From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: A Better Year Ahead
Date: 24 Dec 92 03:24:08 GMT
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison

In article <BzqMMz.Dop@queernet.org> rogerk@queernet.org
(Roger B.A. Klorese) writes:

>In article <18232@autodesk.COM> owen@autodesk.com (D.  Owen
>Rowley) writes:

>>This not withstanding, I have no policy authority, and my
>>advice to *Just say NO* to individuals who use force or
>>fraud to waste our time and poison our newsgroup with their
>>venomous agenda is freely given.

>The notion that it's *our* newsgroup, *our* space.

>If we wish to feed it on our own machines, at our own cost,
>in our own parallel net, it can be *our* newsgroup.  It's
>Usenet's, no more ours than Cramer's when you get right down
>to it, and while we'd *like* it to be "safe space" we don't
>have any *right* to "safe space."

While I agree with you, Roger, as I nearly always do, I
reacted to Owen as expressing good intention more than
demonstrable fact.  It may be whistling in the dark, from
another persepctive, but I too hope that a sense of
commonalities (our diversities notwithstanding) -- of no
predetermined sort -- will permeate soc.motss, to a degree
sufficient that "we/our" is neither fatuous nor an illusion.

I wouldn't include Usenet in the arena of our rights, which
would be silly, but I do think we have a right to safety in
the larger sense, out there in the world.  Indeed, since I
think *everyone* deserves personal safety for no better
reason than that they exist, for us not to have it -- as
manifestly we do not -- signals a miscarriage of justice.

And even on Usenet, in soc.motss, we might at least *aspire*
to something *like* safety, among ourselves, as part of the
qualitative experience of communicating who and what we are
and what we care about.  Our diversities again to one side,
one thing I think nearly all of us have in common is a
firsthand experience of feeling vulnerable.  The
vulnerability itself is not necessarily qualitatively
lesbian, gay, or bisexual, but we share it in ways the
larger society (with few and therefore valued exceptions)
cannot.

I realize I've gone beyond the scope of either Owen's or
your remarks here, but I ...  well, let me put it this way:
1993 will very likely be better for me than 1992 was,
whatever challenges of the unknown it may present, because
1992 was simply the hardest year of my entire life, of that
I am certain.  But my hope is -- not only for myself,
naturally -- that some of that improvement will come from
finding myself, willy-nilly, in a more harmonious, more
compassionate, more nurturing surround.  I'm quite sure
Owen, not alone by any means, for I can hardly imagine you
or dozens of our friends and acquaintances here not feeling
_au fond_ similar hopes, would want a harmony appropriate
to his own aspirations, here in the newsgroup.

Footnote: two wonderful friends have invited me to Ann Arbor
for a few days.  I expect to have telnet access from there,
but I may just flop down on a sofa and read a couple books,
a relaxation sure to be punctuated by high-speed jabber and
some good food.  Lift-off is in ten hours, so I better start
packing, I guess.  Fate was with me when I decided to fly,
rather than drive because there was a big snow here today,
and it has gotten murderously cold, air temp right now is
6.2 (-14.3 for you Celsiosi), with a high wind right out of
the north.  See y'all Monday if not before, have a good one
if that's what yer doin'.

-- 
[Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin]
[Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson]
[Room 3130 <> 1210 West Dayton Street / Madison WI 53706 <> Phone 608/262-5888]
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Newsgroups: soc.motss