracted more to guys than girls and thought something was wrong with me. And by no means was I grateful for that realization back then whatsoever.

When I finally emerged from the closet and accepted I was a gay male in a mostly heterosexual world, it wasn’t an easy transition, as my religious upbringing made sure to constantly provide reminders that I was a living abomination because of my sexuality. Several churches over the years in fact, would even confirm this by rejecting my petition for membership.

Yet, I pressed on and still sought out God and through that, I eventually found a blessing in disguise when it came to my sexuality. I discovered that my sexuality made me far more able to relate to those who have had to deal with racism and discrimination their entire lives. In other words, my sexuality opened up a pathway in my heart for greater compassion and understanding to those who had lived their entire lives feeling separate more than equal from the rest of society.

Over the years, while I continued to struggle at times with the religious views on homosexuality, I came to acceptance that God made me this way for a reason. Not as punishment. Not as a curse. And not as a means to become celibate for the rest of my life either. But rather, as a gift to help me relate more to a vast array of God’s children who were never part of that “average” type of existence and weren’t able to fit in so easily in this world because of it.

You see it’s my sexuality that’s helped me to understand much of the oppression black people have had to go through. It’s my sexuality that helped me to understand the same with people from other races as well. Essentially, it’s my sexuality that helped me to embrace diversity rather than the white privilege I was born into.

Overall, being a gay male in a world that’s mostly straight has ultimately helped me to see things through a clearer set of eyes, ones that have shown me how to unconditionally love, accept, and understand a lot better, those in society who too have felt ostracized and treated differently because of some part of themselves that couldn’t be changed and was not the societal norm.

This is why I’m so grateful today for my sexuality, because with the spiritual journey I’m on, being able to relate on a heart level to as many people from as many different backgrounds as I can, is extremely important to me, as I know it was for Christ as well long ago…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson