My Voice Is Back

At some point around the first of this week, the last of the rasp that I'd been living with as an excuse for a larynx for well over a month went away.

Poof. Like magic.

Except it was a long time going, and my voice became a little stronger every day as the cold or virus or whatever it was finally began to clear my system.

The first thing I did when my voice was back was pick up my guitar and sing a song. Songs are good.

***

The issue at the bank over my name magically went away after my husband dropped off copies of our Real ID and complained to someone there. We signed the papers we needed to sign and took care of business and everything's lovely. But still. WTH was that all about?

***

Like most of the nation's population who live in a house, our house rose in value. There's been a housing shortage for a good while now, since about 2018, I suppose. The county did it's every four-year reassessment and the average increase in real estate value was about 40%. Some properties went way up, like over 100%. They were probably undervalued to begin with.

To see the whining on the Facebook, and then to hear the whining at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, you would think that these people had all been lined up against a wall to be shot. In the first place, the county supervisors have net set the tax rate for the upcoming fiscal year. Until they do that, and I guarantee it will not be the same rate as it now, there is no way to know what anyone will be paying in taxes. Do I expect mine to be more? Yes. Am I complaining about it? No. It makes my bottom line look better.

So many people seem to think they should not pay taxes at all. They think they are some gift to humanity and the ground upon which they trod is sacred and blessed, or some such BS. I think it is a privilege to be alive, and paying taxes is what I do for that honor. Do I like everything my taxes support? No. Do I agree with everything the government does? No. But these people are mean. 

They demean the supervisors when they speak to them. They are ill-mannered, noisy, confrontational, and bullish. I never saw much of this kind of demeanor at meetings until after 2016. And then it grew progressively worse and after the George Floyd riots, it really hit its stride. Some of the people talk to the supervisors like they are not even human. 

I wouldn't talk to a dog the way some of these people talk to the supervisors. What is wrong with them? Who taught these people manners? And these aren't all folks I grew up with - no. The vast majority moved in here in the 1990s and think that gives them some right to overstep societal boundaries. My family was here during the American Revolution. They haven't a thing on me. But you don't see me acting like some know-it-all buffoon at a Board meeting.

The Phone Company and Me

I still have a landline. I know that's old fashioned, but I prefer to talk on the landline than the cell phone. There seems to be some key to cell phone talking that I haven't mastered yet; there's always a time lag and I find myself talking over people. I don't do that on the "old" phone line. On the old phone line, calls don't drop, the volume doesn't suddenly disappear, and the sound is clear.

Not so much on a cell phone. While we've come a long way, baby, in terms of cell phone technology, it still doesn't match the good old landline for clarity and reliability.

That is, until the phone companies stopped caring about the landlines because so many people no longer have them. As an outlier who still has a landline, I'm now a minority. The phone book the company puts out has dropped from about 150 pages to 20. It's pathetic.

It's like the newspaper business. Change change change. All thanks to technology and this wonderful thing called the Internet, which is allowing me to write this piece and post it for all the world to see. Yippee!

My area is rural. My Internet is still DSL. Yes, DSL. That's just a step up from the old dial-up. It's 20+ year old technology. I can do some things with it, but not a lot. Just yesterday I was streaming a meeting of the local county supervisors, and a friend was also watching. She was using a hot spot and she was 4 minutes ahead of me, at least, in time because of the slow downloads that I have. She was sending me texts about stuff that in my world hadn't happened yet because I had not yet reached that point in the meeting.

The phone company, the same one I'm complaining about at the moment, has been promising me fiber "in the very near future" for literal years. They're receiving millions of federal dollars to hook up us rural folks, but we're still not hooked up. And it's still literal years away, from the looks of it.

But I digress. I wanted to write about my experience with my landline. For some time now, I'd noticed an oddity in the calls in that occasionally I would hang up, and then pick up the phone to find that the call had not disconnected on my end. Sometimes I could hear someone still talking, or muttering to him or herself, until they hung up. Once or twice I simply listened in out of curiosity to see what was being said. Fortunately, it was nothing unexpected.

I didn't realize it was a problem, though, until yesterday. I was reaching for the phone to make a call when it rang. I picked it up without thinking to find a spam caller on the other end. I hung up. I picked the phone up to make my call, and the spam caller continued rattling on with his message. I hung up. I did this multiple times, for several minutes, until the spam caller (which seemed to be a recording) ran out of words and hung up itself.

I should be able to disconnect a call immediately. I know long ago, when there was such a thing as party lines and such, you could not always disconnect immediately. Once this became a near life-threatening issue when my grandmother was talking to a friend. My brother, whom she was babysitting for whatever reason, alerted her to the fact that a strange man was on the front stoop taking off his shoes and then rattling the door. My grandmother told her friend to hang up so she could call the police, but her friend didn't understand and kept right on talking. Because the call didn't disconnect on my grandmother's end, every time she picked up the phone, she heard her friend talking and couldn't call out. Finally, she got her friend to hang up so she could call the police.

So, this non-disconnect thing could be life-threatening. What if I were having a heart attack while some spammer was spewing his or her or its nonsense, and I couldn't hang up and call 9-1-1? Or, like my grandmother, had a prowler? There are reasons why we have the FCC, you know.

Once we realized we had an issue, we checked our phones by calling with our cells, and sure enough, the landline wouldn't disconnect a call. This morning we checked at my mother-in-law's house across the street, and she had the same issue. So, we called the phone company.

I call the phone company frequently because the Internet goes down often. I have them on speed dial on my cell. This morning I called, and a woman finally answered the phone after a rather long wait. First, I was miffed because she asked me for a pin number. What is she talking about, a pin number? I took a guess. She said it was probably the last 4 digits of the account holder's social security number unless it's been changed. I do not find that acceptable at all. I was immediately irritated by this new change that was utilizing a social security number. Talk about compromising.

Then she wanted to know if I'd unplug the phone from its base. I explained to her that this was happening to in other homes around me, so it wasn't my phone. She insisted I should unplug the phone from its base. I explained to her that I was talking to her from that phone and if I unplugged it, we would no longer be talking.

I asked to speak to a manager, and my husband took the phone away from me. She finally wrote up a "trouble ticket" and gave my husband a number to write down.

About an hour ago, the phone company called. Some young fellow, who sounded like he was 12, started explaining to me how phones work and information runs through the lines and what was usually going on when there was this problem. I sat listening to him and all I could think the entire time was that I've probably been using telephones for about 3 times as long as this dude has been potty trained.

Finally, he asked me if this happened on every call. "I don't know," I said. "I don't pick up the phone again after I hang it up every time I answer it. I tell you what, you called me, so let me hang up and we'll see if you're still there when I pick it back up."

Which is exactly what I did, and he was still there, and he said he would send somebody out. But, as they always must warn, if the trouble is inside my house there would be a charge.

I'm pretty sure since my mother-in-law has the same issue, this problem is not inside of my house. It's down on a pole somewhere a half mile away.

These companies act like their customers are stupid and they all seem to have superiority complexes. I don't know why people don't understand that regulations are in place to protect us, the consumers, and I would gladly pay a bit more to have clean air and to not have to deal with 12-year-olds in suits because my phone doesn't work. Companies only want my money, that is all. They don't want to give me good service, they don't want to provide me with anything, they just want my money. My job is to hold them accountable and make sure I get what I'm paying for. It's also a function of the government, one that certain people don't like for whatever reason. But I like regulations. I want my things to work properly and to be safe for me to use. I don't want to have to spend all of my time wondering if my phone or my Internet or my whatever is going to work properly or explode in my hand because of lack of regulations.

And right now, I want my phone fixed.

Let Me Explain

History in the Making

We were watching the 5:30 p.m. local news when they interrupted the program with breaking news from CBS News.

The former guy had been officially indicted by a grand jury in New York. The charges apparently stem from hush money payments to a porn star, but the indictment has been sealed and that's really all the public knows.

I strongly suspect there is more to it than that, or the indictment would not have been handed down.  CNN is reporting this morning that there are more than 30 counts of business fraud against the former guy. There will be more information as the thing moves forward.

That said, I do believe the man needs to be in jail, not for paying off a porn star, but for trying to undermine the functionality of the government and the U.S. Constitution. He should be behind bars for attempting a coup.

I do not believe that any indictments or trials against the former guy are politically motivated simply because he was/is a politician (and running for the office of president again). I believe in the rule of law, and I also believe that no one is above the law - and the Department of Justice's current stance that sitting presidents can't be touched is simply wrong. We do not have kings in this country. Presidents are not demi-gods here. They're just men.

And men who break the law should go to jail.

This is the first time a former president has been indicted, so it's history-making. Were there presidents who should have been indicted after they left office? Probably. I always thought George W. Bush committed war crimes and should have been held responsible for that. All of that torture and Guantanamo Bay stuff could not have been legal.

Here in Virginia, our own governor, Bob McDonnell, was indicted and convicted of federal corruption charges. He was the first Virginia governor to be convicted of a felony. It ruined his career. The conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States and the Justice Department decided not to re-try the case.

Let's not forget Oliver North, who was convicted for the Iran-Contra affair (charges vacated in exchange for Congressional testimony). He was on the National Security Council at the time. Not a high-ranking official, but not a nobody, either.

There is a long list of indictments and prosecutions against federal politicians here. None of these people were immune simply because they were in politics.

So, there's precedent for this, at least at the state level. The former guy is not going to go to jail; there will be a trial, and if he's found guilty, he will appeal. He will continue to walk among us, unless federal charges come through.

Whether or not this is enough to convince many of his followers that the guy doesn't walk on hallowed ground with every step he takes, is another matter. I'm afraid the former guy is merely representative of a large minority of Americans, who are racist and hateful people. I don't understand what they're angry about, but they are angry.

Here's the Explanation

I am angry, too, because this is not the United States I felt I was promised when I was growing up. I watched my father rise from literally nothing to being a wealthy businessman. He had opportunities that my brother and I did not, because in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected. From that moment on, the America that I recognized began to change, and the rolling boulder of societal collapse began building.

Like many my age, I did not see it creeping up on us. I was busy trying to establish a career, trying to keep a husband happy, and trying to have children. I didn't like it when the regulations over media were changed - I could see that was going to be a problem. I didn't like it when it became obvious there had been shenanigans with the Middle East that had ended Jimmy Carter's presidency. I didn't like the changes to the welfare system instituted under Bill Clinton (I also didn't care who he slept with, just like I don't care who the former guy slept with.). I'm pretty sure Al Gore should have been president in 2000, and would have been, except for Supreme Court intervention. I was completely against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, two years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. I was horrified by the PATRIOT ACT. I think that is when I began paying more attention.

In a Thursday Thirteen post yesterday, I noted 14 points of fascism and said I blamed both sides. Partly that was because I knew if I placed the blame solely upon Republicans, the Republicans that I wanted to read the piece would not. But it was also because I do blame the Democrats, too. 

I blame the Democrats for not paying attention, for letting things get to this point, and for not acting sooner to stop gun violence, to create a fairer tax system, for not working to stem racism, sexism, and all the other "isms" that upset people. The Democrats at times (admittedly small windows, but still) had the numbers to push through a federal law on abortion and they did not. They could have fought to keep the assault weapon ban in place when it expired in 2004. I don't know why they let that one get by them. Do I think the assault weapon ban would have hindered some of the domestic terrorism we're experiencing today? You bet.

Maybe Democrats play too nice. I know from the right-wing stuff I read that they think the Democrats are forcing diversity and equality down their throats and taking away their version of religion, and that the Democrats are the fascists (a word which seems to have replaced "socialist" in their lexicon), but I don't see that. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of the fence to see that so I can't see it, because I don't believe in meddling in other people's lives and just want to be left alone. 

What I do see is that some Democrats were more concerned with maintaining their seats and positions than they were with ensuring that the dreams of their constituents had validity. So they did next to nothing to counteract the authoritarian bent of their peers on the right.

Truly, it is not the Democrats whom I consider to be fascists and authoritarians. That lies solely at the feet of Republicans. The Democrats may have rolled over, but it's the Republicans who have actively worked to undermine the things - including the singular thing, the United States Constitution - that made this country great, and instead have made this country less than it could be. 

Republicans have cut taxes, fought against infrastructure improvements, turned things that government should run over to the private sector, created culture wars and upset people over stupid things like books, Disney, and the statue of David in Italy, for heaven's sake. The Democrats are not the ones undermining the very foundation of the New Deal (which gave my father the advantages he had), they're not the ones threatening Social Security and Medicare, they are not the ones kowtowing to a man who is not worthy of the dirt on the bottom of their own shoes. Republicans are doing that.

Not all Democrats are good people, just like not all good people are Democrats. I know some very nice folks who vote Republican, for whatever reason. When I talk with a reasonable Republican (yes, there are many, the far right calls them RINOs), generally it boils down to wanting the same thing; the difference is merely in the way we go about obtaining it. And frequently, at least to my face, they'll agree with me that yes, some corporations need to pay more, that the infrastructure needs indicate that more government, not less, is justified. (But they still don't want their money going to some non-white person with babies.)

So yes, both parties have contributed to the decline of this country and to the chaos I now see around me. But one party has contributed by being active. The other has simply been too passive.

I'll end this now with what I really believe in, deep in my soul:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And I'll note that Justice is first, followed by domestic Tranquility.

It's Justice that is working on the former guy right now. Domestic Tranquility is now just a dream, and the source, I feel, of current cultural unrest.

Like Pre-War Germany

Are you a parent? How can you be a parent in this country and not nearly suffocate from fear every time you send your child out to school, or you yourself go the supermarket and may not make it back home to take care of that child . . . because, you know, having deaths is the price we pay for our "god-given"* right to own a weapon.

 

Or how do you not worry that the police will come when your wife takes birth control pills eventually? Because they're trying to pass laws for that.

They're also trying to pass laws to make it illegal for someone besides a parent to transport or assist a minor in obtaining an abortion. There are households where incest is the norm. I think it's sick to force a girl to give birth to her brother.

And then we have the bans on the statue of David, and book banning, and . . . more and more domestic terrorism. How is an asshole with a rifle walking into a school and shooting it up any different from someone from Palestine walking into Israel with a bomb strapped to them? They're the same. Is the gun killing a better way to die? I think not. Or maybe it's because we're white and the Islamic terrorists aren't that makes it all better?

WTF is happening in this country?

How do I - or anyone else - figure out if what we are seeing is popular support for fascism, as opposed to fearful, tactical acquiescence? Or just a lot of somewhat crazy people being caught up in the moment, taken in by the language that plays upon their fears and concerns?

Because while the extreme far right nuts want to call Democrats fascist, they are the ones attempting to curtail rights, ban books, and burn down the US Constitution. It's not Democrats, though the far left has its share of nuts. I foresee a day when the Democrats could do the very same thing, only in some kind of crazy-making reverse.

Culture wars are dismal and are used to force the masses to think this way or that. They are used to create fear, to cause distrust, to disseminate false narratives, to make us into puppets. They are not used to better society, to create hope, to make lives better.

Nothing about what is going on in this country right now is making lives better.

This dive into fascism and authoritarianism, this drive to "win" at all costs - is sick. This must be how a normal person felt in pre-World War II Germany. They could see the insanity all around them, but they didn't know how to stop it.

I don't know how to stop it. Or what to do about it. And frankly, I'm afraid. I'm afraid of what's happening, and I'm afraid I'm going to be one of those people who ducks her head and hides out of fearful, tactical acquiescence.

Every morning, I wake up to crazy. It's easy to become immune to crazy, to begin to see it as normal.

What we have going on here ain't normal, folks. If you can't see that, then you're part of the problem, and to be honest, I don't give a damn who I offend. If you think school shootings are a good price to pay to own a gun, if you think banning books is a great thing, if you think women should die instead of having an abortion, then you're the problem. 

If people would just mind their own business and leave everyone else alone, we wouldn't have this problem. Obviously, people have too much time on their hands since they want to mind everyone's business but their own.

Go mind your own business, whatever that is, and leave the rest of us alone. What I read, what I do with my body, what I think, who I associate with, what kind of sex I have in bed - none of that's your business. Seriously, it isn't.

If you are a parent, it is your business that your schools be safe and that you come home from the supermarket. That means you should consider gun control laws. It means if you think a book is bad, you take it away from your kid. You don't stop other kids from reading it.

You take care of yourself and your own. But you don't impose your will or your wishes upon others unless it is to make for a safer, saner society. But it has to be an honest effort, like gun control (not ban, control. There is a difference.). 

Book banning is not an honest effort. It's just Nazism disguised as protecting children.

We are all just doing the best we can, but some folks seem hell-bent on making it harder on the rest of us than it needs to be. 

How did we get to this nasty, awful place in our society, with awful, nasty people dominating the public conversation?

How did watching people die become so easy?

How do we change into what I truly believe we could be, a people of love, joy, and compassion? How do we reach closed minds?

How do we just live our lives when others want to live them for us?

*The small "g" is intentional. My God doesn't say that.

Amazon's Trick

On November 1, I asked Alexa to shuffle my playlist, and she said, "Shuffling your playlist and similar songs."

Then she told me I could now access over 100 million songs, instead of the 2 million I'd been "making do" with.

What she didn't tell me was what they took away. They gave me access to 100 million songs but:

1) I can no longer ask for the specific song I want to hear and listen to only that song.

2) I can no longer hear only the songs on my playlist (which I spent years building up on this platform).

3) I can no longer hear only songs by a specific artist (unless I've bought the album and it's in my Amazon library, but I noticed some of those are missing from my library).

4) I can no longer ask for songs by a lyric that's running through my head and have her play only that song.

5) I can no longer listen to the music I fell asleep to sometimes (Bread, and only Bread's greatest hits).

6) I can no longer have her repeat a song, so that I can listen to it over and over. This was helpful when I was learning a new song on the guitar.

7) When she does shuffle my "playlist and similar songs," so far, the 7 or so times I've tried that, she starts out with the same songs and plays those in the same order, every time. That's not shuffling.

Basically, they turned Alexa into Pandora. If I wanted to listen to Pandora, I'd listen to Pandora. They took away the things that made listening to the music on Alexa a unique experience. Sure, sometimes one of the songs I asked for wasn't one of the 2 million available to me, and I heard, "That song is only available on Amazon Unlimited,"but I had no problems with that. I'd go find it on youtube if I wanted to hear it badly enough.

"To listen to specific songs you like, try Amazon Music." That's now her refrain when I ask for things I used to receive without question.

The whole point, of course, is to force me to purchase Amazon Music for $8.99 a month. I'm not going to be nickled and dimed by these massive, bloated overbearing corporations. I have the CDs, I have a CD player, and I have a radio. I can hear music some other way.

When my Alexa dies, as electronics do, replacement at this moment appears doubtful. I lived without Alexa before, and I can live without her again.

I can even live without Amazon, convenient though it may be.

In the meantime, this sent me scurrying to find my CD player, to see where I had stashed my CDs, and to see what albums I'd put on my cellphone. I listen to Sheryl Crow (and only Sheryl Crow, not "and similar songs") when I am writing my news stories. Those CDs are on my desktop, and they are on my cellphone.

I have a work-around. But I am not at all happy with my 100 million songs that comes with a lack of choice, so every night now I give Alexa feedback and tell her so.

At least I have the satisfaction of thinking I'm wasting somebody's time somewhere, if they actually read or listen to the feedback.

He Did Not Act Alone

He did not act alone, this shooter who, at last count, had taken 19 lives and wounded countless others during a massacre in an elementary school in Uvalde, TX yesterday.

Nor did the shooter who took 10 lives at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York on May 14.

And neither did the male (they are almost always male) who killed 13 people in Virginia Beach, VA on May 31, 2019, or man who killed 12 people on November 7, 2018, in Oakland, CA.

The man who killed 17 students in Parkland, FL, in 2018 did not act alone, nor did the man who killed 61 people in Las Vegas, NV on October 1, 2017. Neither did the fellow who killed 50 people in Orlando, FL in 2016, or the guy who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Or the man who killed 32 at Virginia Tech in 2007.

We all have blood on our hands because we sit back and offer "thoughts and prayers" as if that is going to stop this grotesque mindset that Americans have, this horrific, terrible thought that "owning my gun" is more important than the life of, well, anybody.

Our senators do nothing. This falls mostly on the Republican side, but the Democrats are proving so useless and spineless that I have come to the conclusion they are complicit, not merely complacent, in all of this, or else they'd find a work-around the stupid rules in the Senate and the House. Those are rules, not laws, and rules are meant to be broken from time to time.

Sometimes even laws need to be broken, and sometimes a perceived right is not a right. I am being inundated by opinion pieces telling me women do not have the right to have an abortion under the US Constitution, but everyone (especially men, apparently), has the right to carry a gun, even though when the US Constitution was written "bearing arms" did not mean carrying a gun. It meant being in the damn military. One can't pick and choose "rights" from that dusty document.

We have to be the most gruesome, gory, heartless, warlike bunch of people to ever live on this planet.

The blood running down the street belongs to all of us, because we accept this as the way of life in the USA. This doesn't happen in other countries. Only here. Anybody want to take a guess as to why that is?

I am all for gun reform. I am for background checks, for making people who own guns carry appropriate insurance, for taking them away from people who shouldn't have them. I am a gun owner - I live on a farm and occasionally they're necessary, when a coyote is killing a calf, or a rabid groundhog goes after a dog. My husband hunts. He pays a fee to get a license every year. 

We both have had gun training. I treat guns with the utmost respect; they are locked up.

But I've blood on my hands, too. I haven't called my legislator every day demanding something be done. I've written a few letters from time to time, but it's not a constant drumbeat.

Why is it acceptable that young children have to have lock down drills in case of a massive shooting incident in this country? Why must we thrive on fear - not only of other countries, but of our own people? I do not believe any of this has to be because "it is what it is." Acceptance indicates lack of desire to change.

I do not accept this.

Isn't it time that we the people, the ones who are really supposed to run this government, stand up and say, no more?

Isn't it time we the people bring the country back to some semblance of sanity? Wasn't one million dead from Covid enough for two years?

My god, how much death do we need to prove our points? How many more elementary school children have to die to prove that certain segments of the population only care about youth when they're in a woman's uterus? Those elementary school children had heartbeats too.

Out, damn spot! Out I say! . . . What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?

Take back our power, people. Wash the blood from our hands, remove the idiots in office, find our footing, and regain our sense of society as a whole. We are all one. We are not islands unto ourselves. We're a society. We're supposed to look out for one another. We're supposed to be brothers and sisters.

It's way past time we act like it.

The Madness of Crowds

This is going to be mixed up, because I have a lot of mixing up in my head at the moment. I just finished listening to the audio version of The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny,* and this, along with the (very loud and frustrating) conversation on Roe v Wade has my head spinning.

So spoilers for the Louise Penny book - you've been warned. As for the rest, well, I like to use the word "fuck" a lot so you've been warned there, too.

In the book, Penny deals with life post-pandemic, but she takes on multiple heady topics, including, kind of, abortion.

The story is about a statistician who has determined that because of the decline in resources, statistics indicate that it should be mandatory to kill off the elderly at a certain age, and to kill off disabled people, including children. Only the healthy (whatever that is) should be allowed to live. 

The inspector is asked to protect the statistician when she has a talk near his home, someone tries to shoot her, someone else is murdered, he has to find the murderer, blah blah.

The underlining themes of this book are troubling and troublesome. We had people in the United States saying that grandmas should take one for the team and just die of Covid. These were Republican members of various state legislatures, if I remember correctly. I find the idea morally reprehensible, although I think if Grandma knows she has uncurable cancer and wants to take an early out, she should have the right to do that. But it shouldn't be forced on her.

This story is about the government forcing early death. That's the statistician's premise.

It gets mixed up even more because the inspector's second in command, Jean-Guy, has, in the previous book All the Devils Are Here, had a second child, one born with Down's Syndrome.

The reader (or listener, in my case), sees Jean-Guy's angst over his child in this latest book. At one point he calls her a burden and he is totally floored by his own words. He can't believe he called his daughter that. He loves his daughter - but.

There is talk about why Jean-Guy and Annie didn't abort early on when they learned the child had Down's Syndrome. He said he and his wife discussed it but decided against it. But, he also admits they weren't prepared for what raising a disabled child means. He questions the decision, but ultimately decides they made the choice appropriate for them, and he loves his daughter (without the "but"). He finds the statistician abhorrent because she would have his child "dismissed" from life.

So here we are with a fictional story that is hitting hard emotionally on all sorts of topics, from ridding the world of the elderly to disabled children and quality of life, and abortion. When is killing good? When is it bad? What constitutes a legitimate killing? Is a fetus a person?

And all around me I see fucking morons who have no idea what they're talking about trying to lay claim to the authority of women's bodies. Until a fetus is out of its mother's body, it's a parasite. It can't exist without the womb.

This is a decision that's nobody's business but the woman's and possibly the man she is involved with, but I have noticed men have simply taken three steps backwards and are out of this conversation, except for the big high-powered white assholes who are making the decisions for the little women anyway.

Over on Facebook, I'm involved in a discussion where two people who were unwanted wish they'd never been born, and being unwanted meant that they had severely crappy childhoods (sexual abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, etc.), another who was adopted who thinks we're all saying she shouldn't have been born, when no one is saying that at all, another who survived an ectopic pregnancy thanks to Roe v Wade (I wrote about a similar situation for myself last week), and a lawyer who's chimed in about bodily autonomy and how forcing a woman into pregnancy is similar to slavery.

This is a group of well-educated highly informed women discussing a very emotional and highly complex topic. We are doing it without name-calling, without yelling, without calling one another names, or being overly upset (except for the adoptee, although I think she understands that we're all glad her mother chose to have her and give her up. We're glad she had that choice.). 

And the questions we're really asking are these: if Roe v Wade is abolished, who is going to take care of all of these unwanted children? Who is going to see that the mothers receive appropriate prenatal care? Are we going to revive orphanages? Are we going to throw more money at a foster care system that doesn't work? What about the children with disabilities? Who is going to care for them? The Republicans already are working to undo all the social networks we have in place to keep people from dying of starvation. What are they going to do for these children they want to force women to have?

Are we going to look at the racism that is really behind this? If one traces the issues of abortion and current discussion back to its beginnings, we find the KKK and white nationalism and racism behind it. Nobody cares if there are black babies being aborted. It's the white women they're after here, and everyone knows that. It really is The Handmaid's Tale. 

The poor and minorities are going to be the ones suffering because some powerful white male and his wife want to adopt a sweet little white kid and they can't get one from Ukraine at the moment, because, you know, fucking fascists are over there bombing the place while the fucking fascists here in the US are undermining the Constitution at every turn and have made a mockery out of what once was a legitimate government. (Thanks a lot, GQP.)

In the meantime, we have these anti-human fuckers who really wouldn't care if certain people already living died. They want a war and they want blood. They're ready to shoot me because they think I'm a Democrat (I'm not, really, I'm what a Republican used to be, a very long time ago). They're ready to shoot me because I couldn't have children. They'll shoot me because I'm fat. They'll shoot me because I'm old. They'll shoot me because I used to be a journalist. They'll shoot me because they can because we're too fucking stupid to understand what the Second Amendment of the Constitution really says, because the fucking Supreme Court conveniently overlooked the "well-armed militia" part of the amendment.

I have a niece and a great-niece. Roe v Wade doesn't affect me personally, but it affects young people I care about. I don't want my niece to have to have a child if she should become pregnant before she's ready to raise that baby. I don't want my tiny little great-niece growing up thinking she is a second-class citizen simply because she is a girl. I want her to grow up thinking she's Wonder Woman and she can do whatever the hell she wants with her life (within reason, of course). If she wants to wait until she's 40 years old to have her first child because she wants to build up a law career and be a partner in a law firm, then I want her to be able to do that. I sure don't want her to have to have a child because some asshole convinces her to have sex when she's 14.

Mostly I want people to stop and think, use logic, and take emotions out of the law. Law is about thinking and rationality. Rational people believe murdering the elderly or disabled children is wrong. That isn't a liberal point of view (as someone said in the reviews of Penny's book on Amazon). That's a humanistic point of view. That's a moral point of view.

And as for Roe v Wade, we're not gods, and if women have to give up the right to abortion and their bodily autonomy, then I want a chastity belt slapped around the pelvis of every man on this dying, decaying, morally bankrupt planet, and the keys left on the wall of some female judge who lives 500 miles away. Because without that damn penis, we wouldn't be having this discussion. That's where the problem lies, so let's fix the problem that way, instead of placing it all on the woman.

*Also, I did not like this book as well as the others in the Three Pines series.*

American Nightmare

Riots.
Dead.
Cities on fire.
Statues toppling.
Lack of government oversight.
Deregulation.
No respect.
Loss of control.

Just another day in the American nightmare.

How long has our society been a total dystopia? Apparently a long time - most of my life, I suspect. I couldn't tell you when it began. Perhaps it started the moment Europeans set foot on the continent, bringing with them smallpox and death to the Native Americans who lived here.

Dystopian literature has long been a favorite genre of mine. These stories are about the ends of societies. People know them by their names in books and movies - Mad Max, The Hunger Games, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, The Giver, etc. Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, was one of the first dystopian novels I fell in love with. The story, about survival on the Florida coast after nuclear demise created by unrest in the Middle East, felt real and possible to me then, way back in 1980 when we were dealing with the hostage crisis at the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency.

Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, which dealt with aftermath of the collapse of current civilization and went through until it collapsed again, also made quite an impression in my younger years.

And here we are in America, living lives of suffering, watching death and economic collapse occur on what is truly an epic scale.

We are now living in The Hunger Games and Animal Farm, and in most of those imaginary worlds. Don't believe me? I can take you to the coalfields right now and show you District 12 from The Hunger Games. Look at Congress, see the pigs we have for leaders, right up to the chief boar, biggest pig of them all, who has his followers believing with every breath that some are more equal than others. Such a total twisting of truths, the bald-faced lies of "fake news," is so 1984ish it is as if I fell into the book.

We are the only nation in this world - this great big planet - with deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic on a massive scale. With no leadership to speak of, with a government completely undermined and dislodged from reality, did we really think we'd find solace and comfort from the enemies within? We have only ourselves to blame for our stolid independence, our devout fortitude, our utter dismal faith that God will keep us, even as we are too stupid to use the minds He gave us to better our own lot.

Instead, we vote in the fools and let the inmates run the asylum.

American Nightmare.

We're the only nation, too, with multiple school shootings. We're the only nation who willingly eats our young in order to maintain our "freedoms" to hold a rifle, and now, I suppose, our "freedom" to not wear a mask and to spread a deadly disease. We'll allow this virus to run rampant amongst our children, letting it chew on their hearts and lungs, before we step back and see if we can do something different.

Will we have the children social distance while they're doing shooter drills every couple of weeks? How is that going to work out, I wonder.

We are trapped. We are caught with a leadership that is negligent, indifferent, irresponsible, and crazy. A leadership that at one moment incites people to violence (LIBERATE VIRGINIA) and on the other hand offers handouts to the very rich who don't need the money.  Give the people $1,200. That will shut them up. Here, big oil, millions for you. You're welcome.

We also have an intellectual class that at some point did not step in and stop this when they should have. I don't know when that was. The 1990s? Earlier? But of course they (I) said nothing. Because how dare we question the status quo, even though it is the most fucked up, evil, and ruthless system on the planet. How dare we!

So we didn't.

Look at us now. For the last 20 years, since 9/11, we have become despicable people. We have more poor, more ill, more desperate people than any other country. We also have more rich. This disparity between rich and poor was created and made worse by a ruthless class of assholes who want theirs at the expense of everyone else. As if Capitalism is a pie, and they want 7/8 of it, giving the rest over to the worthless idiots who can't figure out that the system is set against them from the moment they are born.

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps my ass. American dream. It's a fucking dream alright. It's a goddamn nightmare, is what it is.

Now we have this great divide. Us against them. Who are them? Anyone who isn't us. Skin color, hair color, jobs, political points of view. Religious fealty. But mostly we're a bunch of scared, nervous people who are suffering from terrible feelings of powerlessness, rage, hopelessness, and pessimism. Because honestly, how is this going to get any better?

These internal feelings for white people, especially white men, are, I suspect, relatively new. America has always been a dystopia for black people, for the Native Americans we so casually displaced, for most women - for anybody who stood out and was different and dared to try to actually live that fucking American dream. A few even "made it," if making it is defined by monetary success. Which in America is, after all, how we define everything. Every single damn thing in this country is defined by a dollar bill.

And because dollar bills are what matters, people do not. We do not care about one another. We don't care about anyone who isn't "us," whoever the hell that is.

This is our society today. It goes like this: 

We're the richest country in the world and about 13 million children live in food insecure homes. Over 4 million children do not have health insurance or adequate healthcare. Over 17% of our children live without basic necessities. About 5.5 million reports of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are made annually.

And what is our response? We cut funding for school lunch programs. Right now, this very moment, the current administration is fighting to do away with the Affordable Healthcare Act, taking it before the Supreme Court in another effort to dismantle it completely. We assume that if kids have poor parents, well, tough luck. Apparently the parents don't deserve decent wages, for whatever reason. If kids are being abused, well, that's a shame, but parents have the right do raise their kids as they see fit. 

What can you do with such apathy? How do you fight this total lack of empathy and human feeling?

We could do a lot of things. We could ensure people have enough money to feed their children with a decent minimum wage. We could have regulations for clean air. We could have health care for all. We could ensure better mental health services, more counseling, better education . . . we could spend the money we spend on the fucking military on our own people instead of on more fighter jets that we don't need.

What we need to stop doing is putting little Band-Aids on big, major problems that require resolve and courage to solve. We need to step up and say, "Fuck this shit. This is enough."

Capitalism exploits us. It is a screwed up economic system that requires people to be poor so someone else can be rich. It has been going on for so long, people don't even realize that the corporations and the wealthy are exploiting them. We're nothing but a power source, a labor source, and if we're all used up, then we are totally and completely expendable.

So sure, die from a virus. If your immune system can't take it, no sweat off of their backs. There are billions of people. They might even have to take in some brown folks to fill space after the white folks all die off, but the corporations don't care. They just want the money anyway.

We have been totally dehumanized, us stupid Americans. We've divided ourselves into human and non-human. We are incapable of doing things other countries - better countries, really - have managed to do and do well. Things like healthcare, retirement, vacations, education, income. Feeling safe in your home, your grocery store, your surroundings. Basic human rights. We don't even know what a basic human right is, except for "pursuit of happiness." And what does that mean, after all, if you haven't any means to reach it?

When I was growing up, I expected to find a job, stay in it, have a good income and a retirement plan. That is all gone. Out the window, blowing in the wind, a pipe dream. My grandfather and father lived it, but he and others like him made damn sure his children didn't and wouldn't. And my niece and nephews haven't even a clue that it existed once, this small taste of security and belonging.

The only people who can walk around safely now live in gated communities with armed guards, like those folks in Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake, where they are safe and can be who they want to be. They don't have to worry that there are fewer and fewer jobs out there. They don't care, probably don't even know, that people are making do with less and less. (Though one day it will reach them, too. For all their money, they are not immune. Even the rich must die.)

The rest of us, we have to do for ourselves. And this goes back how far? As far as I can trace it. Racism and bigotry lies at the heart of this dystopia, because it kept us, as U.S. citizens, from becoming truly a single nation, keeping us instead as a country of "them" versus "us." Always. We never built systems to protect and help people, never put things into place to ensure the kind of social safety net that is a basic human right, because we were so busy being concerned that someone else might get "ours" when "they" shouldn't have it, that we have vaulted to the bottom of the first world nations.

We're not even a first world nation now. We're like a fifth world nation or something. Even third world nations don't have the problems we do. They don't have the failing infrastructure, the mass shootings, the total unhappiness that surrounds me every single time I go into the grocery store, when the waves of anger and frustration simply come at me as if I am in an ocean of angst.

I am drowning in that ocean, and so are you. And you. We are all drowning and fooling ourselves that the water we are allowing into our lungs is actually good for us, when in the end, it so polluted with hatred that it will destroy this country and take our children with it.

We have the greatest military. Whoopee. We did not invest in the things that mattered. We did not invest in our future as people. We have become fragile. The coronavirus has shown us for what we are - weak, secluded, scared saplings, ghosts of the people we could have been, had our world been just a little bit different, our minds just a little more open, our lives just a little less filled with hate.

When we are only commodities - and that is all we are, in the end, in a capitalistic society - how could we have expected to ultimately end up with a functioning society? We can't. Because we're too busy now living the worlds created in our dystopian literature, where we each have to protect what little we have because, well, because it's all we have.

We don't even know how to reach out to one another as human beings in an effort to make it better. We watch the protests on TV and see them turn into riots and gasp. Those others! We don't think, don't empathize, don't care.

God, what a sickening society we are. We are the zombies we have been afraid of all of this time. We don't need to look for them on TV.

They are all around us, each of us, dragging our feet, watching our lives waste away, searching for meaning in faux religions and cultish leadership, wanting to eat one another out of fear and loathing.

And now we have reached a pinnacle where fascism is here, its ugly nastiness a jackboot around the corner. We are a vote away from it. Regardless of who wins, it is here, and it isn't going to go away. We will kill one another in the end, if the virus doesn't get us all first.

We have never been a country that understands friendship. We adore ignorance. We don't want to know. We don't want to understand, improve, care, imagine a better world - damnit, we simply don't want to change. We're not friends, none of us. We're just strangers living in the same land, looking askance at one another, wondering not, "How can I help?" but "What do they want?"

Is it any surprise to anybody that now we're watching cities burn? We've got a lunatic with his finger on the nuclear codes.

And us? We are all simply bewildered and horrified.

Happy I Have Morals

Last night, my husband and I caught the first part of a new Discovery series called "Undercover Billionaire."

I think this was the second episode. I missed the first one.

The premise is that Billionaire Man will go into some city and in 90 days create a $1 million company. This is to prove, I think, that people who are poor are poor because they aren't smart or can't figure out how to beat the system or something. It's obviously slanted in that direction.

It's propaganda.

To my absolute horror and dismay, in the first minutes of the episode last night, Mr. Billionaire went onto private property (some vacant industry), then drove around back and waded through a pile of tires until he found several good ones. He then STOLE those tires and sold them for $1500 to get his "seed" money for his business. (Actually it was to get him a room because he'd been sleeping in his truck.) I don't know what happened after that because I turned the TV off.

The moral here I guess is that if you're willing to (a) trespass and (b) steal, then you can move forward in life. (Can you see my eyes rolling?)

He is nothing but a crook. If he thinks this is ok, then I doubt he's a billionaire because he did something legal to earn his millions.

This morning I am happy that I am not a crook. I am happy that I know right from wrong, and that I do not believe that just because your bicycle is out next to your house, I have the right to take it. Basically that is what Mr. Billionaire did. Even if the property had been reposed by the city, that land and its contents belongs to the taxpayers and the stuff wasn't Mr. Billionaire's to take.

So I am content to be mediocre and not of great wealth, because at least I have my principles.

I am happy that I have good morals.

Each day in August you are to post about something that makes *you* happy. Pretty simple. And, it doesn't even have to be every day if you don't want it to be. It's a great way to remind ourselves that there are positive things going on in our lives, our communities, and the world. Check out the gal that initiated this here.

If I Responded on Facebook

I try not to respond to political posts on Facebook. Mostly I don't post on Facebook at all unless it is something that appears relatively harmless, although in 20 years I imagine people who post kitten pictures today will be apologizing for that.

At any rate, one post this morning riled me. It was about my local county and how irresponsible the spending is, yada yada. I've covered this county government for 30 years and still go to the supervisors meetings sometimes. I read.

We are not a poorly run, over-spending county. I started to write a response and then decided to move it here. But this is not just about my county. This is about living in society and being a citizen and paying taxes, and understanding that everything affects everything else. It is also about stupidity, which seems in vogue but which is going to destroy us.

Since 2009, the amount of money that Botetourt County receives from the state and federal governments has decreased. The difference comes from county citizens as local taxes: the politicians we have in the state and federal government want to place the burden back on localities.

We are building a new school. We offered incentives to new companies (corporate welfare). Because of this, the county's debt service has increased.

However, Botetourt remains one of the most fiscally sound counties in the area. You can't have it both ways. You can't have low taxes and build a new school. You can't have parks & rec programs, libraries, historic parks at Greenfield, commit $2 million to the new YMCA, and not have debt service increase.

Local taxes will remain flat this year, based on what I'm seeing. Nobody's taxes are going up locally (though you might be paying federal dollars because of that smoke-and-mirrors federal "tax cut" that so many people fell for). 

Sure there are some things that could be cut from the local budget - but they are miniscule as far as funding goes and won't affect taxes. Much of it is state-mandated and can't be touched.

More than half of the budget goes to the schools. They need what they need. I want an educated population, well-rounded and learned, to take care of me and the rest of the world when I'm old.

We are having to pay for emergency services now; that used to be volunteer only. We need to increase pay for deputies. County buildings need upkeep and updating.

Austerity only works when you want stupidity to rule the world. That's what we have now at the federal level. I don't see it working out very well.

I consider paying taxes an honor and a privilege. Why do people think they should live here for free? If you think that, then stop driving on public roads, don't use public facilities, go rent because your deed is recorded in a public courthouse, don't call for the rescue squad when you have a heart attack, don't call the fire department if your house is burning down, don't visit the Smithsonian, use a National Park, call the Social Security Office if your payment is late, or do anything else that is a government service paid for by your taxes.

It is all related. President Obama was right when he stood here in Roanoke and said no one does it on their own. You don't. You just think you do, and I think you're an idiot for thinking that.

So there.

Cape Henry Lighthouses

Our trip to Virginia Beach was different for us. For one thing, we never went into the ocean and barely set foot in the sand.

The weather was great - it never warmed above 76 or so, with cool evenings. There weren't a lot of folks on the beach, so we were not alone in looking for other things to do in the area.

We like history so we set out on Friday, October 20, to see the Cape Henry lighthouses.

The oldest of the two lighthouses there, which is also one of the oldest in the nation, is the first federally funded lighthouse. The government built it to guide maritime commerce at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. It stands near the “First Landing” site where English settlers arrived in 1607.

The structure, authorized by George Washington and overseen by Alexander Hamilton, was completed in 1792. It was designed by New York architect John McComb and it was used for about 100 years before being replaced by a cast iron lighthouse that still stands about 100 yards away.

Preservation Virginia acquired the Cape Henry Lighthouse in 1930. Over the years lighthouse and its surroundings have been restored including repairing the lantern after damage from Hurricane Barbara in 1953, repairing the damaged original Aquia sandstone and restoring the surrounding dunes.

Visitors to the Cape Henry Lighthouse can climb to the top of the tower.

Our first surprise occurred at the entrance. We thought this was a historic site - which it is - but it is also part of Fort Story, an active military base.

To get in to see the lighthouses, you must be searched and you must allow your car to be searched. If you go beyond a certain point, you will be arrested and charged with trespassing.

This is not exactly the welcome I've come to expect at historic sites.

When you accept the four-hour "historic site access pass" from the soldiers who declare you fit for entrance, you agree not to use text messaging or hands-free cellular telephones and to only photograph the historic sites.



This happy little dolphin greets you.



It immediately becomes not so happy when you realize
you're on a military base.



You were not supposed to take photos of personnel. I
took these photos before I was told that and I have
altered the faces and the license tag of the car in front
of us.



This is the original 1792 lighthouse.



This is both lighthouses as you approach them from the
entrance.



This is the new lighthouse. I don't think
it is in use.



No clue what the other buildings beside the lighthouse are.



The old lighthouse.



A nice poster in the gift shop.



The lighthouses from the backside.



The old lighthouse from the back side.
 

I had never been searched before. It was intimidating though the soldiers were polite. They asked if we had any weapons and I produced a tiny little knife that I use sometimes to trim my nail cuticles with, and the guy waved it away like it was a plastic fork. My husband had his pocket knife and produced that, which was also waved away. Our drugs consisted of our prescriptions, and the only other thing in the car was my MS Surface which wasn't working so we'd stowed it in the trunk.

I would not have consented to any kind of body search but they didn't ask to do one. I would have asked to turn around and be allowed to leave had I been told that would be necessary. No one is touching me without reason, which is why I don't expect to ever get on an airplane again. I don't consider searching me - because that implies I have done something when I have not - to be a good reason to feel me up. I still believe in innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. Searches assume you are guilty. (For the record, it is also why I don't go to many things at the local coliseum - I hate the searches, especially when they make women open their pocket books while the men walk in with guns holstered to their ankles, something I have personally observed. How stupid is that?)

The one thing it showed me is that the "land of the free" - isn't. And anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

I did wonder why, since there was a vast expanse of land between the historic areas and the closest military buildings, they didn't just move the checkpoints back behind the historic areas so the public could access them without all the rigmarole.

Anyway, this colored my appreciation of the historic structure quite a bit, and not in a good way.

It is nice that it is still there, though.

It is not so nice that my government considers me guilty of something simply because I want to see a historic structure that my tax dollars are keeping up. I'm sure others see searches like this differently, and simply accept it, but this is why I am not like everybody else. I have never been one to abide by arbitrary rules and accept the status quo.