Riders, RVs, and training - oh my...

The first training for the 2010 Equality Ride began on January 5 in Austin, Texas.  My flight there from LA was an exhausting affair involving 3 alarms, 2 poorly packed bags, a Flyaway shuttle, and a layover in Phoenix - an ordeal (oh how I suffer for justice!) that would probably have perturbed me more had I been fully conscious for any of it.  As it was, I drifted in and out of sleep through most of the journey, waking only to worry, as I always do when preparing to meet a large group of people I don't know, "Will they like me?"

Which is a pretty silly thing to worry about because:

1. Obviously, I'm fabulous. (Why are you laughing?)
2. Group trainings always start out with people feeling real nervous and end with people getting real close.  Sometimes there's a bit of "real annoyed" in there too, but generally speaking there's a pressure-cooked kind of bonding that happens during these short, intense experiences.

It's true!  It happened in RA training as we played "big booty big booty" and learned about campus resources.  It happened in AmeriCorps training as we exchanged "what makes me diverse" stories and learned about disaster response scenarios.  And it happened at Equality Ride training as we swapped "coming out" experiences and learned about interlocking systems of oppression.

Also inevitable is the Moment.  It's typically near the end of training - the Moment when the honeymoon begins to end.  People get tired.  The euphoria of learning fades, and the reality of having no personal space sets in.  And hey, super bonus: they stop having to listen to the person who doesn't know when to put his hand down.  (I am often on both side of this particular equation.)  Because you see, no matter how great a group of people generally is, there's always someone in it who's there with (gasp!) less than pure motivations.  You know, the RA who's only doing it for the free room and board, who cares about student life?  The AmeriCorps member who's serving only so they can get that $5,000 to pay off student loans, who cares about community service?  And the rest of us who lie somewhere in-between anyway.

So after getting past the "Will they like me?" stage, my jaded old self settled into actually learning something while waiting, increasingly begrudgingly, for the Moment to arrive.

And learn we did.  We learned about the "clobber" passages in the Bible often incorrectly used to condemn homosexuality, and the Bible's true core message of justice and acceptance for the least, the last, and the lost.  We learned about racism, sexism, and classism and how our own work will amount to nothing if we refuse to meaningfully account for them.  We learned about nonviolent resistance - how to use it, stick to it, and keep sticking to it.  (We also learned about substituting hummus for mayonnaise and how to make a great vegan chocolate chip cookie, but those are other stories I guess.)  We learned and learned and I waited and waited for the Moment to rear its ugly head.  But, weirdly enough, it never did - at least, not in the form I had been conditioned to expect.

See, there's nothing about the Equality Ride that's comparable to free room and board at school or free money to pay off your student loans.  There's nothing in it for you if you don't actually care about talking to people about justice for LGBTQ people.  The rest of it - a crowded bus, crowded hotel rooms, possible arrests, strangers telling you you're doomed for hell - isn't much of a trade off if that first thing doesn't mean anything to you to begin with.

Which is not to say that getting an awesome road trip out of the deal isn't pretty sweet, because it really is.  But when your group's Moment arrives and it involves everybody staying up until 3am on the last night writing love notes to one another...

Well, let me put it this way.  As I flew back to LA the evening of January 13, I pondered my sleep-deprived anxiety on the first day of training and thought about how silly it was that I was worried whether anyone would like me.  Because ultimately, of course they liked me (fabulous, remember?), but I also liked them.  And even better, I liked what we were setting out to do...

Together.