Hello, Tim!
I only have about an hour today, so I have to be quick.
Tomorrow is our second midterm, and I’m, as per usual, far from prepared. I had made a schedule for studying that would take up a whole day, and now is time for letter writing!
There is only one thing I want to talk about today, and that is the referendum voting that took place yesterday.
As you must have heard, Tim, the results are, in my eyes, a total loss.
This is the first year the government had lowered the age requirements to vote for the referendum, from twenty to a lower eighteen. A younger generation is brought into the world of voting, and in their first year (Sadly, I’m still seventeen) they are already bombarded with ten questions that can make big differences to the society in Taiwan. More than ten million people are eligible to vote, and from the words you had sent to Summer, I understand that you are already more or less well-acquainted with the issues, so I’m just going to go to the results.
All referendums concerning LGBTQ rights are going against the supporters will. Three of them against gay people and education on gender equality passed with enormous success, while two issues voting for gay people and giving same-sex couples the rights to be under the protection of the civics law went down in flames. With an overview of all five issues, the proportions can be simplified like this: Among those who have voted, three out of two people express disapproval towards the rights of gay people.
What do I think about this? Immensely upset, of course, but I cannot say that I didn’t expect this would happen. Taiwan is a country with a high elderly rate, and even though this might sound a bit biased, but most of them still have traditional thoughts, and this is what Hu Jiah Meng, a group working to convince people to vote against gay marriage, is aiming at. With the elders taking up a great deal of Taiwan’s population, their opinions matter much more than those who just turned 18. “We are voting for our children,” they said. “Teaching children about gay people will turn all of them gay, and Taiwan will fall when everyone is gay, and we won’t have kids anymore,” they were sure to add. I’m not even kidding! That is what they had told my grandmother and my aunt! They told them that when the two pro-gay referenda are passed with green lights, EVERYONE would have to get married to a person of the same sex! What is the logic in that? On the off chance that people are going to fear the unknown, they portrayed gay people like wild beasts that are better rounded up altogether, hid under a cellar, and never let them see sunlight again. I know fully well that I sound like a whiny loser right now, but the more I typed down the words, the more indignant I had become, thinking about how in the world can they ever justify doing so, a practical public witch hunt!
At this moment, people from the Hu Jiah Meng must be sipping on their pride from their crystal wine glass, a dark-red liquid tasting rather salty in a glass container taken from a dusty attic, in a box that is labeled with the words ‘dilapidated but perfectly justifiable traditions we must keep’. It just made me even angrier.
Still, we can’t bury our heads in the sand, convincing ourselves that the reality at this moment is something we have envisioned when it really isn’t. We stand up, we step up. We shout out, we exclaim!
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| A Google Image. |
We keep faith. And wait when our version of justice can take over.
This is all for this week.
Sincerely yours,
Hugo
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