This World

I'm sitting here in a peaceful, safe place that took me a lifetime to find. And yet, underneath the calm is the depressing realization that the world around this place, and also at times within it and of it, has become riots in the street at one end and virtual warfare at the other.

This is the time we live in, a time where there is no middle. In spite of the vastness of information available to us through every medium imaginable, we have isolated ourselves into a small cocoon of sameness, of things that don't vary from the rigid realities we have set for ourselves.

Our tolerance for differences is purely intellectual because in real life we don't tolerate differences very well. Rather than look at the people around us, look at those that are not around us. Those are the ones we need to examine, especially the reasons why they are not around us.That is where the true sickness of our society lives, in those people we threw away because they just did not fit into our extreme constricts of acceptable and unacceptable.

In the last couple years the polarization of the external world of politics and wealth accumulation has infected the day to day relationships of ourselves as human beings. We are so easy now to cut someone out of our lives because they are not like us. We are uncomfortable without our own personal choir of yes we agree, and we dissect the different ones who don't agree as if they were tumors infecting our perfect world.

We demand everyone be completely socialized, never say the wrong thing, never step outside the rigid lines we have drawn. If they mess up once, if they displease us in the least, if they say one thing we don't completely agree with, then we cut them out of our lives. That person annoyed me. Off with their head! We have let our ego needs turn us all into the Queen of Hearts.

The harsh thing, the dehumanizing part of this is we do it now without even bothering to talk about it anymore. No one feels the need to explain, to apologize, or even defend their right to demand only those like them live and interact with them. No one thinks much of gated communities anymore. They are normal now. They are who we have become, the walled cities of sameness.

We are no longer families with each other where the weird uncle was tolerated because that's just who he was, even if he wasn't like us. Now we cut the weird uncle out of our lives. We no longer tolerate the flaming activists who take to the streets for justice, for information, for equality, for the truth. Instead we condemn them and judge them for bringing "negative" energy into their lives, for choosing to focus on what's wrong with the world instead of what is right. We have grown so fond of living with our heads in the sand that we no longer feel the kick in our ass from those stepping over our indifference.

We no longer understand that not everyone was raised the same, not everyone speaks the same language even if it is linguistically similar. We no longer accept that intellectual and emotional growth happens at different levels and times for different people. We want everyone to be perfect, especially if we are not. The more imperfect we are, the more we demand perfection in others. It's a vicious cycle we just can't seem to break.

We no longer end marriages, relationships, friendships. We burn down the house, trash everyone associated with the destruction, even if we lit the match. We walk away bitter and vengeful and since we live in a world where bitterness and vengefulness are the norm now, it's easy to raise armies to support us in the war on each other.

We are all so special now, all so believing that only we have the right to dictate how others should be and live. We have become intolerant sheep who are led around by flatterers, by yes men and women, by artificial praise and ego boosts. Our needs mean more than the needs of others. Our aches and pains hurt more than those of others. Our childhoods were more awful/perfect than others. Our marriages were more awful/loving than others. Our relationships are more awful/perfect than anyone else. We all just know we are the only ones who get it and everyone else is deficient.

How did we get here? Maybe if we started asking ourselves that instead of finding new ways to judge each other, to make each other THE OTHER, we might just find out how to heal the mess we find ourselves living in. Until then we will continue to live with violence and despair and hatred.

And we MUST get involved. The racism that has taken over this country once more grew because too many people fell asleep. Too many people felt it wasn't their job to deal with it. Too many people didn't want the negative energy of doing something or even being aware it was happening. Too many people just didn't give a damn because their own needs, their own specialness was more important.

At some point America became a selfish, bitter, country intolerant of everyone and anyone who is and was different. This didn't happen overnight. This happened one person at a time. It happened the first time we cut someone out of our lives because they weren't perfect. It happened the first time we criticized someone for not being just like us. It happened the first time we put ourselves in the position of being the judge instead of the citizen.

We can't go on like this. If the country is to change, we must change ourselves first. It's always been that way. What hasn't been that way is our understanding of that simple truth. We let it die because we became more important as individuals to ourselves than to the greater good of a larger world.

This World

The Rotating Finger Of Blame

I'm not in a good mood today. I go back and forth between anger and tears. I have moments when I feel nothing but disgust, a whole shitload of it at what we as a country have become. I spent a lot of time today waiting to calm down before I could write what I was feeling , and I finally gave up and said fuck it, this is what I feel, this is what many women right now are feeling, and while I love my male friends, forgive me for saying this, but you just can't understand what we're feeling right now. Don't even try because I suspect it will just make many of us even angrier. This is our pain and our despair. We need it to move us and the country forward. We need its motivating fire or nothing will change.

There is a rotating finger of blame for what happened yesterday in Santa Barbara. That finger points at several moments in time when we had a chance to be decent human beings but just couldn't be bothered. It begins with a dying political party trying to pad its voter base by appealing to the worst bottom feeders imaginable: the racists, the bigots, the misogynists, the religious fanatics, the angry little fucks who point the finger at everyone but themselves for their pathetic loser lives.

And for what? For money to get re-elected to their multimillion dollar jobs serving the "people," except those people were greedy, women-hating racists like the Koch Brothers, like Rupert Murdoch, like Rush Limbaugh, like the hatemongers and bottom feeders on Fox News. Women to them are robotic idiots who blather on about what the men want them to blather on about.

The women on these shows help the Rush Limbaughs of the world insult the Sandra Flukes of the world by denouncing her testimony on birth control in front of an all-white, all-male panel of rich Republican douchebags. They let their male colleagues refer to her as a slut without speaking up. By their silence, or worse, by their parroting of misogynist talking points, they perpetuate their own insignificance as human beings.

A big finger of blame belongs to the lobbyists for organizations like the NRA who let a misogynist  child molesting douchebag like Ted Nugent speak for them just because there's a few mouth-breathing knuckle draggers in some swamp who might buy a few more guns, a few more bullets if you just scare their pea brains into thinking that scary black guy in the White House is coming for them.

Another finger of blame belongs to the politicians who courted the right wing lunatic fringe of religious fanaticism because they needed their votes, and then to keep them happy, passed laws regulating women's bodies as if they were cheap goods harmful to the American public. They looked the other way when these same American versions of the worst of the Taliban women haters used the bible as an excuse to beat their wives, rape their daughters, and deny them a decent education.

No man would put up with that. No man would allow anyone to make him less a man by making parts of his body subject to regulation by special interest groups. No man would allow a group of religious nuts to tell him what he can and can't read.

Another finger of blame belongs to the movie, television and gaming industry that uses women  to sell everything from cars to donuts. Video games and movies use women as props to be abused and fucked. The heros are always the beaten and bullet-ridden he-man who flings his bloody and bruised body on the first female he stumbles across because there's nothing like a good fuck to heal what ails him. Of course, there's never a scene where she says no, where she recoils in disgust at this dirty, bloody, stinking excuse for a man throwing himself on her. She is an insignificant prop put in the scene only to perpetuate the savage male's ego and superior brawn.

There is more, so much more. There is a Supreme Court that defines corporations as people and bestows even more rights and privileges upon rich white men. There are the corporations who will make money off anything, no matter how distasteful, how despicable. All that matters is the bottom line, the profit margin, the shareholders whining they need to make even more money so squeeze the workers even more, especially the women.

What kind of fucked country denies women the right to earn a decent living by punishing them with lower wages than a man, keeping them locked into low-paying jobs and treating them like garbage when they dare to ask for an increase in the minimum wage. The minimum wage! How disgusting is that? How denigrating to women, and how wrong of this country, how hypocritical of this country to not speak up against it.

There's an old saying that you become that  which you oppose and I see no real difference between how women in this country are treated and how they are treated in backward countries trapped in religion and misogynist ideology where women are pretty much disposable bic lighters who can be abused, abandoned and easily replaced.

 I don't feel equal. I feel as if I live in a country where women are taught how to avoid being raped but men are not taught how not to be rapists. I live in a country where women's bodies belong to everyone but the women. I live in a country that won't speak up and call someone a racist, a misogynist, a bigot because they don't consider it their place or their job to do so.

To those people, I ask then who? Who speaks up and says this is wrong? Who speaks up and says this is enough? Who goes to the voting booth and votes out every single one of these misogynist freaks who care only about money and power even if their own wives, their own daughters, their own sisters end up paying the price?

I ask you, what have we become and how did your silence, you apathy, your own bigotry, racism, and your own rejection of everyone different from you contribute to this shit pile of humanity we call America?

Most importantly, I ask, what are you gong to do to make sure your own daughters don't have to grow up this way, because it's not just your world. It's a world that will have a future and it's your children who will suffer if you don't get off your apathetic ass and do something

The Rotating Finger Of Blame

Age Of The Ass-Kissing Weenie

Today was payday at one of the PODs that prints our designs to sell to their customers. And since we all worked three or four times harder than last year to make up for the commission cuts and other corporate takeaways from this company that finds new and more outrageous excuses every few months to pay us less, there was the usual amount of grumbling, and some panic. My friend whose Faceborg page it is, posted she was worried about stretching the meager amount to buy enough oil for her furnace and also pay for a new tire that was practically bald on her car. Within seconds of her post, the weenie arrived to take up the cause of the corporation:

We're all lucky to have a paycheck at all considering how expensive it is to run a business. If they could pay us more, they would, so quit complaining and count your blessings.

Right on cue, the Ass-Kissing Weenie arrived to take the side of the company. Some of our group has speculated that she might be on the payroll of this company, but after years reading the comments sections of news blogs and frequenting different forums, I am almost certain she is not being paid. She does it because she has put herself in the position of always defending authority against those who challenge it.

The kind of person who does this often is under the delusion if she praises the corporate masters openly and profusely, they won't mistreat her as badly as they mistreat everyone else. She's convinced if only she kisses enough ass, when the company struggles, it will save her and toss everyone else overboard.

This is a response based on fear, and while I can sympathize with that, I also know everyone else is in the same position and their fears are just as legitimate. But they're not weenies. They wouldn't drag her down to elevate themselves. And what she fails to understand, is the corporate assholes she defends will not reward her for this kind of behavior.

They will consider her someone not to be trusted and kind of icky and nasty. And what we all know and she is clueless about, is that when the hammer comes down, she'll be lined up against the wall with everyone else, because no one likes a weenie, and the company really does think we are worthless, can easily be replaced, and could care less if we like, hate, criticize or praise them. They don't see her as any different, no matter how much she fools herself into believing this. If we're shit, then she's shit, too. It's the corporate reality in Dicken's America.

I've always believed that kind of ass-kissing weenieness is High School behavior that was  never outgrown. I just bet these kind of weenies who stick up for their corporate masters,  were the same sneaky little tattletales who had to run to the teacher with everyone's transgressions. They've probably also had a run as the neighborhood gossip who never had anything good to say about anyone, and who were always the first  to let everyone know who's fucking whom, who's getting a divorce, and of course, the first one to appoint themselves the official trash talker in everyone else's relationships, courtings, break-ups and divorces.

That kind of weeniness is not fear. That's pretending they're better than other people. That's stepping on others to elevate themselves. That's using other's misfortunes to make themselves look better or more important. Those are the most disgusting of weenies. I have only disdain for such weenies. There's nothing redeeming in their actions, nothing worthy or meaningful. It's just mean and vindictive.

Another variation of people like this, the weenies who never really left High School behind, usually end up as forum monitors because it allows them to punish people they personally don't like for either their politics, their religion (or lack of one), or just to make themselves feel more powerful. Usually you can tell these kind of weenies run the forum because it's always just them, a few yes-weenies, and nothing but rainbows flying out of unicorn butts when talking about "the company."

 I've seen them everywhere from t-shirts to cancer forums. There's a sadness that permeates these places because nothing meaningful is ever discussed, nor are problems ever acknowledged. It's Joe's Bar and Grill with a few tired and underpaid staff waiting around hoping for some new customers that will never walk into such a depressing place more than once.

A variation of these kind of weenies usually run conservative/right wing blogs. No one is allowed to comment about anything except topics inside the bubble. Banning is immediate for daring to bring up unapproved topics or a perspective that doesn't fit the narrative. It's total mind and sheep control, unlike liberal/progressive sites where everyone is welcome and chaos reigns supreme and everyone has a different opinion that's equally as valid as someone else's.

Then there's the Weenie bosses from hell who are so inept that everyone laughs behind their backs. They probably know how everyone feels about them so they exercise their weenieness by being total shits to those unfortunate to work for them. They never praise, only criticize. Nothing is ever done to their satisfaction. Everyone is an idiot. It's always someone else's fault.

And yet, such bosses are incapable of performing most of the jobs of those they criticize. And they attract the ultimate weenies, the ass-kissers who defend the boss every time, whether that boss is Boeing, Walmart, or the owner's idiot son.

Weenies like this are the same kind of weenie teabaggers who let rich assholes like the Koch Brothers create a fake movement that existed only to defend the wants of the very wealthy. As long as these weenies think there's someone below them in dignity like black people, liberals, democrats, and women, they will kiss their rich masters asses until their lips are rubbed raw.

The Ass-Kissing Weenie Troll is always found in the comments section of most online publications. When you eliminate the paid trolls who post the same response all over the internet for pennies per thousands, you'll find the authority loving weenies. These people LOVE authority. They love getting reamed by anyone with a badge, uniform, fancy title, hefty bank account, or political office.

They are the ones verbally assaulting the old, poor, and weak. It makes them feel important and less like losers. In High School, they were the ones who waited until the bullies finished beating up the weak kid, and then when everyone was gone, would go and give the victim one final kick, and then run away.

And finally, today on a blog that some of us set up to help a friend in need of financial assistance, the ultimate evil weenie just had to come and put his shit stain on something that was none of his business. He wanted to know when us old assholes were going to die off and leave the country to the makers and not the takers, and that he found it personally disgusting that we were soliciting handouts for an adult that was too lazy to work, and that he was tired of paying for our social security checks, food stamps, and free health care.

I didn't even bother to respond. I just deleted his comment. I didn't have the heart for arguing today. A year ago, a woman I greatly admired, died because she didn't have the money to get a mole checked out. It took her three months to find a doctor who would even see her without insurance. By the time she was able to get tests, the cancer was in all her organs. A year earlier, and it would have been a simple removal of a mole. Her doctor kept asking her why she waited so long and didn't seem to understand the whole concept of no money and no doctor but you would see me until it was too late.

So I deleted the mean and heartless comment directed at a woman suffering from cancer that some of us were trying to send on a bucket list vacation. He wouldn't understand why this is important to us, so I deleted him without bothering to explain.

Maybe if we all did that, there would be less weenies, less mean people, less creepy stalkers of the poor and sick looking for ways to make themselves look better, bigger, or more important. I let one person drag me down to her level today when I responded. I'm glad I didn't let another one get to me as well. A small victory, but I do enjoy seeing the blank space where his mean comment was. It means he didn't win and that's enough to make today not a total loss. And it inspired one of the readers of my friend's blog to donate the final amount to send her on her bucket list trip of a lifetime. That makes today a winning day in spite of the Ass-Kissing Weenies.

Age Of The Ass-Kissing Weenie