The miniscule, off-the-cuff statement that comes unexpectedly, that pierces the heart, sometimes does the most damage.
The damage can be inexplicable, too. The pain can be for the other, for yourself, maybe even someone you've never met.
My heart is pierced with thousands upon thousands of holes. My emotions and my soul both, I imagine, look something like a bit of netting, thin strands of togetherness interwoven with space consisting of grief and agony. Here and there one would find gigantic tears, gapping places where some major event took away a large piece of that secret place inside of me.
This morning my second alarm went off - yes, I need two - and I realized I'd not yet said goodbye to my husband before he left for work.
We long ago established that I am not a morning person, while he is, and he despises a conventional breakfast anyway, preferring to eat a peanut butter sandwich or a slice of left over pizza over cereal or scrambled eggs. Everyone needs their alone time, and he has the early morning when he rises at 5 a.m. - such an ungodly hour! - and spends an hour gathering himself and preparing for his day.
After my alarm went off, I sat up quickly and grabbed my glassed for a look at the time. The lights were on in the kitchen, and I slipped from the bed and padded down the hallway. I softly called to him.
"Sweetie, are you still here?"
I heard him fold up the paper and jump up. "We actually got a newspaper this morning. I was reading it. I'm late!" He hurried past me to finish his grooming, brushing his teeth.
And with that, I felt my heart shed a tear for him. For he is 59 years old now, and if he wants to take an extra five minutes to read the paper, then he has earned that right. But he had to hurriedly kiss me goodbye and rush out the door, because he'd let time slide by a little longer than he'd anticipated.
This would be a good time to rail against the world, against this horrible economic system we've put in place, one that keeps people tied to clocks and schedules, and forces us all to bow down to corporate whips and politicians who don't give a damn if you're almost 60 and doing a younger man's job.
But I won't do that. I will only say that when I realized my beloved husband had to leave without finishing his newspaper, such a simple request, I felt a sting in my soul. Only a little rip, but a tear nevertheless.
Showing posts with label Musings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Musings. Show all posts
Friday, October 05, 2018
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Tell Me Every Story Told
A long time ago, a friend who is no longer with us told me she was not going to work on writing novels anymore.
The world has enough people trying to write and publishing things. There are already too many books, she said.
My total astonishment at her words was profound. She went on to blast our mutual alma mater as a place that actually deters writing even though it is a college that has Pulitzer Prize winning authors and national poet laurates among its alumnae. The teaching, she maintained, was so geared toward writing The Great American Novel of Literature that it overlooked and discounted multiple genres and forms of writing.
She never published a novel, though she did publish a history book. Like me, she wrote for newspapers. She also had five novels tucked away in a drawer when she passed away, and who knows what else.
I did have a novel tucked away in a drawer, but I threw it out some time ago. I have another stashed in a file cabinet someplace that I never finished. My essay for my masters degree is probably the longest piece of decent writing that I have.
Truth is, I never wanted to write The Great American Novel. I wanted to be a ghost writer and write Nancy Drew books. I wanted to be Janet Evanovich and write Stephanie Plum novels. I wanted to be Victoria Holt and write gothic romances.
I didn't want to write Catcher in the Rye or Jane Eyre. I read those books and enjoyed them, but I couldn't see myself writing them.
My friend was correct about one thing - the college I graduated from gave short shrift to anything not deemed "literature." Aspirations for other forms of writing were ignored.
I don't know if it is still that way. When I went after my masters degree, it wasn't quite as "literary" but that sense of it was still there. It helped that one of my professors was a genre writer, I think. She didn't look at genre quite like other teachers.
Story comes in many forms. Oral stories are great - my father and brother are both great orators. They can bullshit with the best of them and both are salesmen. I am not a good oral story teller, but I do all right with words on paper. I operate best there.
Everyone has a story, but every story is the same. Right? Wrong? I think not, because even in a family, no one sees a situation or event in the same way. What may be funny to one person might horrify another.
That's the thing about humanity and the human story. Differences abound everywhere, even among twins, triplets, or quadruplets. We have a basic underpinning - we're born, we live, we die. It's the middle part that is so fascinating (although some births are rather fascinating stories, in and of themselves). That "live" part.
Living is so different for everyone. Hard for most, easy for a few. Some laugh their way through it, some cry. Some see joy everywhere while others see nothing but sorrow. Some see a mix of everything.
And who's to say who is right or wrong about any of it? Who has the right to tell someone else that what they see with their own eyes, and feel with their own heart, is good, bad, right or wrong? Society has a set of morals that we use to determine certain things in life - it's bad, for example, to murder someone. That feeling needs to be set aside and not acted upon, if you're feeling murderous toward someone. That goes for any other emotion that causes someone else harm or angst. Societal mores have said we don't do those things, and we are raised to know this. Well, most of us are, anyway. If we didn't know this, society would break down and not function.
My friend did not really stop writing. Being a writer means you never stop thinking like a writer, even if you aren't writing. Being a writer is a different way of seeing the world, a way of looking at details, of searching for the overlay of story arc in an event. A search for the protagonist and antagonist in every outing. Is that the good person? The bad person? Who is right or wrong? Who is going against the dictated social mores?
Sometimes I think that every story has been told. Maybe all we're all doing is rewriting Shakespeare in invisible ways, or telling stories from the Bible in new ways, thousands of times over. Maybe we're telling stories with meaning, or maybe our stories mean nothing at all.
Supposedly there are only seven basic plots: overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; rebirth. I always read them as conflicts of man against self, man against man, man against nature, or man against other/society.
However you define it, even if there are only seven plots, there are endless stories, as many stories as there people. Maybe as many stories as there are stars in the sky.
And here I am writing blog posts, or essays. It counts. It's a story about stories. Somewhere in what I have written this morning, is a story.
The world has enough people trying to write and publishing things. There are already too many books, she said.
My total astonishment at her words was profound. She went on to blast our mutual alma mater as a place that actually deters writing even though it is a college that has Pulitzer Prize winning authors and national poet laurates among its alumnae. The teaching, she maintained, was so geared toward writing The Great American Novel of Literature that it overlooked and discounted multiple genres and forms of writing.
She never published a novel, though she did publish a history book. Like me, she wrote for newspapers. She also had five novels tucked away in a drawer when she passed away, and who knows what else.
I did have a novel tucked away in a drawer, but I threw it out some time ago. I have another stashed in a file cabinet someplace that I never finished. My essay for my masters degree is probably the longest piece of decent writing that I have.
Truth is, I never wanted to write The Great American Novel. I wanted to be a ghost writer and write Nancy Drew books. I wanted to be Janet Evanovich and write Stephanie Plum novels. I wanted to be Victoria Holt and write gothic romances.
I didn't want to write Catcher in the Rye or Jane Eyre. I read those books and enjoyed them, but I couldn't see myself writing them.
My friend was correct about one thing - the college I graduated from gave short shrift to anything not deemed "literature." Aspirations for other forms of writing were ignored.
I don't know if it is still that way. When I went after my masters degree, it wasn't quite as "literary" but that sense of it was still there. It helped that one of my professors was a genre writer, I think. She didn't look at genre quite like other teachers.
Story comes in many forms. Oral stories are great - my father and brother are both great orators. They can bullshit with the best of them and both are salesmen. I am not a good oral story teller, but I do all right with words on paper. I operate best there.
Everyone has a story, but every story is the same. Right? Wrong? I think not, because even in a family, no one sees a situation or event in the same way. What may be funny to one person might horrify another.
That's the thing about humanity and the human story. Differences abound everywhere, even among twins, triplets, or quadruplets. We have a basic underpinning - we're born, we live, we die. It's the middle part that is so fascinating (although some births are rather fascinating stories, in and of themselves). That "live" part.
Living is so different for everyone. Hard for most, easy for a few. Some laugh their way through it, some cry. Some see joy everywhere while others see nothing but sorrow. Some see a mix of everything.
And who's to say who is right or wrong about any of it? Who has the right to tell someone else that what they see with their own eyes, and feel with their own heart, is good, bad, right or wrong? Society has a set of morals that we use to determine certain things in life - it's bad, for example, to murder someone. That feeling needs to be set aside and not acted upon, if you're feeling murderous toward someone. That goes for any other emotion that causes someone else harm or angst. Societal mores have said we don't do those things, and we are raised to know this. Well, most of us are, anyway. If we didn't know this, society would break down and not function.
My friend did not really stop writing. Being a writer means you never stop thinking like a writer, even if you aren't writing. Being a writer is a different way of seeing the world, a way of looking at details, of searching for the overlay of story arc in an event. A search for the protagonist and antagonist in every outing. Is that the good person? The bad person? Who is right or wrong? Who is going against the dictated social mores?
Sometimes I think that every story has been told. Maybe all we're all doing is rewriting Shakespeare in invisible ways, or telling stories from the Bible in new ways, thousands of times over. Maybe we're telling stories with meaning, or maybe our stories mean nothing at all.
Supposedly there are only seven basic plots: overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; rebirth. I always read them as conflicts of man against self, man against man, man against nature, or man against other/society.
However you define it, even if there are only seven plots, there are endless stories, as many stories as there people. Maybe as many stories as there are stars in the sky.
And here I am writing blog posts, or essays. It counts. It's a story about stories. Somewhere in what I have written this morning, is a story.
Monday, July 09, 2018
A Diamond Road
At first, we came here for the soil. A dirt road was good enough.
Then we went west for the gold.
For a while we settled for plastic and asphalt as the wheels of industry turned.
And now?
Now we search for diamond roads. Roads littered with sparkles and jewels, roads that lead only to riches. And not the riches of heaven, either. We search for the spoils of the day. Big cars. Big homes. Nice clothes. Expensive shoes. A yacht, maybe.
Living the good life, walking that diamond road.
The thing about diamonds is they are hard and nearly impenetrable. You can't eat them. You can carve them into pretty things, or use them as tools to cut things, but they're rather useless in the day-to-day world.
Walking a diamond road is about like walking a gravel road. Just shinier.
In Frank Baum's book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the road is a yellow brick road. The book was written in 1900, so the gold boom in California was still fresh on everyone's mind, I imagine. A yellow brick road would be like that diamond road of today.
Baum's book has lots of lessons. Dorothy is the immigrant to Oz, which one could consider to be the United States. She follows the path and has to traverse lots of dangers to get to the Emerald City (aka the United States). She is then spit-polished and sent back out into danger, to emerge victorious in her return to Oz. In the end, though, she discovers Oz is an illusion. (Don't mind the man behind the curtain.)
Is the "American Dream" an illusion? I think it is for a lot of people.
Robert Frost took the "road less traveled." In an Eagles song, a couple goes rushing down a highway and then are dying to get off as they live "life in the fast lane."
It seems to me today most people want that diamond road. They're not searching for the dirt road, or the soil path, or even a yellow brick road. They want on that fast lane and they want all the riches they can grab.
While riches are not like pie - there really is enough for everyone, if the thing is only carved properly - the spoils seem to be spun out in strange fashion in this country. The diamond road is pranced upon by a small few, while the rest believe they are walking on it but they're really on a dirt road and the rocks beneath their feet aren't diamonds. Just rocks.
Most people ultimately travel many roads as they head toward their ultimate destination - which is, for every single one of us - death. I have often wandered off the road to see what is across the meadow or on the other side of the pond. It leads to an interesting and creative life, these adventures, but it doesn't bring diamonds.
At some point I decided I really didn't want diamonds. I'm not sure I even want a road. I think maybe I'd just like a little path, one not trod by many, with lots of distractions along the way.
Then we went west for the gold.
For a while we settled for plastic and asphalt as the wheels of industry turned.
And now?
Now we search for diamond roads. Roads littered with sparkles and jewels, roads that lead only to riches. And not the riches of heaven, either. We search for the spoils of the day. Big cars. Big homes. Nice clothes. Expensive shoes. A yacht, maybe.
Living the good life, walking that diamond road.
The thing about diamonds is they are hard and nearly impenetrable. You can't eat them. You can carve them into pretty things, or use them as tools to cut things, but they're rather useless in the day-to-day world.
Walking a diamond road is about like walking a gravel road. Just shinier.
In Frank Baum's book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the road is a yellow brick road. The book was written in 1900, so the gold boom in California was still fresh on everyone's mind, I imagine. A yellow brick road would be like that diamond road of today.
Baum's book has lots of lessons. Dorothy is the immigrant to Oz, which one could consider to be the United States. She follows the path and has to traverse lots of dangers to get to the Emerald City (aka the United States). She is then spit-polished and sent back out into danger, to emerge victorious in her return to Oz. In the end, though, she discovers Oz is an illusion. (Don't mind the man behind the curtain.)
Is the "American Dream" an illusion? I think it is for a lot of people.
Robert Frost took the "road less traveled." In an Eagles song, a couple goes rushing down a highway and then are dying to get off as they live "life in the fast lane."
It seems to me today most people want that diamond road. They're not searching for the dirt road, or the soil path, or even a yellow brick road. They want on that fast lane and they want all the riches they can grab.
While riches are not like pie - there really is enough for everyone, if the thing is only carved properly - the spoils seem to be spun out in strange fashion in this country. The diamond road is pranced upon by a small few, while the rest believe they are walking on it but they're really on a dirt road and the rocks beneath their feet aren't diamonds. Just rocks.
Most people ultimately travel many roads as they head toward their ultimate destination - which is, for every single one of us - death. I have often wandered off the road to see what is across the meadow or on the other side of the pond. It leads to an interesting and creative life, these adventures, but it doesn't bring diamonds.
At some point I decided I really didn't want diamonds. I'm not sure I even want a road. I think maybe I'd just like a little path, one not trod by many, with lots of distractions along the way.
Wednesday, May 09, 2018
Walk With Me
Not so very long ago, someone called me a socialist.
I was supposed to take offense at this, but since I consider myself a democratic socialist, sort of, I did not.
Not everyone is capable of pulling themselves up out of poverty. I am in favor of a "safety net" that keeps people in their homes and off the streets, and if a few manage to outsmart the government and get more than they should (which happens because we've underfunded the positions needed to capture these folks, but that's another blog post), then I'm okay with that.
There aren't many democratic socialists in the government right now. I'm not even sure there are any democrats. Today it seems to me, the democrats in general are just old-school Republicans. Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run so that both meet public needs, and profits do not make just a few wealthy and leave the rest working three jobs to get by. (Think Norway.)
At any rate, I have often wondered how I came to this place in my mind. My grandfather was a democrat and a union man, so maybe it comes from there. But I think it is more because of my former work as a news reporter.
Being a news reporter meant that I could not stay in a specific circle or bubble. I had to visit people in their homes, wherever that might be. I think when we reach a certain stage - and many people are born into this stage and never leave it - where you have a nice suburban home and you see clean yards and homes, and nice vehicles, and then you drive back and forth to your job in your little cubicle, going out to the movies or the groceries store - you are in a bubble. We don't drive down the backroads and see the house trailers or the slums in a certain part of town. We instinctively avoid that because it is different.
But I could not avoid it when I was working as a reporter. If the story called for me to visit an older lady who lived alone in a home that was falling down, a place where the roof leaked and the furniture was purchased by her great-great-grandparents and she told you not to sit in a certain chair because the leg was broken, then that is where I went.
So I saw how people with different means live. I saw that people who had what seemed like good jobs - jobs paying more than I was making - lived in relative poverty. Maybe they had a spouse who couldn't work, too, or lots of doctor bills. Maybe they had five kids. Whatever the reason, they couldn't afford to buy a new vehicle or keep their house spruced up. Not only could they not afford it, they didn't have time.
Now some of the people were obviously doing something newsworthy - maybe graduating from nursing school at the age of 40, or had somehow built a roller coaster out of matchsticks, or they were beekeepers, or collected something of interest, or had won some award at work. Whatever the reason for the story, it gave me many chances to see how people live.
The circumstances sometimes astounded me. And sometimes, I admit, I wondered why someone didn't simply purchase cheap paint and spend a weekend making something that looked awful a bit more appealing. But I think most people perform at the height of their limits, and sometimes, without a little assistance, they just don't know where to turn, what to do, or how to be a human being. They are so busy trying to support themselves or their family, - being human doings (some might call them corporate serfs) - they don't have time to think about how something looks, much less do something about it.
After walking around two local counties, including my own, and visiting folks in places that maybe appeared nice on the outside but the poverty was visible on the inside, or vice versa, or whatever, it became apparent to me that we are a cruel society. We condemn people who do not live up to expectations, though these expectations vary by gender, race, and other conditions (and some of the conditions are invisible, unacknowledged, and unknowable be the persons who are being condemned).
We expect everyone to be able to become a millionaire, but it isn't going to happen. A recent article I read said one out of every 6 retirees was a millionaire - if you counted the value of the home in that. These are folks who need Social Security and Medicare, both programs that are part of the social safety net that some people want to dismantle, even if they are worth a million dollars. I'm afraid with today's health care costs, $1 million isn't going to go very far.
I could put up charts and facts all day long, but instead, I want to issue a challenge. Drive down a road or two you've not been down before, or not been down in a long time. Look at a home where someone lives, one you might find distasteful for whatever reason. Practice empathy and imagine why the place looks that way, what the lives of those folks might be like, and how a little more support from the community (i.e., the government), could make their lives even the slightest bit better. You can't go inside, but you can imagine.
Walk in someone else's shoes for a while. Pretend you're a librarian making $22,000 a year and work up a budget to live on. Could you do it? How about working a part-time minimum wage job? Could you make ends meet? Could you make ends meet with three part-time minimum wage jobs? No?
I've seen this stuff. People hurt, and they don't know how to fix it. In this America, if you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps, something is wrong with you and apparently you deserve to be wherever you end up. So we don't want to help (though I don't understand this type of thinking at all). Not everyone starts out with boots, for one thing, and it's hard to go forward from there. Sometimes you end up walking around in your socks.
I assure you, if everyone could retire a millionaire, most would do it.
I was supposed to take offense at this, but since I consider myself a democratic socialist, sort of, I did not.
Not everyone is capable of pulling themselves up out of poverty. I am in favor of a "safety net" that keeps people in their homes and off the streets, and if a few manage to outsmart the government and get more than they should (which happens because we've underfunded the positions needed to capture these folks, but that's another blog post), then I'm okay with that.
There aren't many democratic socialists in the government right now. I'm not even sure there are any democrats. Today it seems to me, the democrats in general are just old-school Republicans. Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run so that both meet public needs, and profits do not make just a few wealthy and leave the rest working three jobs to get by. (Think Norway.)
At any rate, I have often wondered how I came to this place in my mind. My grandfather was a democrat and a union man, so maybe it comes from there. But I think it is more because of my former work as a news reporter.
Being a news reporter meant that I could not stay in a specific circle or bubble. I had to visit people in their homes, wherever that might be. I think when we reach a certain stage - and many people are born into this stage and never leave it - where you have a nice suburban home and you see clean yards and homes, and nice vehicles, and then you drive back and forth to your job in your little cubicle, going out to the movies or the groceries store - you are in a bubble. We don't drive down the backroads and see the house trailers or the slums in a certain part of town. We instinctively avoid that because it is different.
But I could not avoid it when I was working as a reporter. If the story called for me to visit an older lady who lived alone in a home that was falling down, a place where the roof leaked and the furniture was purchased by her great-great-grandparents and she told you not to sit in a certain chair because the leg was broken, then that is where I went.
So I saw how people with different means live. I saw that people who had what seemed like good jobs - jobs paying more than I was making - lived in relative poverty. Maybe they had a spouse who couldn't work, too, or lots of doctor bills. Maybe they had five kids. Whatever the reason, they couldn't afford to buy a new vehicle or keep their house spruced up. Not only could they not afford it, they didn't have time.
Now some of the people were obviously doing something newsworthy - maybe graduating from nursing school at the age of 40, or had somehow built a roller coaster out of matchsticks, or they were beekeepers, or collected something of interest, or had won some award at work. Whatever the reason for the story, it gave me many chances to see how people live.
The circumstances sometimes astounded me. And sometimes, I admit, I wondered why someone didn't simply purchase cheap paint and spend a weekend making something that looked awful a bit more appealing. But I think most people perform at the height of their limits, and sometimes, without a little assistance, they just don't know where to turn, what to do, or how to be a human being. They are so busy trying to support themselves or their family, - being human doings (some might call them corporate serfs) - they don't have time to think about how something looks, much less do something about it.
After walking around two local counties, including my own, and visiting folks in places that maybe appeared nice on the outside but the poverty was visible on the inside, or vice versa, or whatever, it became apparent to me that we are a cruel society. We condemn people who do not live up to expectations, though these expectations vary by gender, race, and other conditions (and some of the conditions are invisible, unacknowledged, and unknowable be the persons who are being condemned).
We expect everyone to be able to become a millionaire, but it isn't going to happen. A recent article I read said one out of every 6 retirees was a millionaire - if you counted the value of the home in that. These are folks who need Social Security and Medicare, both programs that are part of the social safety net that some people want to dismantle, even if they are worth a million dollars. I'm afraid with today's health care costs, $1 million isn't going to go very far.
I could put up charts and facts all day long, but instead, I want to issue a challenge. Drive down a road or two you've not been down before, or not been down in a long time. Look at a home where someone lives, one you might find distasteful for whatever reason. Practice empathy and imagine why the place looks that way, what the lives of those folks might be like, and how a little more support from the community (i.e., the government), could make their lives even the slightest bit better. You can't go inside, but you can imagine.
Walk in someone else's shoes for a while. Pretend you're a librarian making $22,000 a year and work up a budget to live on. Could you do it? How about working a part-time minimum wage job? Could you make ends meet? Could you make ends meet with three part-time minimum wage jobs? No?
I've seen this stuff. People hurt, and they don't know how to fix it. In this America, if you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps, something is wrong with you and apparently you deserve to be wherever you end up. So we don't want to help (though I don't understand this type of thinking at all). Not everyone starts out with boots, for one thing, and it's hard to go forward from there. Sometimes you end up walking around in your socks.
I assure you, if everyone could retire a millionaire, most would do it.
Tuesday, May 01, 2018
Civics? What's Civics?
I spent 30 years trying to explain the difference between a town and a county.
That basically sums up my career writing for small, local newspapers. I wrote about government. Mostly I wrote about local government, but sometimes state or federal government made laws or enacted legislation that had a local impact, so I wrote about that, too.
What I learned in those 30 years is that many people have no idea how government works, not even at the local level. Even people who lived in towns had no idea how their town worked, or what it could or could not do as far as say, raising taxes or having its own school system.
The differences between a community, a village, a town, and a county are vast but lost on the population. The biggest differences are legalistic, but along with that legalistic jargon comes power.
A community has no power, except whatever power a group of people who band together might give it. Daleville, for example, is a community - a very large community, to be sure - but it has no power. It's not a legal entity, and there is no way for citizens in that area to petition for redress of grievances to something called the Daleville Town Council. There isn't one.
Daleville, as a community, is overseen by the county, so only the county wields power over that area. And all of those people (about 6,600) are represented by a single person on the county board of supervisors.
Fincastle is an incorporated town, and thus it has a town council, and power. It can tax. It can and recently did annex a part of the county to make itself larger, though it required the county's permission to do that (the county has more power). Those citizens in the town are still county citizens and subject to county laws, but they also now have a layer of town laws to abide by. If the county says it's okay to have chickens in your yard but the town says otherwise, you must take your complaint to the town council, not the county, if you want chickens. The town can have its own zoning laws, its own taxes, and its own rules - provided they are rules and laws that have been granted to them by the state through its municipal charter.
The county holds another set of powers. It can tax. It can set zoning laws. It can do everything a town can do (except annex another county with permission, but even that has some wiggle room, as Botetourt and Roanoke County "reset" boundaries in the Hollins area in the last 20 years. I remember writing the story.). The county can only do what the Virginia legislators allow it to do. The county cannot tax, say, cigarettes, because Virginia law doesn't allow counties to do that. It does allow cities to do that.
Cities generally have more power than counties. So the pecking order, by lack of power, is community, town, county, city, state, federal.
Virginia is what is known as a Dillon Rule state. This means that Virginia legislatures delegate powers to localities through the Virginia constitution, via municipal charters or by statute (the Virginia Code). A charter can be viewed as the "birth certificate" or "articles of incorporation" of the municipality. And the General Assembly may amend municipal charters at any time. They have done this in recent years to allow towns to change their elections from May to November, for example.
The Dillon Rule is why Botetourt County can't decide to open school after Labor Day. The Virginia legislature has set a time frame for when schools can operate. It is why Botetourt County doesn't set the speed limit on roads. The state has held that power for itself. You can go to your county board of supervisors and complain about speeding on your road, but all they can do is pass it along to representatives of the state highway department, who will then do an investigation and see if the speed limit needs to be changed or if the road needs to be off-limits to truck traffic, or whatever the issue might be. Roads are not in the county's pack of powers.
Now you may be wondering why I am writing about this today. I don't know. It is on my mind because I'm watching things go on that seem wrong, not just in my community but in communities across the state. I'm watching people sit in trees to protest the taking of their land for a natural gas pipeline. The state gave this private company the right of eminent domain and is letting it take people's land - land that has been in some folk's family for generations - so they can put in this natural gas line that is for the private company's profit, at least on the face of it. But a state judge ruled it was in the public good.
I happen to know that judge personally and am not at all surprised she ruled for the company. From my observations of her, it is my opinion that she believes in privatizing everything, so she would agree with the corporation. I don't think anyone but a government entity should be using the right of eminent domain and I fear this sets up a terrible precedent. Actually the precedent was already set up here in Botetourt County when the State Corporation Commission agreed to give a private company the water rights to a large swath of Botetourt County. This would have taken in our farm but we argued against it and the farm was cut out of the final decision. Or at least it was supposed to have been.
Anyway, I think what gets me is how little people know about government, but yet how much they think they know. If you don't know the difference between a town and a county, and you really have no idea how a federal law is created, then how can you make an intelligent decision at the voting booth?
You can't really.
And now I know why I'm writing this. It's because I realize that this utter failure of knowledge, this lack of civics, this total breakdown of information about what it means to be a good citizen and practice citizenship, is why we have arrived at the place we are today.
And where we are today is the era of the Cult of Personality. People do not vote for representatives because of ideals or a desire to make laws or do away with laws or whatever. Some of that is there, of course, but I have found that people generally have only "notions" about what they really want and no vision as to what it will look like in the end. Doing away with regulations to help corporations may sound great, but when your kid is dying of asthma because of the pollution, or has cancer because of something in the water, you might wish you had given that more thought.
So instead of thinking, people vote for personality. I knew Bob McDonnel was going to be governor of Virginia one day when I first met him. He had personality. I knew, instinctively, that Mr. Trump had a chance, despite his outrageous attitude, because he has a personality. A pretty horrible personality, in my opinion, but a personality all the same, and an attitude that many people admire. I get that because people don't think for themselves anymore. They wanted a daddy to do it for them.
Today is election day in Virginia. It's a day that most people eligible to vote in these elections ignore. This is an election for towns and cities. Roanoke's city council is up for grabs today. This doesn't affect me where I live but it does affect me because my husband is a city employee. The votes of a few - maybe 10 percent of eligible voters - will have an impact on how the city works, and that will impact my husband and me.
I have met a lot of candidates, winners and losers, in my 30 years of writing for newspapers. I've met every governor from Doug Wilder through Bob McDonnel. (I retired and never met McAliff.) Over that time, I failed to see the change-over from electing a person for good reasons - because of what he or she stood for, his or her morality, etc. - to the Cult of Personality. For the first 20 years of my career I could reasonably predict who would or would not win an election.
I haven't been able to do that since 2000, when Al Gore won but George Bush became president. Even at the local level, I am stymied, because I don't operate via Cult of Personality. I have no idea who is going to win the seats for council in Roanoke today.
This is a great big world and it isn't going to end unless we blow ourselves up, which we may very well do. My goal is always to leave things better than they were. When I was writing for the paper, that was my hope - that I'd impart knowledge and leave the county better than it was.
Did I do that? Or did I fail? Was it all a wasted effort because no one was reading it?
I honestly do not know.
That basically sums up my career writing for small, local newspapers. I wrote about government. Mostly I wrote about local government, but sometimes state or federal government made laws or enacted legislation that had a local impact, so I wrote about that, too.
What I learned in those 30 years is that many people have no idea how government works, not even at the local level. Even people who lived in towns had no idea how their town worked, or what it could or could not do as far as say, raising taxes or having its own school system.
The differences between a community, a village, a town, and a county are vast but lost on the population. The biggest differences are legalistic, but along with that legalistic jargon comes power.
A community has no power, except whatever power a group of people who band together might give it. Daleville, for example, is a community - a very large community, to be sure - but it has no power. It's not a legal entity, and there is no way for citizens in that area to petition for redress of grievances to something called the Daleville Town Council. There isn't one.
Daleville, as a community, is overseen by the county, so only the county wields power over that area. And all of those people (about 6,600) are represented by a single person on the county board of supervisors.
Fincastle is an incorporated town, and thus it has a town council, and power. It can tax. It can and recently did annex a part of the county to make itself larger, though it required the county's permission to do that (the county has more power). Those citizens in the town are still county citizens and subject to county laws, but they also now have a layer of town laws to abide by. If the county says it's okay to have chickens in your yard but the town says otherwise, you must take your complaint to the town council, not the county, if you want chickens. The town can have its own zoning laws, its own taxes, and its own rules - provided they are rules and laws that have been granted to them by the state through its municipal charter.
The county holds another set of powers. It can tax. It can set zoning laws. It can do everything a town can do (except annex another county with permission, but even that has some wiggle room, as Botetourt and Roanoke County "reset" boundaries in the Hollins area in the last 20 years. I remember writing the story.). The county can only do what the Virginia legislators allow it to do. The county cannot tax, say, cigarettes, because Virginia law doesn't allow counties to do that. It does allow cities to do that.
Cities generally have more power than counties. So the pecking order, by lack of power, is community, town, county, city, state, federal.
Virginia is what is known as a Dillon Rule state. This means that Virginia legislatures delegate powers to localities through the Virginia constitution, via municipal charters or by statute (the Virginia Code). A charter can be viewed as the "birth certificate" or "articles of incorporation" of the municipality. And the General Assembly may amend municipal charters at any time. They have done this in recent years to allow towns to change their elections from May to November, for example.
The Dillon Rule is why Botetourt County can't decide to open school after Labor Day. The Virginia legislature has set a time frame for when schools can operate. It is why Botetourt County doesn't set the speed limit on roads. The state has held that power for itself. You can go to your county board of supervisors and complain about speeding on your road, but all they can do is pass it along to representatives of the state highway department, who will then do an investigation and see if the speed limit needs to be changed or if the road needs to be off-limits to truck traffic, or whatever the issue might be. Roads are not in the county's pack of powers.
Now you may be wondering why I am writing about this today. I don't know. It is on my mind because I'm watching things go on that seem wrong, not just in my community but in communities across the state. I'm watching people sit in trees to protest the taking of their land for a natural gas pipeline. The state gave this private company the right of eminent domain and is letting it take people's land - land that has been in some folk's family for generations - so they can put in this natural gas line that is for the private company's profit, at least on the face of it. But a state judge ruled it was in the public good.
I happen to know that judge personally and am not at all surprised she ruled for the company. From my observations of her, it is my opinion that she believes in privatizing everything, so she would agree with the corporation. I don't think anyone but a government entity should be using the right of eminent domain and I fear this sets up a terrible precedent. Actually the precedent was already set up here in Botetourt County when the State Corporation Commission agreed to give a private company the water rights to a large swath of Botetourt County. This would have taken in our farm but we argued against it and the farm was cut out of the final decision. Or at least it was supposed to have been.
Anyway, I think what gets me is how little people know about government, but yet how much they think they know. If you don't know the difference between a town and a county, and you really have no idea how a federal law is created, then how can you make an intelligent decision at the voting booth?
You can't really.
And now I know why I'm writing this. It's because I realize that this utter failure of knowledge, this lack of civics, this total breakdown of information about what it means to be a good citizen and practice citizenship, is why we have arrived at the place we are today.
And where we are today is the era of the Cult of Personality. People do not vote for representatives because of ideals or a desire to make laws or do away with laws or whatever. Some of that is there, of course, but I have found that people generally have only "notions" about what they really want and no vision as to what it will look like in the end. Doing away with regulations to help corporations may sound great, but when your kid is dying of asthma because of the pollution, or has cancer because of something in the water, you might wish you had given that more thought.
So instead of thinking, people vote for personality. I knew Bob McDonnel was going to be governor of Virginia one day when I first met him. He had personality. I knew, instinctively, that Mr. Trump had a chance, despite his outrageous attitude, because he has a personality. A pretty horrible personality, in my opinion, but a personality all the same, and an attitude that many people admire. I get that because people don't think for themselves anymore. They wanted a daddy to do it for them.
Today is election day in Virginia. It's a day that most people eligible to vote in these elections ignore. This is an election for towns and cities. Roanoke's city council is up for grabs today. This doesn't affect me where I live but it does affect me because my husband is a city employee. The votes of a few - maybe 10 percent of eligible voters - will have an impact on how the city works, and that will impact my husband and me.
I have met a lot of candidates, winners and losers, in my 30 years of writing for newspapers. I've met every governor from Doug Wilder through Bob McDonnel. (I retired and never met McAliff.) Over that time, I failed to see the change-over from electing a person for good reasons - because of what he or she stood for, his or her morality, etc. - to the Cult of Personality. For the first 20 years of my career I could reasonably predict who would or would not win an election.
I haven't been able to do that since 2000, when Al Gore won but George Bush became president. Even at the local level, I am stymied, because I don't operate via Cult of Personality. I have no idea who is going to win the seats for council in Roanoke today.
This is a great big world and it isn't going to end unless we blow ourselves up, which we may very well do. My goal is always to leave things better than they were. When I was writing for the paper, that was my hope - that I'd impart knowledge and leave the county better than it was.
Did I do that? Or did I fail? Was it all a wasted effort because no one was reading it?
I honestly do not know.
Friday, April 20, 2018
Music Shuffle
Put your music player on shuffle and write the first three songs that play and what your initial thoughts are.
1. Talking to My Angel, by Melissa Etheridge
(Don't be afraid. Close your eyes. Lay it all down. Don't you cry. Can't you see I'm going where I can see the sun rise? I've been talking to my angel, and he said that it's alright.)
2. Into the Dark, by Melissa Etheridge
(There were stairs they were steep/I was falling falling deep/You were there you were small/
There was screaming down the hall/I've been here sleeping all these years/There comes a time we all know/There's a place that we must go/Into the soul into the heart/Into the dark.)
3. Home, by Sheryl Crow (The video for this song is incredible.)
(I woke up this morning/And now I understand/What it means to give your love/To just one man/
Afraid of feeling nothing/No bees or butterflies/My head is full of voices/And my house is full of lies/[Chorus] This is home, home/And this is home, home/This is home.)
My initial thought was this should be a pretty plain list, because I only have a couple of albums on my cellphone, and what I have are by only three artists - Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, and Fleetwood Mac.
Upon listening to the first two songs, I'm struck by how the lyrics of the songs reflect my life and how I feel about a lot of things. Into the soul, into the heart, into the dark - places we must go. Introspection and inner growth, something I think many people do not do enough of. So many people reach a certain point and simply stop thinking their own thoughts and instead parrot the news or their preacher or whomever. I value originality, but the world doesn't, does it? It doesn't seem to.
And then there's Sheryl Crow's Home, which is full of incredible longing and a song with a video that maybe Democrats should watch. They might understand why Mr. Trump won the 2016 election if they look closely. The video was made in 1996, I think. Not much has changed.
These are rather melancholy songs, full of longing and loneliness. These are the songs I listen to when I'm feeling sad and contemplative. They aren't dance tunes, they're thinking tunes.
I think I do a lot of thinking. Maybe even a little too much.
_____________
Linking up with the April challenge from Kwizgiver. April 20 done!
1. Talking to My Angel, by Melissa Etheridge
(Don't be afraid. Close your eyes. Lay it all down. Don't you cry. Can't you see I'm going where I can see the sun rise? I've been talking to my angel, and he said that it's alright.)
2. Into the Dark, by Melissa Etheridge
(There were stairs they were steep/I was falling falling deep/You were there you were small/
There was screaming down the hall/I've been here sleeping all these years/There comes a time we all know/There's a place that we must go/Into the soul into the heart/Into the dark.)
3. Home, by Sheryl Crow (The video for this song is incredible.)
(I woke up this morning/And now I understand/What it means to give your love/To just one man/
Afraid of feeling nothing/No bees or butterflies/My head is full of voices/And my house is full of lies/[Chorus] This is home, home/And this is home, home/This is home.)
My initial thought was this should be a pretty plain list, because I only have a couple of albums on my cellphone, and what I have are by only three artists - Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, and Fleetwood Mac.
Upon listening to the first two songs, I'm struck by how the lyrics of the songs reflect my life and how I feel about a lot of things. Into the soul, into the heart, into the dark - places we must go. Introspection and inner growth, something I think many people do not do enough of. So many people reach a certain point and simply stop thinking their own thoughts and instead parrot the news or their preacher or whomever. I value originality, but the world doesn't, does it? It doesn't seem to.
And then there's Sheryl Crow's Home, which is full of incredible longing and a song with a video that maybe Democrats should watch. They might understand why Mr. Trump won the 2016 election if they look closely. The video was made in 1996, I think. Not much has changed.
These are rather melancholy songs, full of longing and loneliness. These are the songs I listen to when I'm feeling sad and contemplative. They aren't dance tunes, they're thinking tunes.
I think I do a lot of thinking. Maybe even a little too much.
_____________
Linking up with the April challenge from Kwizgiver. April 20 done!
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Landing a Job When the Ads Are Gone
Not so long ago, or maybe now it was a lifetime ago, I never had trouble finding a job.
I was a speedy typist (95+ wpm) on an IBM Selectric II and as computers came onto the stage, I became a whiz at WordPerfect. I could do anything in WordPerfect in 1991. I could even do a little DOS programming if I had to.
Work was something I did because I felt I should, and while I didn't exactly know what I wanted to be - (a novelist, I always thought, though apparently not) - I had marketable skills that meant nearly very time I sent out a resume to a blind box advertisement in the jobs section of the newspaper, I at least merited an interview, if not the job.
My health caused me to change jobs more frequently than I liked. Unfortunately employers aren't very understanding when you need to take six weeks to recover from unexpected abdominal surgery, and that cut into my longevity with bosses a few times.
But I never worried about it. I took out the ol' job section, put a red circle around the openings that looked interesting to me, and sent off a resume. I was never out of work long.
Then the migraines came in the mid-1990s, and I realized after a while that I was not able to stay in a prolonged employment situation because let's face it, you can't do a decent job if you're sick three days out of every week. That was how frequently I was having migraines, and for how long. Three days. I would work through the headaches as much as I could, but I made mistakes when I felt bad, and I obviously wasn't able to give my best - well, I always gave my best at the time, but that "best" certainly couldn't measure up to the "best" before the migraines.
So I switched to freelancing for the local newspaper and other publications. It did not pay well, but it kept me busy. I could work when I felt like it and shut the blinds when I could no longer stand the light, and I was a good reporter. I wrote my little heart out and invested my soul in my words and in making educating the people via my sentences my life's work.
Then stuff happened. I'd put most of my effort into one basket, and that basket was bought and sold and it went bankrupt, and while it stayed afloat I lost that basket as a client. I wrote for other local publications for a while to fill the void but the economy was tanking and journalists locally were losing work and the competition became stiffer and I discovered I disliked writing for publications that were slanted a certain way. I also discovered that some local publications would just as soon steal your work and send you on your way than pay you.
I went back to college and earned my masters degree. I thought I'd teach at the college level, and I started out doing some adult learning programs and they were going along fine. Then I had another surgery.
Five years out I'm still not well. I have good days though, and on those days I think about going back to work. I think about freelancing, and the landscape looks even worse than it did in 2010, with fewer publications and many more that are slanted and not objective. I'm an objective journalist, or I was, anyway, and I find the slant eats at my soul. I want to keep my soul intact, thank you very much, so if I am going to hang on to my scruples I either need to take my freelancing to a more national level (which is a scary-as-hell thought, especially since I don't know how well I'd hold up under the strain of a major publication deadline) to find the more objective publications or I need to find a part-time job doing something to fill the time and help pay the cellphone bill.
Finding something part-time sounds easiest, but you know what? I don't know how to find a job anymore. There aren't any jobs in the local newspaper. Well, the newspaper advertises jobs for itself, if you want to be a circulation manage (which I don't), but if I wanted to know if there was a part-time job at some insurance company in Daleville, at the moment the only way I know to find out is to walk in the place and ask.
Looking for work is a whole new ballgame in our brave new world. Now you do it all online and you have to figure out which company is the best fit for you, not the other way around, although you still have to offer the company something that benefits them. It feels backwards from the way it used to be, when I could go to an interview and say, "I am an earnest worker, I always do my best, I type 95 wpm with 99% accuracy, I have a nice telephone voice, and I would like to help your company move forward." That is no longer good enough.
Now you interview the company first, sort of, online, to see if you want to work there, and then you send in an application (online) and hope to hear from somebody.
So here I sit with a masters degree and a sometimes desire to work that maybe could turn into a full-time desire if I actually found something part-time, but I don't know how to even begin the job search. Heck, resumes aren't even what they used to be. Which reminds me, I need a new one. Better add that to my "to do" list.
If you type in "how to find a job" you don't get a lot of help. There's no method to searching for work anymore, especially if you're, ahem, in the elder age brackets. Maybe things are different if you're jumping right of college where there are job assistance programs and such.
Finding a part-time work is actually a lot like freelancing. You send out queries when you freelance until you find the right editor who wants your work. Same now with resumes. You send one out until you find the right person.
But it sure seemed easier when all I had to do was put a red circle around the advertisement in the newspaper, address an envelope, slip in my resume, and wait for the response.
I was a speedy typist (95+ wpm) on an IBM Selectric II and as computers came onto the stage, I became a whiz at WordPerfect. I could do anything in WordPerfect in 1991. I could even do a little DOS programming if I had to.
Work was something I did because I felt I should, and while I didn't exactly know what I wanted to be - (a novelist, I always thought, though apparently not) - I had marketable skills that meant nearly very time I sent out a resume to a blind box advertisement in the jobs section of the newspaper, I at least merited an interview, if not the job.
My health caused me to change jobs more frequently than I liked. Unfortunately employers aren't very understanding when you need to take six weeks to recover from unexpected abdominal surgery, and that cut into my longevity with bosses a few times.
But I never worried about it. I took out the ol' job section, put a red circle around the openings that looked interesting to me, and sent off a resume. I was never out of work long.
Then the migraines came in the mid-1990s, and I realized after a while that I was not able to stay in a prolonged employment situation because let's face it, you can't do a decent job if you're sick three days out of every week. That was how frequently I was having migraines, and for how long. Three days. I would work through the headaches as much as I could, but I made mistakes when I felt bad, and I obviously wasn't able to give my best - well, I always gave my best at the time, but that "best" certainly couldn't measure up to the "best" before the migraines.
So I switched to freelancing for the local newspaper and other publications. It did not pay well, but it kept me busy. I could work when I felt like it and shut the blinds when I could no longer stand the light, and I was a good reporter. I wrote my little heart out and invested my soul in my words and in making educating the people via my sentences my life's work.
Then stuff happened. I'd put most of my effort into one basket, and that basket was bought and sold and it went bankrupt, and while it stayed afloat I lost that basket as a client. I wrote for other local publications for a while to fill the void but the economy was tanking and journalists locally were losing work and the competition became stiffer and I discovered I disliked writing for publications that were slanted a certain way. I also discovered that some local publications would just as soon steal your work and send you on your way than pay you.
I went back to college and earned my masters degree. I thought I'd teach at the college level, and I started out doing some adult learning programs and they were going along fine. Then I had another surgery.
Five years out I'm still not well. I have good days though, and on those days I think about going back to work. I think about freelancing, and the landscape looks even worse than it did in 2010, with fewer publications and many more that are slanted and not objective. I'm an objective journalist, or I was, anyway, and I find the slant eats at my soul. I want to keep my soul intact, thank you very much, so if I am going to hang on to my scruples I either need to take my freelancing to a more national level (which is a scary-as-hell thought, especially since I don't know how well I'd hold up under the strain of a major publication deadline) to find the more objective publications or I need to find a part-time job doing something to fill the time and help pay the cellphone bill.
Finding something part-time sounds easiest, but you know what? I don't know how to find a job anymore. There aren't any jobs in the local newspaper. Well, the newspaper advertises jobs for itself, if you want to be a circulation manage (which I don't), but if I wanted to know if there was a part-time job at some insurance company in Daleville, at the moment the only way I know to find out is to walk in the place and ask.
Looking for work is a whole new ballgame in our brave new world. Now you do it all online and you have to figure out which company is the best fit for you, not the other way around, although you still have to offer the company something that benefits them. It feels backwards from the way it used to be, when I could go to an interview and say, "I am an earnest worker, I always do my best, I type 95 wpm with 99% accuracy, I have a nice telephone voice, and I would like to help your company move forward." That is no longer good enough.
Now you interview the company first, sort of, online, to see if you want to work there, and then you send in an application (online) and hope to hear from somebody.
So here I sit with a masters degree and a sometimes desire to work that maybe could turn into a full-time desire if I actually found something part-time, but I don't know how to even begin the job search. Heck, resumes aren't even what they used to be. Which reminds me, I need a new one. Better add that to my "to do" list.
If you type in "how to find a job" you don't get a lot of help. There's no method to searching for work anymore, especially if you're, ahem, in the elder age brackets. Maybe things are different if you're jumping right of college where there are job assistance programs and such.
Finding a part-time work is actually a lot like freelancing. You send out queries when you freelance until you find the right editor who wants your work. Same now with resumes. You send one out until you find the right person.
But it sure seemed easier when all I had to do was put a red circle around the advertisement in the newspaper, address an envelope, slip in my resume, and wait for the response.
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
What's the Right Price?
I have always subscribed to magazines. My mother was a big magazine reader, and I looked forward to reading Reader's Digest, Woman's Day, True Story, and many others after she was finished with them.
Reader's Digest has been one I've read since childhood continuously. But I eventually lost interest in other magazines, like Cosmo. I found the articles repetitious or not germane to my life, and my subscriptions dwindled.
Writer's Digest was a staple for about 25 years, but I gave that up about 10 years ago. The articles seemed stale and I was busy earning a living with my writing and did not need that advice anymore.
For a long time I took O! The Oprah Magazine, but in September decided to stop it. I sent instructions online to halt my subscription because I wasn't renewing.
The magazine kept coming anyway. Finally, this last issue arrived, proclaiming "Final Issue."
Along with the proclamation came a "preferred renewal rate" of $19.97 for one year - plus I could give two people a year's subscription for free! (Of course, they would billed the next year.)
The same day that arrived in the mail, I received an invitation from O! for a one-year annual subscription to the magazine for . . . $8.00.
And also that same day, I received an envelope from Hearst magazines. It was a "We've missed you!" sale. It offered a variety of magazines, including some I used to subscribe to, like Redbook - and they were each only $5 for the first year.
O! was also included in this offer. For $5.00 in this advertisement, I could get a year of the magazine.
Now I confess $5 for a year's worth of a magazine is very enticing. But I recalled the clutter and the piles of magazines that I once had, and I read the fine print about the "continuous service program" wherein the subscription continues until you ask them to stop (and apparently, based on current experience, for months after you've asked them to stop). It really isn't worth the hassle.
I also wonder why I can't get the magazine for $5 in digital. I might subscribe to three or four of these for $5 each if I had the option to get them on my Kindle, PC, or smart phone instead of in paper. I might waste my money and ultimately never read them, but at least I wouldn't have to deal with the clutter.
It irked me too to have received on the same day an offer of three different prices for the same magazine. Obviously if I were going to subscribe again, I'd take the $5 deal.
From a marketing standpoint, I give this effort a Fail. First, I am not subscribing, regardless of the price, so their product is no longer something I find useful. (The clutter outweighs the advice, I guess.) Second, having three separate price quotes for the same magazine on the same day is just so . . . wrong. If they can afford to sell the magazine for $5 a year, then why offer it for $19.97? And why is it $4.50 a single issue if I pick it up at the grocery store?
(I looked up the digital edition of O! on Amazon. For my Kindle, it would cost me $19.99. Other Hearst magazines are available for $5 (Family Circle, which I used to receive, was one), but they have that stupid auto renew feature. I hate auto renew.)
I like all of these magazines. I suspect I will, at some point, pick one up from the newsstand on impulse and bring it home.
But for now, Reader's Digest will remain my lone magazine subscription. It is the one I have always read, and the one I expect I will always read, as long as it is published.
*As a writer, I feel guilty for not subscribing to more magazines. As the person who has to keep the trash picked up, I'm not sorry at all. I am sorry corporations believe auto renew is great, though, because I could have my magazine in digital if I could just by an annual subscription and be done with it.*
Reader's Digest has been one I've read since childhood continuously. But I eventually lost interest in other magazines, like Cosmo. I found the articles repetitious or not germane to my life, and my subscriptions dwindled.
Writer's Digest was a staple for about 25 years, but I gave that up about 10 years ago. The articles seemed stale and I was busy earning a living with my writing and did not need that advice anymore.
For a long time I took O! The Oprah Magazine, but in September decided to stop it. I sent instructions online to halt my subscription because I wasn't renewing.
The magazine kept coming anyway. Finally, this last issue arrived, proclaiming "Final Issue."
Along with the proclamation came a "preferred renewal rate" of $19.97 for one year - plus I could give two people a year's subscription for free! (Of course, they would billed the next year.)
The same day that arrived in the mail, I received an invitation from O! for a one-year annual subscription to the magazine for . . . $8.00.
And also that same day, I received an envelope from Hearst magazines. It was a "We've missed you!" sale. It offered a variety of magazines, including some I used to subscribe to, like Redbook - and they were each only $5 for the first year.
O! was also included in this offer. For $5.00 in this advertisement, I could get a year of the magazine.
Now I confess $5 for a year's worth of a magazine is very enticing. But I recalled the clutter and the piles of magazines that I once had, and I read the fine print about the "continuous service program" wherein the subscription continues until you ask them to stop (and apparently, based on current experience, for months after you've asked them to stop). It really isn't worth the hassle.
I also wonder why I can't get the magazine for $5 in digital. I might subscribe to three or four of these for $5 each if I had the option to get them on my Kindle, PC, or smart phone instead of in paper. I might waste my money and ultimately never read them, but at least I wouldn't have to deal with the clutter.
It irked me too to have received on the same day an offer of three different prices for the same magazine. Obviously if I were going to subscribe again, I'd take the $5 deal.
From a marketing standpoint, I give this effort a Fail. First, I am not subscribing, regardless of the price, so their product is no longer something I find useful. (The clutter outweighs the advice, I guess.) Second, having three separate price quotes for the same magazine on the same day is just so . . . wrong. If they can afford to sell the magazine for $5 a year, then why offer it for $19.97? And why is it $4.50 a single issue if I pick it up at the grocery store?
(I looked up the digital edition of O! on Amazon. For my Kindle, it would cost me $19.99. Other Hearst magazines are available for $5 (Family Circle, which I used to receive, was one), but they have that stupid auto renew feature. I hate auto renew.)
I like all of these magazines. I suspect I will, at some point, pick one up from the newsstand on impulse and bring it home.
But for now, Reader's Digest will remain my lone magazine subscription. It is the one I have always read, and the one I expect I will always read, as long as it is published.
*As a writer, I feel guilty for not subscribing to more magazines. As the person who has to keep the trash picked up, I'm not sorry at all. I am sorry corporations believe auto renew is great, though, because I could have my magazine in digital if I could just by an annual subscription and be done with it.*
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Money For Nothing
Because of some issues I'm having with my phone company, I started thinking today about all the ways we hand over hard-earned cash.
The phone company wants me to pay $3 a month to block a single irksome caller. It's a call that has no remedy as the call just rings one and a half times and that's it. Nobody is ever there when you pick up. I also know, because I asked on Facebook, that many others are receiving this call. But the phone company won't block the number unless I add call blocking to my phone. I refuse to pay for something I think the phone company should rectify. Ultimately, they are going to lose even more of my business because I'm going to get rid of voice mail and go back to an answering machine, and I'm also going to look into something other than their DSL for Internet. They stand to lose $100 a month over $3, if I can get it all sorted out.
Anyway, this brought to mind numerous other items that I pay for with minimal return. A head of lettuce is one. I buy lettuce because I'm supposed to eat healthy salads, but I haven't found a way to "process" lettuce so that it keeps for any period of time and is convenient. I find making a salad inconvenient as I am forced to spend 20 minutes making a healthy dish that I eat in 5 minutes. I may as well simply walk into a grocery store and say, here's $10, this is my "salad allotment" for the month, and walk out with nothing. Ultimately the salad fixings end up in the trash.
AOL also brought this to mind today because they've changed their log-in screen or something, and now I am having to log in with a password every time and I have three accounts. This is frustrating. I remember when AOL was the only access to the Internet for me, and so I paid for dial-up through it. Then after I was able to obtain dial-up through my local phone company, I no longer paid for AOL (by that time it had switched to a free version). I ignore the advertisements and use the email. However, I have a friend who still pays whatever she was paying for dial-up with AOL from way back when. I have suggested multiple times that she is paying for something she doesn't use, but to my knowledge she still pays it. I don't know how that keeps happening as credit cards expire but whatever.
This is why I dislike allowing companies to charge for things on your credit card automatically. It is too easy for a person to ignore the charge and for the company to simply take money. I had signed up for a trial run of a Zazzle Black account during the holiday season so I would get free shipping, and I forgot to cancel it within the one month period. I was dinged for the $9.95. That was my bad so I ate it.
Norton (virus protection) always wants to do its automatic charge and I turn that off, too. They charge the full price for automatic renewal, but you can always find a better deal and get it that way and save yourself $20 or more.
My mother-in-law was paying the phone company for a rotary dial phone rental - a phone that they had long since tossed. I finally convinced her to call and get the charge off of the bill. I wonder how many older folks are paying that fee on their phone bills when they haven't actually rented a phone from the phone company since 1965.
DirecTV is going up $5 on its charge on January 21, so we will once again be looking at our programming and trying to figure out how to deal with that. Here too there is a possibility we may simply pull out and take our business elsewhere.
Now we are trading money for air. Video games with "in game" purchases are raking in money in $0.99 increments. Every time someone gets stuck and pays the little $0.99 to move ahead, they are literally paying for their lack of patience. All of these games are winnable if people take the time to play them (sometimes over and over, but still, you are putting out your own time and not money). I personally prefer to pay for a full game up front and be done with it. I do not pay for in-game purchases but I know a lot of people do. I am playing one game that I bet people have paid $1,000 for in order to progress, based on the outrageous charges the company asks for the "diamonds" one needs to move forward quickly.
My point - and I do have one - is that we all need to be more careful in our purchases and watch our credit cards and bills. If you see something on a bill that you don't understand, call and ask about it. You may find out you're being charged for something you shouldn't be.
It's a crazy world we live in. Your job is to hold on to what you can make and hope it is enough to live on, and it's everyone else's job to try to take it away from you, apparently. That's capitalism for you. I hate it but I know it appeals to the innate greed of human nature.
Nothing to do but hang tight to my quarters and dimes, I guess.
The phone company wants me to pay $3 a month to block a single irksome caller. It's a call that has no remedy as the call just rings one and a half times and that's it. Nobody is ever there when you pick up. I also know, because I asked on Facebook, that many others are receiving this call. But the phone company won't block the number unless I add call blocking to my phone. I refuse to pay for something I think the phone company should rectify. Ultimately, they are going to lose even more of my business because I'm going to get rid of voice mail and go back to an answering machine, and I'm also going to look into something other than their DSL for Internet. They stand to lose $100 a month over $3, if I can get it all sorted out.
Anyway, this brought to mind numerous other items that I pay for with minimal return. A head of lettuce is one. I buy lettuce because I'm supposed to eat healthy salads, but I haven't found a way to "process" lettuce so that it keeps for any period of time and is convenient. I find making a salad inconvenient as I am forced to spend 20 minutes making a healthy dish that I eat in 5 minutes. I may as well simply walk into a grocery store and say, here's $10, this is my "salad allotment" for the month, and walk out with nothing. Ultimately the salad fixings end up in the trash.
AOL also brought this to mind today because they've changed their log-in screen or something, and now I am having to log in with a password every time and I have three accounts. This is frustrating. I remember when AOL was the only access to the Internet for me, and so I paid for dial-up through it. Then after I was able to obtain dial-up through my local phone company, I no longer paid for AOL (by that time it had switched to a free version). I ignore the advertisements and use the email. However, I have a friend who still pays whatever she was paying for dial-up with AOL from way back when. I have suggested multiple times that she is paying for something she doesn't use, but to my knowledge she still pays it. I don't know how that keeps happening as credit cards expire but whatever.
This is why I dislike allowing companies to charge for things on your credit card automatically. It is too easy for a person to ignore the charge and for the company to simply take money. I had signed up for a trial run of a Zazzle Black account during the holiday season so I would get free shipping, and I forgot to cancel it within the one month period. I was dinged for the $9.95. That was my bad so I ate it.
Norton (virus protection) always wants to do its automatic charge and I turn that off, too. They charge the full price for automatic renewal, but you can always find a better deal and get it that way and save yourself $20 or more.
My mother-in-law was paying the phone company for a rotary dial phone rental - a phone that they had long since tossed. I finally convinced her to call and get the charge off of the bill. I wonder how many older folks are paying that fee on their phone bills when they haven't actually rented a phone from the phone company since 1965.
DirecTV is going up $5 on its charge on January 21, so we will once again be looking at our programming and trying to figure out how to deal with that. Here too there is a possibility we may simply pull out and take our business elsewhere.
Now we are trading money for air. Video games with "in game" purchases are raking in money in $0.99 increments. Every time someone gets stuck and pays the little $0.99 to move ahead, they are literally paying for their lack of patience. All of these games are winnable if people take the time to play them (sometimes over and over, but still, you are putting out your own time and not money). I personally prefer to pay for a full game up front and be done with it. I do not pay for in-game purchases but I know a lot of people do. I am playing one game that I bet people have paid $1,000 for in order to progress, based on the outrageous charges the company asks for the "diamonds" one needs to move forward quickly.
My point - and I do have one - is that we all need to be more careful in our purchases and watch our credit cards and bills. If you see something on a bill that you don't understand, call and ask about it. You may find out you're being charged for something you shouldn't be.
It's a crazy world we live in. Your job is to hold on to what you can make and hope it is enough to live on, and it's everyone else's job to try to take it away from you, apparently. That's capitalism for you. I hate it but I know it appeals to the innate greed of human nature.
Nothing to do but hang tight to my quarters and dimes, I guess.
Monday, January 08, 2018
When That New Day Dawns
So last night at the Golden Globe Awards, this happened:
It perplexes me not because it is a movement, or unnecessary, but because what is required is a massive cultural upheaval if women are to finally be seen as human beings and not as chattel for men, particularly white men. Women have been viewed in that manner since before Christ came along, so this is not something that will change simply because a few women find their voice.
We all have to find our voices, and that takes a lot of strength, resistance, and resilience that not every person has.
Such a massive cultural upheaval is not going to come about while one third of the country stands firm in its reverence for somebody who's been divorced several times, has demeaned women publicly, and is a known playboy with tapes of sexual innuendoes floating around the internet. It's not going to take place while men hold the majority of leadership roles. Nor is it going to come about simply because women who also hold power, such as Winfrey, decide it is time for a change.
I read somewhere that feminists are bracing for a backlash against this #metoo movement. I've been waiting for that as well. I've also read that some feminists are tired of it, because it so compellingly shows how easily women are victims and victimized. It also implies that women are unable to stand up for themselves, something a strong woman, or a woman who has not been beaten over the head by the indoctrination of the patriarchy from a young age, may be unable to understand (although I sincerely do not believe there is a single woman on this planet who has not, at some point, been a victim of the patriarchy, or, to put it simply, belittled by a man).
The problem begins, I'm afraid, at home, and it will be generations before this type of change takes hold. That isn't to say we shouldn't work hard at making it happen, because of course we should, but we're not exactly a society here in the U.S. that holds free parental courses for young fathers and mothers so that they know how to raise a son who doesn't go out and rape women. We don't even meet people's basic needs here, much less do something that innovative.
Another issue is language. We almost always use the passive voice when describing victims. "She was raped by the guy in the white van." "He was abused by the coach." That puts the onus on the victim, making it the victims' fault that such things happen to them. We must change our language. "He raped her." "He abused the boy." "She abused the young teenager." (Because yes, women are abusers, too.) We need to watch what comes out of our mouths and what we put on paper.
Lastly, changing this requires awareness when power struggles are happening. The control issue between white men and women is a particular concern for me because it happens so easily and so seemingly innocently. For example, around Christmas, I was watching a type of bloopers real from a local TV station. The reporters had chosen folks to give money to, and they took them shopping. Sounds nice enough, right?
The ick factor took over as I watched nearly every white man who was a money recipient turn toward a female reporter in these clips and ask for a hug. As a long-time journalist, I have run across this myself many times. There is always some white man - and it is always a white man - who thinks that because he has graced you with his time or whatever it is that he thinks, you owe him a hug.
The reporters in the stories obeyed the request and gave the hug. Now, given the season and the reason, maybe a hug was appropriate, but if the guy wouldn't ask a male reporter for a hug at the end of the story, then it wasn't appropriate. That is a good marker for heterosexual men to follow. If you wouldn't ask a guy at the end of an interview for a hug, then you don't ask the female reporter for one, either.
But they do ask, and we oblige, because we were brought up to oblige. Nobody has ever taught me a nice but polite way to say "no" to some man who wants to hold me for two Mississippis longer than he should during a hug. Nobody has told me what I am supposed to do if I oblige with the hug request and then feel the guy's penis go "boing" and poke me in the gut. Generally I get away as fast as I can, and I frequently say, "I'm sorry, but I'm catching a cold and don't want to give it to you," if some idiot asks for a hug and I'm not feeling very obliging. But sometimes they catch you off guard. I mean, I've had men I know walk up behind me and whirl me around for a hug. Would they have done that to a male reporter? No. Is that assault? I honestly don't know. I know it makes me uncomfortable and it's not welcome. Did it hurt me? Not physically. But mentally, every unwanted hug adds to my sense of loss of self, and it adds to the hug-giver's sense of entitlement.
I have a lovely niece who just turned 16. The very idea that she will have to endure these hugs, squeezes, and smooshes from various dirty old men, as I have done, makes my skin crawl. However, I feel sure she has already experienced this and it hasn't even occurred to her that it is wrong. Nor has it occurred to her father (though it might now, as I know he reads my blog) to teach her that if a man touches her, she has every right to elbow him in the face and break his nose. She needs to be taught a polite way to tell a man "no" if he wants a hug.
Not every hug is bad, of course. People need to use commonsense. Friends hug. Couples hug. Dates hug, but I didn't date every guy who wanted a hug and neither will my niece. And my niece has the right to say no, and she should, and she should know she has that right. She also needs to know that her parents, and her aunt (me), and society as a whole will back her up. That last one is what is missing, because society, as a whole, will not. The guy will stand there with a bloody nose, saying, "What did I do?" and everyone will ask my niece what she thought she was doing, breaking this guy's nose, and she will be portrayed as bad when all she was doing was defending her boundaries.
We have a right to our boundaries, all of us.
This is a very complex topic, and it is not going to be fixed anytime soon. Whatever backlash comes about is not going to be pretty, and it will be the lower class women who pay for it, not the ones with power and prestige like Winfrey. I appreciate their efforts, as well as her acknowledgement that the problem is cultural and all around us. But I would also like to see productive efforts, like more women in politics and in leadership positions, parenting classes, and efforts to change the language as I mentioned above. I will do my best from now on to say, "No," to unwanted advances, and I will try to watch my language and turn things around so that the abuser is the subject of the sentence, not the victim. I hope everyone decides to make an effort - and that includes men who don't want to see their daughters manhandled or their wives felt up on the job - so that women can finally be seen as equals, and human.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Oprah Winfrey became the first black woman to be awarded a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement on Sunday, delivering an impassioned speech in support of those who have exposed sexual misconduct in Hollywood and beyond.
Actress, movie and television producer, and chief executive of her OWN cable channel, Winfrey, 63, was celebrated as a role model for women and a person who has promoted strong female characters.
Her honor came in a year when the awards show, Hollywood’s first leading up to the Oscars, was dominated by a scandal that has seen the downfall of dozens of powerful men as women break years of silence.
Winfrey, who along with most of the show’s other attendees donned a black gown to show support for victims of sexual misconduct, was the first black woman to receive the annual Cecil B. De Mille award, joining the likes of Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand and Sophia Loren.
Winfrey used her speech to praise women who have shared their stories of sexual harassment and abuse, and to declare that “a new day is on the horizon” for girls and women.
“And when that new day finally dawns it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure they become leaders that take us to the time where nobody has to say ‘me too’ again,” Winfrey said, referencing the social media movement raising awareness about sexual harassment. (Click here for article.)Winfrey was referencing the #metoo movement and the spat of sexual harassment allegations against a variety of high-powered men in the entertainment industry and in the political arena. It's a movement I've followed with interest, though it also perplexes me.
It perplexes me not because it is a movement, or unnecessary, but because what is required is a massive cultural upheaval if women are to finally be seen as human beings and not as chattel for men, particularly white men. Women have been viewed in that manner since before Christ came along, so this is not something that will change simply because a few women find their voice.
We all have to find our voices, and that takes a lot of strength, resistance, and resilience that not every person has.
Such a massive cultural upheaval is not going to come about while one third of the country stands firm in its reverence for somebody who's been divorced several times, has demeaned women publicly, and is a known playboy with tapes of sexual innuendoes floating around the internet. It's not going to take place while men hold the majority of leadership roles. Nor is it going to come about simply because women who also hold power, such as Winfrey, decide it is time for a change.
I read somewhere that feminists are bracing for a backlash against this #metoo movement. I've been waiting for that as well. I've also read that some feminists are tired of it, because it so compellingly shows how easily women are victims and victimized. It also implies that women are unable to stand up for themselves, something a strong woman, or a woman who has not been beaten over the head by the indoctrination of the patriarchy from a young age, may be unable to understand (although I sincerely do not believe there is a single woman on this planet who has not, at some point, been a victim of the patriarchy, or, to put it simply, belittled by a man).
The problem begins, I'm afraid, at home, and it will be generations before this type of change takes hold. That isn't to say we shouldn't work hard at making it happen, because of course we should, but we're not exactly a society here in the U.S. that holds free parental courses for young fathers and mothers so that they know how to raise a son who doesn't go out and rape women. We don't even meet people's basic needs here, much less do something that innovative.
Another issue is language. We almost always use the passive voice when describing victims. "She was raped by the guy in the white van." "He was abused by the coach." That puts the onus on the victim, making it the victims' fault that such things happen to them. We must change our language. "He raped her." "He abused the boy." "She abused the young teenager." (Because yes, women are abusers, too.) We need to watch what comes out of our mouths and what we put on paper.
Lastly, changing this requires awareness when power struggles are happening. The control issue between white men and women is a particular concern for me because it happens so easily and so seemingly innocently. For example, around Christmas, I was watching a type of bloopers real from a local TV station. The reporters had chosen folks to give money to, and they took them shopping. Sounds nice enough, right?
The ick factor took over as I watched nearly every white man who was a money recipient turn toward a female reporter in these clips and ask for a hug. As a long-time journalist, I have run across this myself many times. There is always some white man - and it is always a white man - who thinks that because he has graced you with his time or whatever it is that he thinks, you owe him a hug.
The reporters in the stories obeyed the request and gave the hug. Now, given the season and the reason, maybe a hug was appropriate, but if the guy wouldn't ask a male reporter for a hug at the end of the story, then it wasn't appropriate. That is a good marker for heterosexual men to follow. If you wouldn't ask a guy at the end of an interview for a hug, then you don't ask the female reporter for one, either.
But they do ask, and we oblige, because we were brought up to oblige. Nobody has ever taught me a nice but polite way to say "no" to some man who wants to hold me for two Mississippis longer than he should during a hug. Nobody has told me what I am supposed to do if I oblige with the hug request and then feel the guy's penis go "boing" and poke me in the gut. Generally I get away as fast as I can, and I frequently say, "I'm sorry, but I'm catching a cold and don't want to give it to you," if some idiot asks for a hug and I'm not feeling very obliging. But sometimes they catch you off guard. I mean, I've had men I know walk up behind me and whirl me around for a hug. Would they have done that to a male reporter? No. Is that assault? I honestly don't know. I know it makes me uncomfortable and it's not welcome. Did it hurt me? Not physically. But mentally, every unwanted hug adds to my sense of loss of self, and it adds to the hug-giver's sense of entitlement.
I have a lovely niece who just turned 16. The very idea that she will have to endure these hugs, squeezes, and smooshes from various dirty old men, as I have done, makes my skin crawl. However, I feel sure she has already experienced this and it hasn't even occurred to her that it is wrong. Nor has it occurred to her father (though it might now, as I know he reads my blog) to teach her that if a man touches her, she has every right to elbow him in the face and break his nose. She needs to be taught a polite way to tell a man "no" if he wants a hug.
Not every hug is bad, of course. People need to use commonsense. Friends hug. Couples hug. Dates hug, but I didn't date every guy who wanted a hug and neither will my niece. And my niece has the right to say no, and she should, and she should know she has that right. She also needs to know that her parents, and her aunt (me), and society as a whole will back her up. That last one is what is missing, because society, as a whole, will not. The guy will stand there with a bloody nose, saying, "What did I do?" and everyone will ask my niece what she thought she was doing, breaking this guy's nose, and she will be portrayed as bad when all she was doing was defending her boundaries.
We have a right to our boundaries, all of us.
This is a very complex topic, and it is not going to be fixed anytime soon. Whatever backlash comes about is not going to be pretty, and it will be the lower class women who pay for it, not the ones with power and prestige like Winfrey. I appreciate their efforts, as well as her acknowledgement that the problem is cultural and all around us. But I would also like to see productive efforts, like more women in politics and in leadership positions, parenting classes, and efforts to change the language as I mentioned above. I will do my best from now on to say, "No," to unwanted advances, and I will try to watch my language and turn things around so that the abuser is the subject of the sentence, not the victim. I hope everyone decides to make an effort - and that includes men who don't want to see their daughters manhandled or their wives felt up on the job - so that women can finally be seen as equals, and human.
Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Locked Doors
Yesterday as Christmas Day progressed, I opened the door to check the doorbell because the power had blinked and sometimes that makes the doorbell stop working.
I was overcome with a memory of opening the door to the my grandmother's house on Christmas Day. The thing that struck me was how it always happened - my mother simply opened the door and walked in, and there was Grandma.
The door was always unlocked. We always simply turned the knob and walked inside.
My door is always locked.
This made me sad, and I unlocked my door because for one thing I knew my nephews were on their way over, and for another, what has happened to me that I have to have the door locked all the time?
It is, of course, a sign of our trying and frequently tragic times, plus the fact that my grandmother was seldom alone. She may have been the only adult in the house, but she wasn't alone - there were always kids around. I suppose on Christmas she would have been expecting us, so of course the door would be unlocked, but I don't remember ever having to stop and knock on my grandmother's door to enter. I may have done so out of courtesy as I grew older, but I also know I could have simply walked in.
I'm not sure what this memory means, though I can see where the day and my checking the doorbell, the sound of the door opening, the cold air, etc., would have reminded me of such a specific time and moment.
May we all have fewer locked doors in 2018. I think that would be a good world to go back to, one where knocking is an option, and you know you're always welcome, wherever it is you go.
I was overcome with a memory of opening the door to the my grandmother's house on Christmas Day. The thing that struck me was how it always happened - my mother simply opened the door and walked in, and there was Grandma.
The door was always unlocked. We always simply turned the knob and walked inside.
My door is always locked.
This made me sad, and I unlocked my door because for one thing I knew my nephews were on their way over, and for another, what has happened to me that I have to have the door locked all the time?
It is, of course, a sign of our trying and frequently tragic times, plus the fact that my grandmother was seldom alone. She may have been the only adult in the house, but she wasn't alone - there were always kids around. I suppose on Christmas she would have been expecting us, so of course the door would be unlocked, but I don't remember ever having to stop and knock on my grandmother's door to enter. I may have done so out of courtesy as I grew older, but I also know I could have simply walked in.
I'm not sure what this memory means, though I can see where the day and my checking the doorbell, the sound of the door opening, the cold air, etc., would have reminded me of such a specific time and moment.
May we all have fewer locked doors in 2018. I think that would be a good world to go back to, one where knocking is an option, and you know you're always welcome, wherever it is you go.
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
The Language We Use
I have been thinking a lot about language lately.
My mother hated to be called "lady." As in, "Hey lady, you forgot your grocery bag!" or something. She said that lady was the name of a dog.
I rather like being called lady. For one thing, it doesn't have "man" in it - as in "wo-man." My Shorter Oxford says "woman" is now frequently used pejoratively, as in, "Woman, bring me some more bacon." It is an old word, dating back to Old English and beyond, and mostly refers to "wife."
I think "lady" denotes a better since of personhood, a human being of the feminine (I also like "feminine" better than "fe-male" for similar reasons). It is also an ancient word, but of higher status than "woman."
Okay, so I am being picky. But language is important, in spite of those who are now eschewing education and other forms of higher learning.
For example, our illustrious curse-word-user-in-chief called a bunch of football players sons-of-bitches.
That particular bad language is a throwback on women. Because bitches are female dogs. And bitch is the word most often used with women. Misogynists like to talk like that.
I mean, he could have called them dickheads. Or penis brains. Or assholes. Everybody has one of those; sex is irrelevant there.
There is also that nice word "bastard," which again is a throw-back to the mother. This is Old French, and it refers to someone born out of wedlock, an "illegitimate" child. Which in an of itself is a freaky thing to think, that a person is "illegitimate" for any reason.
Other words like fuck or screw, also refer to violation of a woman.
Think about it. Can you name a curse word that doesn't refer back to the female? I can't, except for maybe "damn." I suppose the curse-word-user-in-chief could have called them dickheads. Or penis brains. Or assholes. Everybody has one of those; sex is irrelevant there.
Our words matter. Language matters. It is being dumbed down every day and we have limited our sentences to 140 characters (that is now 280 as of November 2017 - somebody at twitter decided we needed to be able to complete a sentence, perhaps. Or maybe they hoped it would help the twitter-in-chief write more legibly.).
I am a writer, and when I misuse the language, 999 times out of 1000, it is intentional. I'm doing it to achieve a specific goal. But many people misuse language without thinking about it. Sometimes it turns out ok.
But then other times, you're calling the mothers of football players doggies, and that's just not the thing to do.
My mother hated to be called "lady." As in, "Hey lady, you forgot your grocery bag!" or something. She said that lady was the name of a dog.
I rather like being called lady. For one thing, it doesn't have "man" in it - as in "wo-man." My Shorter Oxford says "woman" is now frequently used pejoratively, as in, "Woman, bring me some more bacon." It is an old word, dating back to Old English and beyond, and mostly refers to "wife."
I think "lady" denotes a better since of personhood, a human being of the feminine (I also like "feminine" better than "fe-male" for similar reasons). It is also an ancient word, but of higher status than "woman."
Okay, so I am being picky. But language is important, in spite of those who are now eschewing education and other forms of higher learning.
For example, our illustrious curse-word-user-in-chief called a bunch of football players sons-of-bitches.
That particular bad language is a throwback on women. Because bitches are female dogs. And bitch is the word most often used with women. Misogynists like to talk like that.
I mean, he could have called them dickheads. Or penis brains. Or assholes. Everybody has one of those; sex is irrelevant there.
There is also that nice word "bastard," which again is a throw-back to the mother. This is Old French, and it refers to someone born out of wedlock, an "illegitimate" child. Which in an of itself is a freaky thing to think, that a person is "illegitimate" for any reason.
Other words like fuck or screw, also refer to violation of a woman.
Think about it. Can you name a curse word that doesn't refer back to the female? I can't, except for maybe "damn." I suppose the curse-word-user-in-chief could have called them dickheads. Or penis brains. Or assholes. Everybody has one of those; sex is irrelevant there.
Our words matter. Language matters. It is being dumbed down every day and we have limited our sentences to 140 characters (that is now 280 as of November 2017 - somebody at twitter decided we needed to be able to complete a sentence, perhaps. Or maybe they hoped it would help the twitter-in-chief write more legibly.).
I am a writer, and when I misuse the language, 999 times out of 1000, it is intentional. I'm doing it to achieve a specific goal. But many people misuse language without thinking about it. Sometimes it turns out ok.
But then other times, you're calling the mothers of football players doggies, and that's just not the thing to do.
Wednesday, December 06, 2017
#MeToo
Today, Time magazine announced its "Person of the Year." Or more to the point, it named a group of women who stepped forward to denounce predominate abuse of females by males as its top choice for great applause.
I haven't read the article. I don't know who these women are. I am not even sure who they stepped forward against. Maybe they spoke out against our current sexual predator-in-chief. Maybe they spoke out against some senator or congressman or local council person. It doesn't really matter.
What matters is, they spoke out. And they created a movement, one that we all saw move around the world with the Women's March back in the early part of the year, and one which continued when women in Virginia took more seats in the House of Delegates, and more women ran for office, than ever before.
It's a movement that has long been in the works. It goes back before Anita Hill spoke out against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It goes back into the annals of time to voices long forgotten and drowned out by the muscle and upper body strength of the patriarchy, whose belief in the power of the penis has overcome, with brute strength and great hypocrisy, the delicate sureness of the power of the womb and the heart.
It is past time to take that power back, ladies.
I was five when a man first showed me his penis and asked me to touch it.
My Jane West dolls became targets for my slightly older uncles, who drew bulls-eyes around the breasts of her blue shirt, and colored on the insides of her thighs.
At 9, as my breasts began to bud out, a boy four years my senior dared me to take off my shirt and let him touch me.
In school, boys snapped my bra, backed me against doors, slid their hands down my pants. My cries of "leave me alone," were laughed off and ignored.
When I was around 12, my father took me to a doctor who slapped me across the face, telling me not to talk back to my dad. I don't remember what I said to cause this, but I do remember my father's reaction. He did not defend me. He just said, "You deserved that." A good parent would have hauled me away from that doctor and out the door, but my father laughed it off. And the doctor was an asshole and I refused to see him again. When I learned years later that he had had a bad motorcycle accident, I confess, I was glad.
When I was 14, one of my father's friends, visiting from out of state, was constantly cornering me and trying to stick his hands down my pants. I tried to stay away from him. Finally, his wife confronted me and accused me of "luring her husband" away from her by wearing shorts. Like I knew anything about luring anybody at that age. Her husband was just a lecherous old bastard and I was glad when they stopped visiting.
At 15, a biology teacher told every one of his classes that breasts were just "mounds of modified tissue." For weeks, girls all around the school endured boys running around tweaking their titties, and when the girl said something the boy "innocently" said, "Hey, they're just mounds of modified tissue, what's the big deal?" I think the teacher was trying to ward off the very thing that came about, but I hope he never told another class that.
At 16, another of my father's friends cornered me against the fence in the parking lot where I was working that summer as a receptionist at my father's place of business. He stuck his tongue down my throat and rammed himself against me so hard I thought he broke my back as he shoved me into a post.
At 18, working at a job I hated, where I was placed in the back part of the building in the "parts department," the men would come in and leer at me. One of them constantly walked up behind me and cupped my breasts, no matter how many times I slapped his hands away. He thought it hilarious. It made me angry, defensive, and scared. I finally told him I had a steady boyfriend who would come and beat the hell out of him if I told him what he was doing. When he didn't believe me, I had my boyfriend come and pick me up at work one day. Nobody bothered me after that. (Thank you, my darling husband, for being a big guy who looks like he could knock the teeth out of anybody he wanted.)
Another of my father's friends called me at a different job one day, after seeing my boyfriend and I making out in the car. He said if I would sleep with him he wouldn't tell my parents I was necking with my boyfriend on the backroads. I told him to go to hell. (And my father recently asked me why I didn't like his friends. Go figure.)
Married now, suffering from mental exhaustion from overwork and trying to go to college, all while having multiple surgeries and fighting depression and tears because I wanted and couldn't have children, a man in a repair store grabbed my arm when I took my computer in to be fixed and forced me behind the counter, where he slid his hand down my pants. I called my friend who worked for the local sheriff and reported him; after a visit from deputies, the man closed up shop and ran away to another state. I hope I saved some other woman that humiliation.
I also took a self defense class.
In the late 1990s, a deputy backed me against a corner in a courthouse, putting his hand on my waist and daring me to say or do something as he moved in closer. I felt for his hand, grabbed his thumb, and pushed it back as hard as I could, making the asshole fall to his knees. I then gave him a kick where it counts, and ran.
This doesn't count the multitude of male doctors who have belittled me, talked over me, not listened to, or otherwise discounted my health issues simply because I was just a hysterical female. Jerks, every damn one of them. It doesn't count the members of the opposite sex who think they have the right to try to give me a hug, or to otherwise pull me up against them, simply because I am female. (Here's a clue: if you'd just give a guy a handshake, then you do the same with a woman.)
These are just a few of the humiliations I have suffered at the hands of so-called men. I am just one woman with a multitude of experiences, and these kinds of atrocities can be multiplied millions of times over, probably at least 10 experiences for every woman, some traumatic, some tolerable, none acceptable. These perpetrators are not men, they are monsters. And monsters do not deserve to be on the cover of Time magazine, and their exploits should be called out for what they are - crimes against another person.
#metoo
I haven't read the article. I don't know who these women are. I am not even sure who they stepped forward against. Maybe they spoke out against our current sexual predator-in-chief. Maybe they spoke out against some senator or congressman or local council person. It doesn't really matter.
What matters is, they spoke out. And they created a movement, one that we all saw move around the world with the Women's March back in the early part of the year, and one which continued when women in Virginia took more seats in the House of Delegates, and more women ran for office, than ever before.
It's a movement that has long been in the works. It goes back before Anita Hill spoke out against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It goes back into the annals of time to voices long forgotten and drowned out by the muscle and upper body strength of the patriarchy, whose belief in the power of the penis has overcome, with brute strength and great hypocrisy, the delicate sureness of the power of the womb and the heart.
It is past time to take that power back, ladies.
I was five when a man first showed me his penis and asked me to touch it.
My Jane West dolls became targets for my slightly older uncles, who drew bulls-eyes around the breasts of her blue shirt, and colored on the insides of her thighs.
At 9, as my breasts began to bud out, a boy four years my senior dared me to take off my shirt and let him touch me.
In school, boys snapped my bra, backed me against doors, slid their hands down my pants. My cries of "leave me alone," were laughed off and ignored.
When I was around 12, my father took me to a doctor who slapped me across the face, telling me not to talk back to my dad. I don't remember what I said to cause this, but I do remember my father's reaction. He did not defend me. He just said, "You deserved that." A good parent would have hauled me away from that doctor and out the door, but my father laughed it off. And the doctor was an asshole and I refused to see him again. When I learned years later that he had had a bad motorcycle accident, I confess, I was glad.
When I was 14, one of my father's friends, visiting from out of state, was constantly cornering me and trying to stick his hands down my pants. I tried to stay away from him. Finally, his wife confronted me and accused me of "luring her husband" away from her by wearing shorts. Like I knew anything about luring anybody at that age. Her husband was just a lecherous old bastard and I was glad when they stopped visiting.
At 15, a biology teacher told every one of his classes that breasts were just "mounds of modified tissue." For weeks, girls all around the school endured boys running around tweaking their titties, and when the girl said something the boy "innocently" said, "Hey, they're just mounds of modified tissue, what's the big deal?" I think the teacher was trying to ward off the very thing that came about, but I hope he never told another class that.
At 16, another of my father's friends cornered me against the fence in the parking lot where I was working that summer as a receptionist at my father's place of business. He stuck his tongue down my throat and rammed himself against me so hard I thought he broke my back as he shoved me into a post.
At 18, working at a job I hated, where I was placed in the back part of the building in the "parts department," the men would come in and leer at me. One of them constantly walked up behind me and cupped my breasts, no matter how many times I slapped his hands away. He thought it hilarious. It made me angry, defensive, and scared. I finally told him I had a steady boyfriend who would come and beat the hell out of him if I told him what he was doing. When he didn't believe me, I had my boyfriend come and pick me up at work one day. Nobody bothered me after that. (Thank you, my darling husband, for being a big guy who looks like he could knock the teeth out of anybody he wanted.)
Another of my father's friends called me at a different job one day, after seeing my boyfriend and I making out in the car. He said if I would sleep with him he wouldn't tell my parents I was necking with my boyfriend on the backroads. I told him to go to hell. (And my father recently asked me why I didn't like his friends. Go figure.)
Married now, suffering from mental exhaustion from overwork and trying to go to college, all while having multiple surgeries and fighting depression and tears because I wanted and couldn't have children, a man in a repair store grabbed my arm when I took my computer in to be fixed and forced me behind the counter, where he slid his hand down my pants. I called my friend who worked for the local sheriff and reported him; after a visit from deputies, the man closed up shop and ran away to another state. I hope I saved some other woman that humiliation.
I also took a self defense class.
In the late 1990s, a deputy backed me against a corner in a courthouse, putting his hand on my waist and daring me to say or do something as he moved in closer. I felt for his hand, grabbed his thumb, and pushed it back as hard as I could, making the asshole fall to his knees. I then gave him a kick where it counts, and ran.
This doesn't count the multitude of male doctors who have belittled me, talked over me, not listened to, or otherwise discounted my health issues simply because I was just a hysterical female. Jerks, every damn one of them. It doesn't count the members of the opposite sex who think they have the right to try to give me a hug, or to otherwise pull me up against them, simply because I am female. (Here's a clue: if you'd just give a guy a handshake, then you do the same with a woman.)
These are just a few of the humiliations I have suffered at the hands of so-called men. I am just one woman with a multitude of experiences, and these kinds of atrocities can be multiplied millions of times over, probably at least 10 experiences for every woman, some traumatic, some tolerable, none acceptable. These perpetrators are not men, they are monsters. And monsters do not deserve to be on the cover of Time magazine, and their exploits should be called out for what they are - crimes against another person.
#metoo
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Suicide is Painless
Historians disagree on the real reason that the Roman empire collapsed. Was there an actual date? Many people, I suspect, think it died when Caesar was killed in 44 BC, because we all know about that, but said event did not end an empire.
The Roman empire continued for another 500 years. Its western half went to pieces in the year 476 AD, but its eastern half remained for another 1,000 years as the Byzantine empire.
Countries, empires, nations, states, towns - they come, they go. Here in my little county there are numerous little areas on the maps that once were populated communities. Lithia. Nace. Spec. Oriskany. Lignite. Haymakertown. Trinity. Horrytown. All gone, just names of areas now, a way to give someone a general idea of a specific location in a fairly large geographical area.
These places did not, as a rule, die overnight from one lethal blow. Most of the communities evaporated gradually as resources dried up, large companies turned their attention (and their accompanying fortunes) elsewhere, or some natural calamity occurred. Many of these communities produced iron ore before, during and after the Civil War, but when that no longer became a desired commodity, the little towns died away.
I fear, rightly or wrongly, that the United States is in the process of committing suicide. It will be a long, slow death, I imagine, and we may take down a good portion of the globe with us when we finally cease being the monstrous global demon that chomps on the resources of the world. We may already be eating our own tail.
In any event, I wanted to see what history might have to say about the fall of nations because we forget the lessons of the past. Many states have rose to power and died. I thought I'd look very far back.
Why did Rome fall?
The western half fell in 476 AD from an invasion by Germanic tribes. The Romans and the Goths and Vandals had long been at war, and that year Rome, Italy fell to a Germanic tribe. From then on, no ruler claimed dominion from Italy.
But the empire was already in trouble. The economy was suffering from a wide and ever-growing gap between rich and poor. The nation-state had severe financial troubles. To avoid taxation, wealthy members fled and set up little fiefdoms. Trade and crafts were dependent largely on slave labor, and as expansion failed, so too did the availability of people to exploit. Commercial and agriculture production declined.
However, as the western portion of the empire declined, its eastern half, centered around Constantinople (Byzantium), grew. Constantinople tended to be well-fortified and well-guarded, but Italy - not so much. When Rome was taken, the Byzantium empire remained in power until the 1400s, when the Ottoman Empire overwhelmed it.
The Roman empire at its height, before the west fell, was vast. It stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates River in the Middle East. Communication was poor, and keeping troops in strange and far-away lands became problematic. Frontiers were constantly attacked, taken, and reclaimed. As the military ate up more funds, technological advancement slowed, and infrastructure declined and was not repaired.
Rome's other issue was ineffective and inconsistent leadership. Internal strife kept the empire in chaos. At one point, during the span of 75 years, there were more than 20 men who claimed the title of emperor, usually after the murder of their predecessor. The army began assassination and installing new leaders as they pleased - once they even auctioned off the spot to the highest bidder. The Roman Senate also was full of political foul play, with politicians who failed to halt the political rot that allowed the wealthy to take advantage of those who were less fortunate. The Roman Senate was full of corruption and incompetence. As things worsened, civic pride died and citizens lost faith in the government and its leadership.
Immigration is not a new problem. The Romans grudgingly allowed members of the Visigoth tribe to cross its borders in the 4th century, but they treated the intruders poorly and cruelly. According to some reports, the Romans even forced families to trade their children with slavers in exchange for dog meat to eat in order to keep from starving. This kind of brutal treatment created enemies and eventually the oppressed people rose in revolt.
Another issue was the rise of religion. Christianity began to move in and take the place of the polytheistic Roman religion. Before this, the emperor was considered a divine being and in a sense, worshipped. But Christianity shifted the emphasis from the glory of the state onto that of a solitary divinity. Additionally, popes and other church leaders took on more important roles in the lives of ordinary people and then began to have an increased role in political affairs. This complicated governance. Some scholars believe Christianity played a role in curbing Roman civic virtue, which led to the empire's decline.
Lastly, the Romans ended up with an army composed mostly of mercenaries and not people who were loyal to the country. As the empire grew in size, emperors were unable to recruit enough soldiers, so they hired Germanic tribes to help keep order, particularly in frontier areas. However, these groups had no loyalty to the government, and power-hungry generals were able to easily turn the men against Rome. In fact, many of the soldiers who eventually brought down Rome in 476 AD were, in fact, Roman soldiers.
These are some of the reasons historians cite for the decline of the western half of the Roman Empire. There are others and of course much disagreement about all of them and the roles they played.
However, how many of these reasons can we point to today and say, with not a little alarm, that the United States is in a similar predicament?
Are we being kind to immigrants and others who are not like ourselves?
Are we taking care of our infrastructure?
Do we not have a growing gap between rich and poor?
Has our manufacturing and job growth, theoretically speaking, stagnated, particularly in regions outside of large cities where technology jobs cannot be found? (Let's bring back coal . . . )
Is our nation too big, geographically? We extend from one ocean to another. Is it reasonable to think that such a large land area is going to work together for a common good?
Do the words "political rot" sound familiar?
Does religion have too much influence in government?
No, we are not an exact parallel to the Roman Empire, thank goodness. We have progressed as human beings, though sometimes I wonder just how much. I do think, though, that there are enough parallels there that it should bring pause to anyone who wants to see the United States thrive and stand as a world leader.
There are those who want the United States to fall. Maybe we deserve that. Maybe our government has interfered and badgered and cajoled other nations so much that we deserve the bad reputation we have in other arenas.
But our people, on the whole, are not bad people, and I don't want anyone to suffer or for the United States to become a flailing and failing military power, the one that other nations point to with disgust - or at least, not with any more disgust than they already do. Believe it or not, we are not the most beloved nation in the world.
I don't want us to commit suicide. Suicide can be stopped. We don't have to jump off the bridge, use the knife, or step forward into quicksand. We can reevaluate, rethink, rework, and begin anew, if we must, to create something better and more humane than the nation we have. We can find a way to take care of our people - all of them - if we put emotion and dogma aside and use logic and reason to find answers to pressing questions.
Do we have it in us? Or is the suicide preordained?
You tell me. I'd like to know what you think.
*Thanks to history.com for some of the information about the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Roman empire continued for another 500 years. Its western half went to pieces in the year 476 AD, but its eastern half remained for another 1,000 years as the Byzantine empire.
Countries, empires, nations, states, towns - they come, they go. Here in my little county there are numerous little areas on the maps that once were populated communities. Lithia. Nace. Spec. Oriskany. Lignite. Haymakertown. Trinity. Horrytown. All gone, just names of areas now, a way to give someone a general idea of a specific location in a fairly large geographical area.
These places did not, as a rule, die overnight from one lethal blow. Most of the communities evaporated gradually as resources dried up, large companies turned their attention (and their accompanying fortunes) elsewhere, or some natural calamity occurred. Many of these communities produced iron ore before, during and after the Civil War, but when that no longer became a desired commodity, the little towns died away.
I fear, rightly or wrongly, that the United States is in the process of committing suicide. It will be a long, slow death, I imagine, and we may take down a good portion of the globe with us when we finally cease being the monstrous global demon that chomps on the resources of the world. We may already be eating our own tail.
In any event, I wanted to see what history might have to say about the fall of nations because we forget the lessons of the past. Many states have rose to power and died. I thought I'd look very far back.
Why did Rome fall?
The western half fell in 476 AD from an invasion by Germanic tribes. The Romans and the Goths and Vandals had long been at war, and that year Rome, Italy fell to a Germanic tribe. From then on, no ruler claimed dominion from Italy.
But the empire was already in trouble. The economy was suffering from a wide and ever-growing gap between rich and poor. The nation-state had severe financial troubles. To avoid taxation, wealthy members fled and set up little fiefdoms. Trade and crafts were dependent largely on slave labor, and as expansion failed, so too did the availability of people to exploit. Commercial and agriculture production declined.
However, as the western portion of the empire declined, its eastern half, centered around Constantinople (Byzantium), grew. Constantinople tended to be well-fortified and well-guarded, but Italy - not so much. When Rome was taken, the Byzantium empire remained in power until the 1400s, when the Ottoman Empire overwhelmed it.
The Roman empire at its height, before the west fell, was vast. It stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates River in the Middle East. Communication was poor, and keeping troops in strange and far-away lands became problematic. Frontiers were constantly attacked, taken, and reclaimed. As the military ate up more funds, technological advancement slowed, and infrastructure declined and was not repaired.
Rome's other issue was ineffective and inconsistent leadership. Internal strife kept the empire in chaos. At one point, during the span of 75 years, there were more than 20 men who claimed the title of emperor, usually after the murder of their predecessor. The army began assassination and installing new leaders as they pleased - once they even auctioned off the spot to the highest bidder. The Roman Senate also was full of political foul play, with politicians who failed to halt the political rot that allowed the wealthy to take advantage of those who were less fortunate. The Roman Senate was full of corruption and incompetence. As things worsened, civic pride died and citizens lost faith in the government and its leadership.
Immigration is not a new problem. The Romans grudgingly allowed members of the Visigoth tribe to cross its borders in the 4th century, but they treated the intruders poorly and cruelly. According to some reports, the Romans even forced families to trade their children with slavers in exchange for dog meat to eat in order to keep from starving. This kind of brutal treatment created enemies and eventually the oppressed people rose in revolt.
Another issue was the rise of religion. Christianity began to move in and take the place of the polytheistic Roman religion. Before this, the emperor was considered a divine being and in a sense, worshipped. But Christianity shifted the emphasis from the glory of the state onto that of a solitary divinity. Additionally, popes and other church leaders took on more important roles in the lives of ordinary people and then began to have an increased role in political affairs. This complicated governance. Some scholars believe Christianity played a role in curbing Roman civic virtue, which led to the empire's decline.
Lastly, the Romans ended up with an army composed mostly of mercenaries and not people who were loyal to the country. As the empire grew in size, emperors were unable to recruit enough soldiers, so they hired Germanic tribes to help keep order, particularly in frontier areas. However, these groups had no loyalty to the government, and power-hungry generals were able to easily turn the men against Rome. In fact, many of the soldiers who eventually brought down Rome in 476 AD were, in fact, Roman soldiers.
These are some of the reasons historians cite for the decline of the western half of the Roman Empire. There are others and of course much disagreement about all of them and the roles they played.
However, how many of these reasons can we point to today and say, with not a little alarm, that the United States is in a similar predicament?
Are we being kind to immigrants and others who are not like ourselves?
Are we taking care of our infrastructure?
Do we not have a growing gap between rich and poor?
Has our manufacturing and job growth, theoretically speaking, stagnated, particularly in regions outside of large cities where technology jobs cannot be found? (Let's bring back coal . . . )
Is our nation too big, geographically? We extend from one ocean to another. Is it reasonable to think that such a large land area is going to work together for a common good?
Do the words "political rot" sound familiar?
Does religion have too much influence in government?
No, we are not an exact parallel to the Roman Empire, thank goodness. We have progressed as human beings, though sometimes I wonder just how much. I do think, though, that there are enough parallels there that it should bring pause to anyone who wants to see the United States thrive and stand as a world leader.
There are those who want the United States to fall. Maybe we deserve that. Maybe our government has interfered and badgered and cajoled other nations so much that we deserve the bad reputation we have in other arenas.
But our people, on the whole, are not bad people, and I don't want anyone to suffer or for the United States to become a flailing and failing military power, the one that other nations point to with disgust - or at least, not with any more disgust than they already do. Believe it or not, we are not the most beloved nation in the world.
I don't want us to commit suicide. Suicide can be stopped. We don't have to jump off the bridge, use the knife, or step forward into quicksand. We can reevaluate, rethink, rework, and begin anew, if we must, to create something better and more humane than the nation we have. We can find a way to take care of our people - all of them - if we put emotion and dogma aside and use logic and reason to find answers to pressing questions.
Do we have it in us? Or is the suicide preordained?
You tell me. I'd like to know what you think.
*Thanks to history.com for some of the information about the fall of the Roman Empire.
Friday, October 13, 2017
I Realize, and I Can See
I see the Not Normal.
Every day I wake up and I say to myself, this is not normal. It is not a "new normal," it's simply Not Normal.
The things that are not normal are the fascist government overreach currently being enacted by the present United States government, not just here but all over the world.
"They," whoever "they" are, think Mr. Obama's overreach was bad, but the overreach of today's government is not simply corrosive and treacherous, it is sinful and evil.
One may think there is not much difference in that, but there is.
The difference is one of intent.
The things that I see others do not see, and they see things I do not see, apparently. I blink rapidly when I see people still cheering for the United States, for example. We're at our core a pretty rotten country now, one that is absconding with women's rights with every stroke of a presidential pen, one that has, for years now, imprisoned more of its population than any other nation in the world. We're number one for making sure new parents have no time off to care for their newborns - get your ass back to work, new moms and dads. New kid? Tough shit. We require 0 weeks of paid leave, though you can take 12 weeks off without pay if you can afford it and be assured you will still have a job. Thankfully some companies are a bit more generous than the government, but how long will we be able to count on that?
I also realize that we're number one in making money. In spite of the third-world looks that are rampant in many areas of the nation now, what with potholes in every road and infrastructure failing and a lot of folks not eating well, we still have the world's largest economy. So we're number one in business environment. Yay, wage slaves! Go us.
We are not, however, the world's happiest people. That title belongs to New Zealand, followed by 16 other countries. We're 17th on the happiness scale.
We rank 32nd in health - yeah, that is not number 1 - and we rank 52nd in safety and security. Also, not number 1. We do rank #1 in gun ownership. That's really keeping us safe, isn't it? Because we're hoarding them against the government, as if the most mighty military on earth won't simply knock in your door or blow up your house, if it comes to it, and your little AR-15 isn't going to do a damn thing except maybe come in useful when you want to shoot your own head off. Bang bang, you're dead.
Let's not forget that our life expectancy is less than other countries. Got your coffin purchased yet? Or maybe you prefer cremation. I suggest putting all of that in order, the sooner the better.
The thing is, this could be a very long list, this list of things that we no longer excel at. I see, with wide open eyes, a failing country, one that has stagnated and plummeted in the last 15 years. I expect the drop began much sooner - probably around 1980 - but like so many young folks I was busy trying to earn money and I was sick a lot and trying to have children, the things that people in their 20s and 30s do.
By the time I started paying attention - really paying attention - it was too late and a pall fell over me when I realized that everything I was taught in public schools (except basic stuff, like how to add and subtract and put words together), was pretty much propaganda put in place to keep working stiffs hoping that someday they'd work just hard enough to get ahead.
You never get ahead. You might think you do but you really don't. But keep dreamin' that American Dream. It's easy not to understand what you don't want to see.
Today I hear that our president has cut off subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. Those subsidies allowed poorer folk to have health insurance. I also hear that his health department is defining life as beginning at conception. And they took away the health care of millions of kids a few weeks ago when they let CHIP (Child Health Investment Partnership or Comprehensive Health Investment Partnership, depending on locality) fail for lack of funding.
Because there is nothing like making a country great again by forcing women to have children they don't want and then not helping them care for the life you have forced them to bring into the world. Hurrah for evangelical theological fascist politics. Go to church on Sunday and slit your throat (metaphorically - and maybe literally) on Monday.
I realize that I am powerless to make great changes in the world. Nothing I write here is going to make any difference. Nothing I say to my so-called leaders matters. Their agenda is not my agenda.
I see this.
I know other people see it, too, because they write about it. People have been writing about it for a very long time, and still no one listens. They listen instead to sound bytes and they read 140 character tweets but I honestly wonder how much people think about, well, anything anymore. Nobody sees beyond tomorrow's results. But the things they do today have results that go far beyond tomorrow. One must think long term. There are trees, and there is a forest. And beyond that hills and meadows, mountains, and streams.
There is no one size fits all. Policy set in stone is dictatorial and authoritarian, and it reeks of a kind of patriarchal assholiness that only a certain subset of humanity seems supremely capable of.
Somehow, that subset seems to be the one with the power and the money.
I realize this, and I can see it.
I also see there is very little, if anything, that I can do about it, not as one. I used to believe in the notion that we were a great nation and a great society. I thought I was one of many, not singular and insular. That the greater good mattered. Apparently no one thinks that anymore, that the sum of the parts creates a greater whole. All that matters is me, me, me.
Now all I see is a decaying land and a lost and failing nation, ruled and scourged by lesser men than those who came before.
Nothing to do but watch the fallout, now, and cross the street when the light changes.
Every day I wake up and I say to myself, this is not normal. It is not a "new normal," it's simply Not Normal.
The things that are not normal are the fascist government overreach currently being enacted by the present United States government, not just here but all over the world.
"They," whoever "they" are, think Mr. Obama's overreach was bad, but the overreach of today's government is not simply corrosive and treacherous, it is sinful and evil.
One may think there is not much difference in that, but there is.
The difference is one of intent.
The things that I see others do not see, and they see things I do not see, apparently. I blink rapidly when I see people still cheering for the United States, for example. We're at our core a pretty rotten country now, one that is absconding with women's rights with every stroke of a presidential pen, one that has, for years now, imprisoned more of its population than any other nation in the world. We're number one for making sure new parents have no time off to care for their newborns - get your ass back to work, new moms and dads. New kid? Tough shit. We require 0 weeks of paid leave, though you can take 12 weeks off without pay if you can afford it and be assured you will still have a job. Thankfully some companies are a bit more generous than the government, but how long will we be able to count on that?
I also realize that we're number one in making money. In spite of the third-world looks that are rampant in many areas of the nation now, what with potholes in every road and infrastructure failing and a lot of folks not eating well, we still have the world's largest economy. So we're number one in business environment. Yay, wage slaves! Go us.
We are not, however, the world's happiest people. That title belongs to New Zealand, followed by 16 other countries. We're 17th on the happiness scale.
We rank 32nd in health - yeah, that is not number 1 - and we rank 52nd in safety and security. Also, not number 1. We do rank #1 in gun ownership. That's really keeping us safe, isn't it? Because we're hoarding them against the government, as if the most mighty military on earth won't simply knock in your door or blow up your house, if it comes to it, and your little AR-15 isn't going to do a damn thing except maybe come in useful when you want to shoot your own head off. Bang bang, you're dead.
Let's not forget that our life expectancy is less than other countries. Got your coffin purchased yet? Or maybe you prefer cremation. I suggest putting all of that in order, the sooner the better.
The thing is, this could be a very long list, this list of things that we no longer excel at. I see, with wide open eyes, a failing country, one that has stagnated and plummeted in the last 15 years. I expect the drop began much sooner - probably around 1980 - but like so many young folks I was busy trying to earn money and I was sick a lot and trying to have children, the things that people in their 20s and 30s do.
By the time I started paying attention - really paying attention - it was too late and a pall fell over me when I realized that everything I was taught in public schools (except basic stuff, like how to add and subtract and put words together), was pretty much propaganda put in place to keep working stiffs hoping that someday they'd work just hard enough to get ahead.
You never get ahead. You might think you do but you really don't. But keep dreamin' that American Dream. It's easy not to understand what you don't want to see.
Today I hear that our president has cut off subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. Those subsidies allowed poorer folk to have health insurance. I also hear that his health department is defining life as beginning at conception. And they took away the health care of millions of kids a few weeks ago when they let CHIP (Child Health Investment Partnership or Comprehensive Health Investment Partnership, depending on locality) fail for lack of funding.
Because there is nothing like making a country great again by forcing women to have children they don't want and then not helping them care for the life you have forced them to bring into the world. Hurrah for evangelical theological fascist politics. Go to church on Sunday and slit your throat (metaphorically - and maybe literally) on Monday.
I realize that I am powerless to make great changes in the world. Nothing I write here is going to make any difference. Nothing I say to my so-called leaders matters. Their agenda is not my agenda.
I see this.
I know other people see it, too, because they write about it. People have been writing about it for a very long time, and still no one listens. They listen instead to sound bytes and they read 140 character tweets but I honestly wonder how much people think about, well, anything anymore. Nobody sees beyond tomorrow's results. But the things they do today have results that go far beyond tomorrow. One must think long term. There are trees, and there is a forest. And beyond that hills and meadows, mountains, and streams.
There is no one size fits all. Policy set in stone is dictatorial and authoritarian, and it reeks of a kind of patriarchal assholiness that only a certain subset of humanity seems supremely capable of.
Somehow, that subset seems to be the one with the power and the money.
I realize this, and I can see it.
I also see there is very little, if anything, that I can do about it, not as one. I used to believe in the notion that we were a great nation and a great society. I thought I was one of many, not singular and insular. That the greater good mattered. Apparently no one thinks that anymore, that the sum of the parts creates a greater whole. All that matters is me, me, me.
Now all I see is a decaying land and a lost and failing nation, ruled and scourged by lesser men than those who came before.
Nothing to do but watch the fallout, now, and cross the street when the light changes.
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