Obama, Marijuana, Braces, and the Issues Voter

I was catching up on some of my favorite blogs today and ran across a friend's entry that really bothered me for a lot of reasons. First of all, it demonstrates one of the divides many of the comfortable middle class don't realize is a divide, and second of all, it furthers the message that only appearance is a valid measure of worth. Here's the shortened version of the story:

About three years one of my friends wanted to move from a neighborhood that wasn't a good place to raise her daughter. It was a serious downgrade from a house to a tiny apartment but it was a safe middle-income neighborhood with a good school and she felt it was worth the sacrifice.

There hasn't been any money for extras. My friend is too proud to ever accept any kind of public assistance. She shops at garage sales and thrift stores for school clothes each year. Her daughter always had a lunch to bring, even when dinner was Top Ramen and a box of frozen vegetables. They've managed to squeeze by in three years with their power being turned off twice, and their phone once. They've survived. And they feel safe in their home.

But something happened the other day that sent my friend into a depression that she's having trouble shaking. As I said, they moved into a middle-income neighborhood, the kind of place where the standard of living is just a bit above what my friend raising her daughter alone can afford. It was fine until her daughter started middle school this year and became quiet and even sullen at times. At first my friend thought it was just the normal adjustment period of a new school, but then she began to understand it was more than that.

Her daughter who never asked for anything, who never complained about having to wear used clothing and live in a tiny apartment, came home one day and asked if she could have braces. Her daughter's teeth are not horrible by any means. She has the engaging grin of a young, pretty girl. But her teeth aren't perfect and now it's an issue all of a sudden.

It shouldn't matter but suddenly it's a big deal because all her classmates have braces. And being kids, they make fun of her lack of them. They tell her she will always have ugly crooked teeth if she doesn't get braces NOW! They make this lovely young girl feel ugly because her mother can't afford to have her teeth straightened until they resemble perfect little white picket fences.

It was heartbreaking for my friend to have to tell her daughter she can't afford to buy her braces. It was heartbreaking to watch the previously confident girl with perfect grades suddenly lose all confidence in herself. And it was especially heartbreaking for both of them to realize that no matter how smart a girl is, no matter how much she sacrifices along with her mother so they can both have a better life, she has just received her first lesson that she will go through life judged on her appearance.

There is nothing that can be done to fix this. My friend does not have the money and her daughter's classmates will never understand how something they take for granted--their perfect teeth, will one day be a symbol of class division to those who grew up in homes where braces were a luxury their families could not afford.

It is my sincere hope that by the time my friend's daughter goes to college,  she will have learned her advantage in life is what lives inside her, not what others see and judge on the outside. But I also know she will never forget how she was judged by her classmates who simply didn't understand there were some things that not everyone could afford, and in many ways their very appearance was a privilege others didn't get a chance to have. This lack of understanding is just another brick in the wall that continues to divide the people in this country from each other.

My other issue today came after a discussion with a man who has several post-graduate degrees. He was a radical in college, always up on the latest world events, always engaged and aware of the issues. He went on to the professional career he always dreamed about. His entire adult life has been a comfortable one where he buys a new car each year, upgrades his home about every five years, travels, and has a secure retirement in his future.

But he hasn't read a book in years. He only reads the local Republican rag in his very Republican neighborhood and each year begins to sound more and more ridiculously conservative, spouting talking points that he would have laughed at just a few short years ago. He only uses the internet to check sports scores. He doesn't care enough about the rest of the world to even bother checking to see if it's still there.

The only thing he watches on television is sports. He hasn't even seen a movie in a couple years. He has no interest in anything but coming home from work, plopping himself in front of his TV and watching all the sporting events that dutifully recorded themselves while he was at work. And he smokes marijuana. Lots of marijuana. In his 50 some years of life, I don't think he's ever had a problem finding marijuana. After all, he's a respectable, white middle-class American. No cop has ever stopped him and harassed him for being high or getting high or trying to get high. He buys it from other white, middle class smokers like himself. There's no slumming needed to get his weed.

And yet, he refuses to vote for Obama because he's done nothing to legalize marijuana. Yup, that's his entire reason for not voting, even though nothing has yet to interfere in his desire to get high. He would rather stay home and risk a president getting elected whose religion won't even let him drink coffee, much less ignore people who want to smoke weed or drink,  and he thinks there is no difference between the candidates. This is your one issue voter from the other side, folks. This is your no information voter. This is who will never go to the polls because he won't even educate himself on this one policy that he claims matters so much to him.

And no, I don't believe it's the weed that made him this way. I believe it was working to accumulate all the toys he feels he needs to have on hand to impress people who don't give a crap about him. I believe it's because he quit reading books. I believe it's because he watches nothing but sports. I believe it's because at heart he is a selfish, callous shit with hardly any friends. The weed is just something he uses to mute the tedious boredom his life long ago became. And it's all Obama's fault that weed isn't legal. He says this all the time as he's toking on the other end of the phone, as he talks about the great bud he scored, as he defines his life according to the sporting events he watched and how high he was.

The thing is there wasn't that much difference between him and my friend's daughter. They both had the same beginnings. They were both brilliant with a great future ahead of them. The only thing that got in the way were things like braces, and summer camp, and vacations, and cars. It divided him from them just as my friend's daughter is being  divided from her life and theirs because of her imperfect teeth.

Neither of those are things I can do anything about. Both fall under the this is the way life is category. I can't say my daughter's friend will end up like this man just because of her teeth, but if there's one thing that can stifle her as a human being, it's that pain of realizing that no matter how smart she is, how educated she becomes, until she deals with that horrible pain of childhood, that pain of being excluded because of something beyond her control, her personal growth becomes stunted forever.

 

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Obama, Marijuana, Braces, and the Issues Voter

Yo, Douchebags!

After weeks of watching Republicans pander to the most disgusting of bottom feeders to convince them to vote for their brand of heaving, stinking, steaming pile of thieving crappery, I've reached the upper limits of disgust. This used to be a decent country where people cared about each other as fellow human beings. It used to be a place that prided itself on being the melting pot of the world, a beacon in the darkness for the persecuted to find welcome and shelter.

But now it's perceived by most of the world and many of us who live here, as a pit of corporate influence where even the Supreme Court has become a mockery of justice and the law, where an ethically and morally bankrupt country of greedy and selfish douchebags masquerading as Congress, shit all over each other over in the name of money, greed, and power.

But it didn't get this way overnight. It was douchbagged into existence by some of the most disgusting slime to ever pass as human beings. The list is long and ugly, but a few players rise to the top as the prime douches floating around the bag.

At the top of the shit heap of hate are the Koch Brothers. As the link reminds us, the John Birch Society, an organization devoted to spreading hate and bigotry, has been a part  of the family since it climbed out of that festering pile of hatred to infect America. It's why they labeled President Obama  a communist, a socialist, a liberal, all kinds of scary words to avoid what they really wanted to say: he's black.

 It's not his agenda they hated, it was and continues to be his skin color. Every day when they wake up and are once again reminded America elected a black President, their hatred grows stronger not only against him, but against those who put him in office. They blame the liberals, the democrats, the unions, the middle and working class, the poor for ruining their ugly little white world. All the money they are spreading around like manure on a garden of shit, is purely for payback. They will not rest until they've destroyed the lives of those who dared to elect a black man to what they consider the exclusive realm of rich white men.

But they couldn't do it without hiding behind the most pathetic of losers, those mouth breathing morons who hung on every word oozing from the slime of hate radio.  These pathetically stupid wastes of skin were easily manipulated into believing the Tea Party, a front group funded by the Koch Brothers to help them spread their bigotry across the country, was their own idea instead of yet another noose they helped knot around their own necks. By appealing to their ignorant racism, bigotry, and rampant paranoia about anything or anyone different,  they got these knuckle dragging fools to vote for corporate control over their entire lives from the bedroom to the grave.

But the hate spewing from their radios didn't just grow overnight. It was was scripted and funded by rich haters and bigots to spread blatant propaganda falsely and deceptively labeled as news. They created disgusting  media personalities to infect the country with a new genre of propaganda: Hate Radio. They relied on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital to fund and feed that drug addicted douchebag, Rush Limbaugh and just about every so-called "conservative" with a show aimed at the dumbest white people in America.

Yes, Romney's wealth funded the hate spewed into the ears of paranoid, pathetic knuckledraggers who foolishly believed they were something other than the carefully manipulated tools of the rich and hateful. His wealth paid to stir up their bigotry, their hatred, their paranoia so they would  turn out like good little sheeple and vote in more Republicans to fuck them while they stole the rest of this country's wealth to stash in their overseas bank accounts.

And the worst of the hate, the worst of the bigotry was created and funded by the most morally bankrupt bigot and racist in existence: Rupert Murdoch. The Fox News empire on a daily basis spews more hatred and lies than any other media. It's deceptive, biased, and outright lies rival only that of the former Soviet Union, proving that in Murdoch's case, he became the very evil he claims to have vehemently opposed because nothing is too much of an enemy or too evil if it can put a dollar in his pocket.

But none of this carefully packaged and promoted hatred and bigotry would have gained a foothold without the help of its absolutely evil and ethically perverted partner: religion. Without the churches telling and training their members what group of people to hate, what politicians shared their hatred of specific ethnic groups, the white hooded politics of the Koch Brothers, the Romneys, the Limbaughs, the Murdochs would have remained on the fringe of other lunatic crazies. It was the churches in America, those breeding grounds for bible sanctioned cruelty and misogyny that brought it out from  the rocks it hid under for so long.

However, the effect of being so out in the open is now working against them. The problem with putting all your faith into the hands of people who are so consumed with hate is at some point they begin to believe they are the majority voice. They don't understand that being given a voice by a controlled, propaganda driven media is not the same as having a majority voice. And eventually, the pushback begins from those who truly are the majority and who are tired of some raving crazy's  hatred,  bigotry, and religion-fueled intolerance interfering in their right to live by their own morality and beliefs.

And as stupid and mean and greedy as the douchebags are, they know there is only one thing that can defeat them: a united populace. It's why they work so hard to divide the country from each other, because that way it's easier to split up the groups into manageable chunks of easily controlled stupid people. But they're starting to lose control of their crazies. The mouth breathers aren't happy to find out they're expected to drag their knuckles for the RomneyBot. The douchebags anticipate trouble and so they're making sure only those who will vote their way are allowed to vote, a lot like those dictatorships they're always going on about.

 The best and only way to fight back against the millions of douchebag dollars, the lies, the propaganda, the disgusting greed and ethical wasteland they shit down upon us, is to get out and vote against their candidates.  Vote against Republicans. Democrats aren't perfect, but at least they won't force their religion on you, they won't demand you adhere to their version of morality, they won't inflict misogyny on the women, they won't promote racism, bigotry, or have a paranoid, delusional and insane need to control every inch of your life  like the Republicans will.

 And please re-elect President Obama, if only to know that the Koch Brothers and all their hater buddies will wake up the next morning with a headache they spent millions on to make go away, and it's still there stronger than before. Honor still wins over money, so be honorable on election day and take our country back from the douchebags before there's nothing left to take back. That will give you something to work with that still values your voice instead of finding ways to silence it into submission.

 

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Lord, Save Us From Your Followers: Why is the Gospel of Love Dividing America?

Yo, Douchebags!

You Don't Piss Off The Women!

On January 7th, 2009 I wrote this blog entry Strong Women and the continual battle to stay strong. I was angry that pharmacists were forcing their religion on women trying to fill a prescription. I was more than annoyed at the way, in that political season, women were treated less seriously than the male candidates for the same offices. And as always, I was upset with my sister-women who failed to respect the women who took to the streets, suffered beatings, humiliation, prison and death, just so they could win the right to vote for them in 1920. It took less than a hundred years for their sacrifices to suffer the ultimate humiliation of women refusing to participate at all in electing their leaders. How astonishingly ungrateful can someone possibly be? I was embarrassed and ashamed for them. I hope one day they will realize how cheaply they treated what was fought for them, and that they will make up for it by helping register other women to vote and then making sure they get to the polls.

But all of that was history. I had my moment in the streets as a young woman. I lived and honed my ethics and principles on fighting for equality for all of us, not just the wealthy, not just the white, not just the privileged, and certainly not just one gender. But I felt it no longer was my generations battle because we did manage to accomplish a lot with our activism. We did drag equality into the 20th century. We did accomplish the standard of a woman's right to her own body. We didn't give up until it was done, but we also knew it would never be done because the same people who fought us are still fighting and trying to dismantle everything we accomplished.

But as I got older, as the women of my generation got older, we began to believe it no longer was our generation's battle.  It was the battle of the generations who will suffer from staying home on election day, who see no difference between one vote and another vote, who believe all politicians are the same, who will let those with horrible agendas claim the power that was rightfully meant to be shared equally.

I think in many ways we did too good a job. The generations who came after ours took for granted the right to control their own bodies, the right to be treated equally no matter your gender, color of your skin, or your sexual orientation. They never questioned their right to apply for scholarships that paid them to learn how to excel in their sport of choice. They grew up seeing women delivering the news, sitting in positions of power in both corporations and all levels of the government.

And like all things one takes for granted, there's someone waiting to just take them. And when you get complacent, you don't see the thief sneaking up on your rights. You just wake up one day and find out you're the wrong gender, the wrong color, the wrong religion, the wrong nationality, the wrong fit for a world that changed while you were sleeping away complacently and content in the safety and foreverness of your rights.

That's why as much as I was infuriated by the whole Planned Parenthood/Susan B. Komen attempted religious takeover of our healthcare, as much as I thought Congress had lost its collective mind with the 1950's mentality waging a war on women, as much as I detested that flatulence-infested bag of crap Limbaugh, as much as I want to vomit when I hear or read another women actually defend anything of that, I am in a strange sort of way, grateful to them for being such stupid and clueless dickheads.

You fucking pissed off the women! How stupid is that? And it's beyond stupid because you also woke them up. It's going to be a lot harder to pull your shit because they're awake now and angry. You will pay, and you will pay hard. And this time, it's not just one generation. It's all of us. That's what you did with your stupid and assinine War on Women. Nice job, MORANS.

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You Don't Piss Off The Women!