The Paradox of Growing Up a Mixed-Race Kid (tie in to Untold Tales of the Lair Legion Protocols #343: All Change)

---

Earlier:

(The following is a partial transcript of CrazySugarFreakBoy's! final speech as leader of the Lair Legion.)

I ain't given up on trying to change things, but I'm gonna go about it a lot smarter than I've been doing lately, and step one of that means no more collateral damage. Ain't nobody else who should have to suffer the consequences of my actions except for me.

To that end, and because there's one hell of a lot of people out there — AIs, cyborgs, aliens, mutates and all manner of other people — who are staring down the double-barrels of being denied both citizenship and personhood, I'm gonna put my money where my mouth is on this issue, to a degree that nobody else can.

If our lawmakers see fit to nullify the rights and identities of any person who happens to fall outside the baseline parameters of biological humanity, then I ain't gonna stand on the sidelines like some damned dilettante and passively let it happen, because this is about my rights and identity, too.

I was born 100-percent baseline human, but after I died and came back to life — the first time — my physical form was transformed into pure Impossibilitium, and for those who don't grasp the implications of that, Impossibilitium is so named because it's a substance that every known law of science, magic, logic and God says shouldn't be able to even exist in reality ... and yet, here I am.

The biggest brains on the planet can't even verify whether I still have DNA. Heh ... half the time, I feel like Swamp Thing in "The Anatomy Lesson" anymore, but that doesn't even matter, because I still feel.

It's not just that I think, and therefore I am; it's that I feel, and that makes me real. And the same goes for everyone else out there who's just looking to not get legislated out of existence.

So, this is me, making myself a Wikus Van De Merwe man without a country, so that even the most cynical among you will have absolutely no doubt that I will do everything I can to make this a country for all, even if you're convinced that I'm nothing but a self-serving jerk-off, because now that I've burned my bridges behind me, I'm stuck in the same leaky life-raft as everyone else who's faced with the prospect of impending unpersonhood.

---

Later:

Bernice Teschmacher crossed her arms over her chest. "You just painted a huge bullseye on your chest."

Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove didn't even turn to face her. "Really? I didn't notice."

Bernice rolled her eyes. "You're a terrible liar."

Dream couldn't keep the touch of peevishness out of his voice. "No, I'm an exceptional —"

"STOP," Bernice cut him off.

"Nobody wants to let me have my own catchphrase," Dream muttered under his breath, before he finally faced her. "Besides, I'm not the one who's lying here."

Bernice arched her eyebrows. "And you're implying that I am?"

"Your question implied that I didn't already have a huge bullseye on my chest," Dream corrected her, as his index and middle fingers traced a circle around the smiley-face symbol on his chest. "I disagree," he asserted, tapping the center of the symbol twice for emphasis.

"Alright, granted," Bernice grudgingly acknowledged, before quickly qualifying, "but this one is much bigger."

Dream inhaled sharply. "I don't see it that way."

"Really?" Bernice challenged. "You just declared, before a worldwide and possibly interplanetary audience, that you're now ... what? Transhuman? Posthuman?"

"I reject those labels," Dream shook his head, "because I reject the rejection of self that they imply. I don't believe in self-denial."

"That's already a matter of public record," Bernice suppressed a smirk.

"What? No!" Dream blinked, as he caught on to his own unintended double entendre. "Well, okay, yeah, but in this case, not like that." He sighed wearily, shutting his eyes and rubbing his eyelids with his thumb and forefinger, before pinching the bridge of his nose. "What I mean is, I don't believe in denying any of the things that make up my self, and calling myself 'transhuman' or 'posthuman' would imply that I'm no longer human." He shrugged simply. "I'm still human, just like I'm still Indian, and still white, and a cyborg," he rapped his knuckles against the bicep of his Imaginesium left arm, producing a muted metallic thumping sound, "and something else besides," he again tapped the center of his Impossibilitium chest with the first two fingers of his right hand. "I'm all and none of the above, all at once."

Bernice squinted in skeptical speculation at him. "Except that would make you a paradox, wouldn't it?"

"'A paradox,' she said, speaking to the man made of literal impossibility in physical form," Dream teased. "If it's a paradox, it's one I've been living my whole life, because that's what it means to be a mixed-race kid."

"That's a bit different," Bernice insisted, even as she sensed that the tables had turned and she was now the one on the defensive.

"And you would know this HOW, exactly?" Dream rounded on her aggressively. "Certainly not from the fact that you grew up with a mom and a dad who were two different colors, not with that lily-white complexion you're sporting." He snorted derisively. "Tell you what, why don't you go tell that to Visionary's kids? Their one dad plus two moms equals a crazy-quilt heritage of possibly human, Caphan, artificial intelligence and faerie myth. How, exactly, are THEY supposed to fill out their census forms, especially when they have so many different parts to their patchwork backgrounds that, even if the members of one or more of the groups that they're descended from make gains enough to be treated like actual people, those kids could still be denied their personhood by virtue of the rest of their makeup?!"

"Civil rights have always been an incremental struggle!" Bernice raised her own voice to match his. "As unfair and hypocritical as it is, it's always been the case that certain groups have managed to improve their collective lot in life, just like the Irish and the Italians did in the last century, and have then used their relatively elevated status to deny the same upward mobility to even more severely disenfranchised groups, like the blacks and the Asians."

"And that's real fuckin' great for the fortunate few who manage to make it first, but I guess you're just fucked outta luck if you can't summarize the whole of your family history in a single checkmark box!" Dream roared as he threw up his hands.

"I don't like it any more than you do, so yelling at me isn't going to change the reality of the situation!" Bernice shouted back, before clutching her temples to brace herself against the stress headache she felt coming on. "After everything you've gone through, and everything that you've forced everyone else around you to go through, you've still somehow managed to remain stubbornly ignorant of the significant difference between being a progressive and being a utopianist."

Dream stopped short. "Is THAT why we've never gotten along?"

Bernice chuckled ruefully. "Do you really think I've written all those editorials in Who Watches the Watchmen? Magazine over the years, condemning your cowboy antics, because your political agenda has been too LIBERAL for me? I hope Karl Braun gets punished to the full extent of the law, but your assault on the Pogroms of Purity in Coeur d'Alene, in addition to being insanely ill-prepared, threw due process right out the window!"

Dream winced. "Yeah, except, see, that was part of a plan —"

"WHAT plan?" Bernice disputed. "How could that festival of civil liberties violations have been part of any plan, unless your plan was to show that you could behave every bit as badly as the people in power whose flouting of the Bill of Rights we've both protested in the past?!"

When Dream failed to stifle the smile that spread slowly across his face, Bernice fixed him with a furious glare. "You unbelievable bastard."

"I did a lot less lasting damage to the Constitution by going after Braun and his Pogroms than all those assholes who have filled up Gitmo with American citizens, who are 'persons of interest' purely by virtue of being either Muslim or of Middle Eastern descent," Dream bared his teeth with a ferocious pride. "And that's not even counting all the non-combatant civilian mutates they've stuck in no-hope shitholes like the Negativity Zone, nor any of the AIs Hallie was ordered to shunt into a virtual internment camp during the Parody War." He beamed fiercely as he popped his knuckles with an affected casualness. "In other words, all the same assholes who wanted to shut me down the hardest were the ones who had already handed me all the legal precedent that I needed to do what I did, which was why they had to remove me from the team WITHOUT calling into question the legality of my actions ..."

"Because otherwise, they'd risk refuting the precedent that they use to do whatever THEY want," Bernice nodded, even as she scowled in disapproval. "You WANTED that conflict, because you honestly thought you could force them into some sort of no-win position, where they'd have to choose between either letting you run wild, or subjecting themselves to equal accountability." Her scorn faded slightly into pity. "You seriously believed that would work."

"Xanatos Gambit," Dream flashed a grin.

"Two members of your team depowered, and another one unable to cope with his guilt over taking someone's life," Bernice countered coldly.

Neither one spoke for a few seconds after that.

"And if I'm wearing the biggest bullseye that I can paint on my own chest, then it becomes that much less likely that anyone else will get hit," Dream tapped the symbol on his chest yet again. "Hell, I'm walking proof of the Phoenix probability parabola, so there's no harm if I play the role of Captain America's shield for the benefit of others."

Bernice stared silently at him, the sharp creases of her frown softening from anger into sadness. "There were other ways of making things right ... even after Coeur d'Alene," she allowed. "You could have stayed silent —"

"If you can say that and mean it, then you don't know a goddamn thing about me," Dream turned away from her. "It's not about atonement, or at least, it's not entirely about that. It's about identity. I can't NOT be this, whatever 'this' is, any more than you could NOT be a Jewish woman." He ran his fingers through his hair. "I've got an Indian dad, a white mom, an Impossibilitium body and an Imaginesium arm, which makes me human and cyborg and something else besides, but it doesn't matter, because it's all still just ME."

"Can I quote you on that?" Bernice cocked an eyebrow and pursed her lips, as she clicked her ballpoint pen.

"HA!" Dream barked, as he glanced over his shoulder. "Well, why the hell not?" As he walked away, he called out behind him, "Looks like you finally got that exclusive interview you kept pestering me for after all."

Of course, legally you were allowed to make fun of anyone you wished, so I guess you had the advantage there.

A well done exchange between the reporter and the hero! I thought there were good points made on each side of the argument, and I enjoyed the that the division was less about political ideology and more about pragmatism vs. idealism. That does seem to be the major bone of contention in Dream's short run at leading the Legion.

Looking forward to finding out what he does next...

not sure if you can watch it where you are, but if so it's at: http://www.abc.net.au/austory/specials/madworld/default.htm

Here's the opening:
CHRIS ‘DOUGGS’ MCDOUGALL: "I try and have the most fun out of everyone on the planet, and I reckon I’m doing a pretty bloody good job so far. Obviously I’d rather do things legally, it’s a lot easier, a lot less stress, but I’m not going to allow it to stop me doing what I do. We love to get up to mischief. We love doing dodgy risky things, jumping off cliffs, jumping off buildings and love dodging the law. We’re the Robin Hoods of crime, you know, we take from the smart and give to the dumb. We will go and sneak around and sneak past security cameras and climb up a building and jump off and next minute run off from the cops and get away in a getaway van and then go and have a beer and just laugh about the whole saga. The only things we won’t do is vandalise anything or steal anything. You know skydiving and BASE jumping, a lot of partying goes on, a lot of booze, a lot of girls, a lot of nudity. If there are people out there who want to hear my story, you know, if you’re religious, if you’re monogamous, if you don’t like alcohol, if you don’t like carnage and chaos, then turn away now because that’s what my whole life is about, all those things. I love the chaos theory, you know, I love the fun, the stupidity and getting into mischief. Good old fashioned mischief is lost these days and I’m trying to bring it back."