Today I took part in two very different, but still community-affirming, events.
This morning, I had the honor to represent Cathedral City in the 23d annual Greater Palm Springs Pride Parade. Immediately after that, I participated in Cathedral City’s Healing Field commemoration.
Each event reflects a part of our American experience; we celebrated lives being lived with pride and lives lost in the service of the nation we call our own.
Pride represents a time for the Desert’s sizeable LGBTQ community to come together, reaffirming solidarity and staking a claim -as yet unfulfilled- to a seat at the front of the American bus.
Healing Field is a time for us to remember those who have fallen in the military operations in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
In a sense, both events are linked by a fundamental truth; it is suffering that brings people together.
Pride -whether in Palm Springs, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York- is about people standing up and saying “no more” to being treated as second class citizens.
The Healing Field is about coming together to find solidarity in the shared loss of friends, family, neighbors, and fellow Americans.
In the end, at Pride I think of Gloria Gaynor’s lyric “I will survive,” and I honor the perseverance of the LGBTQ community in its ongoing quest for an authentic place at the table in the American Commonwealth.
At the Healing Field, reading the names -ever more every year- of the fallen, I remember the words of Grantland Rice: “I’ve noticed that the dead were hardly more than boys [and now, girls, too],” and I offer the simple prayer: rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, may light perpetual shine upon then, and may their souls and the souls of all the departed rest in peace. Amen.”
And at day's end, I remember the teaching of the sages: live isn't meant to be easy; it's meant to be life.
"Death plucks at my ear," wrote a Roman poet 2000 years ago, "and says: 'live, I am coming.'"
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Councilmember Paul S. Marchand: Working for All of Cathedral City's People.
