What's the point of it all?

Sometimes things just feel so futile. 

Like, when I get action notices from one of the many, many liberal advocacy groups that I seem to be on the email list for, urging me to contact my senator or representative, I know that it won’t matter if I do or not.  If the issue is access to abortion, my state representative and senator are both personally against that, so it doesn’t matter what their constituents think. 

My congressman is also a solid right-winger, so he’s not going to be on board with anything I write to him about.  My two Senators, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, are pretty solidly liberal, so I can already count on them to echo my views.

It feels like if you’re a liberal living in a red-county, it doesn’t really matter what you think.  The majority rules here, and the majority goes to church and thinks that gay people are “icky” so they shouldn’t be allowed to get married and raise children.  What’s the point in calling my representative or senator?  I already know where they stand on the social issues.  My state representative (who is an anti-choice DEMOCRAT) told me on Pro-Choice Lobby Day two years ago that he has “a personal faith that guides his decisions on these issues.”  How can I argue with that?

And our state senator makes his decisions based on his Christian world view. He has a gay daughter yet still authored a bill to add a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage.  How do you talk sense to a person like that? 

Sometimes I just wonder what the point of it all is.  Maybe I’m just having some sort of birthday existential crisis, or maybe I just need some cheerleading from my liberal cohorts.  Or maybe I just need a cigarette.

Town Hall Meeting

Our uber-conservative state senator had a town hall meeting on Saturday.  It was attended by roughly 30 liberals and 4 conservatives.  I gotta say though, he kept fairly cool for a guy who had a whole room full of people ganging up on him.

Here are some direct quotes (to the best of my memory).  My italicised responses are my thoughts, but most of them were directed at the senator by various people in the group:

Responding to a question about why we aren't raising the taxes of the richest 2% of people in the state -
"Well, the thing is that we live under the system of capitalism, not socialism."
So "socialism" now means requiring that the richest people in the state pay the same percentage of their taxes as the poorest people do?
"Rich people have worked hard for their money and they deserve to keep most of it."
But I guess poor people don't work as hard for their money.  All those wonderful rich people must have started out at the bottom, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and made a fortune all on their own, huh? 

In response to the onslaught of people begging him (some through tears) not to support the creation of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage-
"The purpose the state has being involved in marriage is that it brings two people together to have children."
Then why do we let the elderly get married?  And why did my marriage license not come with a mandate to bear children for the state of Minnesota?
"We just need to let the good, common sense people of Minnesota make this decision and not activist judges."
You do NOT put the rights of the minority up for a vote by the majority.  What if we had done that with civil rights for black people 50 years ago.  And an "activist judge" usually means one you don't agree with.
"When gay marriage passed in Massachusetts, it trampled the rights of the Catholic Church and the rights of parents not to have their children taught tolerance for gay people."
So somehow, since Catholic Charities was no longer able to discriminate against gay people in their adoption policies, that was "trampling on their rights?"  As far as I know, they're still allowed to NOT marry gay people in their churches.  And I may be mistaken, but are parents in Mass. no longer allowed to send their kids to parochial schools to learn their intolerance?

All in all, it was fun to watch the senator sweat a little bit, but I couldn't help but think we were just talking to a brick wall.  The best part of the afternoon was the liberal drinking session in the bar afterwards.

Mother's Day

I must say, Mother's Day is one of my favorite days of the year.  It's the one day of the year when my husband wakes up early, gets the kids up, and they all leave the house for the morning, leaving me to sleep in and then enjoy my cup of tea in peace and catch up on all of my violent TV shows instead of watching Go, Diego, Go.  It's a wonderful, wonderful gift.

For all the hoopla surrounding Mother's Day though, we don't seem to give much respect to mothers in this county.  We're asked to give birth to a child (usually working up until the day we deliver), and then get our lazy asses back to work after about 4 to 6 weeks.  If you've ever had a newborn, you know that 4-6 weeks is not enough time to adjust to sleepless nights and spending every waking moment caring for your baby. 

Every civilized country in the world has a vastly more generous policy on maternity leave than we do here in the land of the free.  They recognize that motherhood is an overwhelming and life changing experience, and they honor that fact. 

Here we just demand that women carry babies to term no matter what their circumstances, then provide no daycare or health care assistance to them and talk shit about them for not working hard enough when they get stuck below the poverty line.

Happy Mother's Day!

National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy

Today is the National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, so it's time to think about what we as adults can do to try to curb the epidemic of teen pregnancy in our communities.

One thing going on in my community is the Wellness Educators program.  It's a program that teaches teens about various wellness issues (birth control, substance abuse, nutrition, suicide prevent, etc.) and then tasks them with mentoring the peers about what they've learned.  There's also a service learning component in which they have to work for various community organizations.

There used to be a similar program (although it was just for boys) called "Wize Guyz" that was run by the local Planned Parenthood office.  That one was seen by the community as a ploy by PPH to get their evil claws into our children for the purpose of teaching them how to have rampant orgies and abortions.  Wellness Educators is run through Sexual Assault Services, so it's seen as more acceptable by the community.  I guess sexual assault is better than planning parenthood.

I'll be heading over to the WE session tonight to help them make buttons.  What will you do today to help engage the youth in your community?

Wordplay

I was listening to NPR in the car earlier and they were discussing whether or not some of the info crucial to capturing Osama Bin Laden was obtained using "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Who wrote the memo telling everyone in the media that they had to use that term? Probably Frank Luntz I suppose. Is there some reason we can't just call things what they are? Jesse Ventura called waterboarding "torture." Considering he's actually had it done to him, I'm going to go ahead and take his word for it.

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" makes my mind conjure up some sort of peaceful breathing exercise. And I think that's the point. If the words we use trick our minds into thinking things are less serious than they are, then we won't take things as seriously.

The opposite is true as well. If we use words like "death panel" and "big abortion," then things seem a lot worse than they really are.

My grandmother always told me that when you speak as though you're stupid, then people will assume you're stupid. Words matter.

OsamaCare

So we finally got Osama Bin Laden huh? Well it's about damn time. So conservatives, go ahead and tell me how the President did it wrong. Come on, I'm waiting. I want to hear it.

Wouldn't you just have loved to be a fly on the wall for that phone call from Obama to Bush? "Hey George, whatcha havin' for breakfast? Eggs? Great - tell Laura hi for me. Oh ya, I CAUGHT OSAMA BIN LADEN!! HA!"

I gotta say though, this whole display of people cheering in the streets is really creeping me out. It reminds me of the "death to America" scenes we always get from the middle east. Aren't we supposed to be a Christian nation? I know Bin Laden was a despicable human being, but this ostentatious celebration of a person's death seems very un-Christian. I thought we were supposed to be better than that.

16 and Pregnant (with an asshole for a boyfriend)

I'm addicted to MTV's "16 & Pregnant" and "Teen Mom."  I know the shows get a lot of flack for "glorifying" teen pregnancy, but I don't think they do that at all.  I think they give a pretty accurate portrayal of how hard teen parenting is, even under the best circumstances. 

I also think that they provide a little snapshot of the state of teen behavior in America today.  And that state is depressing.  On almost every episode, the girls have a discussion with their friends about what they were using for birth control when they got pregnant, and almost across the board the answer is some form of "what's birth control?"

No matter what their race, social class, or educational status is, these girls seem to know astonishingly little about contraception, and I put the blame squarely on the abstinence-only "education" that we continue to rely on, despite the plethora of evidence showing that it doesn't work.

Besides the contraception ignorance, the other thing that makes me crazy is the attitude of the boys on the show.  I will say that some of the young men are decent, caring boys doing their best to rise to the challenge and be good fathers and partners.  But by a sad majority, they seem to be foul-mouthed assholes content to sleep and play video games while their girlfriends do all the real work of parenting. 

The way that some of these boys talk to their girlfriends is either bordering on, or all out, abusive.  They say the most despicable, unacceptable things to these girls, and no one (including their own parents) seems to call them on it.  I have two sons, and if I ever heard some of things these boys say come out of my sons' mouths, I think I'd have to give them a swift slap across the face (not that I advocate child abuse or anything).

Maybe along with comprehensive sex ed, we need to start teaching a class on basic respect and social behavior since so many parents don't seem to be teaching that anymore.