The View From Here

I live in a tiny vacation community, one of the handful of year round residents in my neighborhood. My neighbors, when they are here, are mostly Canadian. The rest of us are varying degrees of American ranging from born and raised in the same community, to recent and not so recent immigrants. In the three years I've lived here, I've made a couple of really good friends, am working on filling out a couple more, and am on good happy daily hello terms with all my neighbors. What makes this unusual is that every single one of us differs politically, religiously, and economically. And yet we live in happy harmony with each other.

I've thought a lot about this in the last few days. I thought about it as I exchanged hellos and small talk about kitties and the suddenly delightful spring-like day with my neighbor. The day after the election he wore a shirt with an anti-gay marriage theme and bemoaned the taking over of America by socialism. I made no secret that I voted for every one of his worst nightmares...Obama, same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization...his entire list of horrors. We basically nullified each other's votes.

For a couple days he avoided me and my equally treasonous spouse. We didn't see each other by the mailbox. We didn't say hello. We didn't exchange small talk. And then there he was as if nothing had happened. He was friendly. I was friendly. I played with his kitties. He bragged about their antics. We went on with our respective days.

I think what soothed this over is that we both have had a chance to interact on a small, friendly and frequent basis. Brief though those moments are,they are still enough to let both of us see we are not monsters. In fact, if you laid a lot of our lives side by side, they'd be similar. We've both worked most our lives. We both are approaching retirement with just enough to survive on if we are frugal and don't want for much, he a bit better than I because he had a great union job for most his life.  For both of us, it's how we've lived most our lives so there isn't much of a step down. It's normal. We're working class. We have no rich relatives to save us in old age. We are our own saviors.

And yet we are so different in how we think. He is conservative. I'm as liberal as they come. I have two wonderful friends I desperately want DOMA to go away for so they can stay in the country. He's terrified gays will force him to marry his cat. We've never talked religion, but I suspect he has strong religious beliefs but does not feel the need to inflict them on me, just as I have no need to talk about my atheism to him. It's ours. It is who we are and not something we need to force on others to have it be meaningful to ourselves.

We get along because we know enough about each other to feel comfortable with each other. We're never going to party together or even have a cup of coffee on the porch. We have our own lives, our own friends, our own families. We are neighbors in a small village and we both know if it comes down to it, we have each other's back, politics and religion be damned.

The neighbors that are closest to me politically are still a few levels shy of liberal and are what I consider salt of the earth type Americans, the ones you call "good people." They are not complex, but they are not stupid. They value the beauty of the land because they grew up in it and so are environmentalists by default. They hunt and fish because it's a source of food they grew up with and they still need the extra supplies to survive when money is tight. They waste nothing, grow most of their own food, and spend a lot of time just enjoying life.

They believe in a live and let live philosophy and they walk their talk. I can't imagine them judging anyone. I felt immediately accepted by them. They are familiar to me. I grew up with them. I married a man who came from the same kind of background. I like them as people. When we first moved here, they sent over cookies and a holiday card with a Bible quote that was more inclusive and loving than mean and judgmental.

I suspect they are true Christians, the kind of people who volunteer at the food bank and give generously to their church when they have extra. If I needed help with anything, I'd feel comfortable asking them and I'm certain they'd feel comfortable asking me. We are good neighbors. We joke about things in the neighborhood. We laugh a lot. I'm fairly certain they voted similar to me except for the gays, but I'm certain that soon as they actually meet and interact with someone openly gay, they'll come around. There's no reason for them not to.

My other neighbors are retired Canadians who worked as firefighters, law enforcement and white collar professions. We live here for the same reason. We love the trees, the saltwater, the squirrels, the heron, the eagles, the absolutely luscious vegetation, the blissful peace and quiet. On holidays we like to drink and be merry. We have friends and family around the fire pits and grills. We makes things go boom on the 4th of July and New Year's.

We live a simple and delicious existence. None of us are rich. Some of us are poor. But all of us have found what we require to survive and be happy. We get along. We enjoy seeing each other in our gardens, on our porches, decks, and mowing the lawns that refuse to stop growing. We are here for the same reason and that is far more important than our religions or political beliefs.

And of course, being such a diverse and delightful environment, there's also people here who are just like me. We've had delightful conversations. We've already created perfect worlds over bottles of wine, glasses of beer, and cups of tea. We've met in the local taverns, gone out to eat together, and sat down on the beach to absorb the sunsets. We've become friends and are working on deepening those new and delightful bonds.

All in all, we are a tiny neighborhood in a small community in a vacation suburb of a larger town. We are as unique as where we live and just as we appreciate the diversity of nature and wildlife, we are learning to appreciate each other. We may not always agree, and we may in some cases never agree, but what we do share is we took the time to say hello to our neighbors, got to know each other, and discovered our differences were far less important than the common ground and dreams we shared.

In our tiny piece of paradise, we've caught a glimpse of how the world can truly be if we lived in it as neighbors, if we watched out for each other, if we didn't try to force our beliefs on each other, if we respected each other's individual spaces as if they were our own, if we lived as if we all had the same right to exist in the same tiny little place on the planet. Yes, we are not perfect, but we are trying and maybe that is what makes the difference between harmony and horror. Maybe that is why we can get along with each other when others can't. Maybe we have something here that others can have as well if they take the first step, extend the first hand, share the first hello. It sure beats the alternatives.

The View From Here

Words From One Of The Carrots In The Stew

We've never met in person,  but our virtual friendship is entering the twenty year mark, long enough for both of us to forget we never actually met in person. But that's the internet and I am grateful that it brought us together that day on a long defunct literary discussion list. From fifteen women, we are down to a handful. Literally a handful. We can count each other on one hand.

Over the last couple decades we've shared our lives with thousands and thousands of words. They've described love, life, death, rebirth, the good, the bad, the indifferent, and tears of joy, of sadness, of despair, and of loss. We've grieved the death of our literary sisters. We've lamented, cursed, and screamed at growing old, not for vanity or the loss of our youth, but because it takes away those we love. If you live long enough, you become a survivor by default and it's often a sad place to be. There is no victory in it, just the whimsical nature of time and the hand you are dealt.

And sadly now, my friend is in her final weeks. Last week she decided to end all further attempts to heal her and is instead focusing on what she calls "the end game." We've both lost enough friends to breast cancer in the last decade to know it's not a fight to lose because she never picked cancer as an opponent. It just happened to her as it happens to far too many women. To call it a fight implies a loss or victory to the opponent. No. It is simply a change, a transition from living to dying. She's a purist that way. Throughout it all, she's focused on living and not on dying. She's wanted to be addressed and acknowledged and loved as a living human being, not one who is dying. Victory to her means her friends and those she loves are able to forget what is going on in her body and focus on her the way they always did.

She refuses to be called brave because she says she is not. She does what the doctors tell her. She listens to what her body wants and does not want. As another of our friends who died last year said, who she is becomes far more important than what is happening to her. Rather than brave or courageous or strong or winning and/or losing, she prefers the term "growing." I have loved watching the process of her coming into her own as a woman, as a friend, as a delightful human being.

Yes, the sadness over eventually losing her is often hard to feel, but honestly, the same can be said for all my friends. Once you hit those later years, the sixties, the seventies, losing friends becomes far more common than we ever realized. We become better at saying goodbye. We become better at helping. We become better at cutting through the crap and learn to just be with each other.

While I really believe we have become better as a culture at accepting that death is an inevitable part of living, there are certain issues that still need perfecting, and one of those is pain management. There is absolutely no reason my friend or anyone should have to suffer pain at the end of their life. And yet they do. I've asked my friends in the medical professions how this is possible, how is it that with all our advances, the only option for pain management at the end is either suffering so you can stay conscious as long as possible, or such heavy doses that you are virtually in a coma until you transit from here to some other reality.

I've heard many answers and the most common seems to be our dance with morality. We are taught certain drugs are bad and unbelievably there's still those who would deny the full range of pain medication to the dying because they don't want to make them addicts. Seriously. I'm not joking. There are moralists who would rather see someone in pain than risk making them addicts just before they die. This is just fucked up in so many ways.

Then there's the whole money/research issue. Life is for the living and so we focus the funds on helping the living and not the dying. Medicines are developed for profit and pain medications are relatively cheap compared to chemo drugs, so the dying get filled up with those and have to suffer in pain. My friend has learned to be insistent to not feeling pain and also not being out of it until it's time to be out of it.

This worked well until a couple days ago when she lost the ability to speak and can barely type. Now she is dependent on what others think is good for her instead of what she needs and wants. This is in spite of reams and reams of last wills, living wills, final directives. At some point, the "team" takes over and the patient is no longer a willing participant.

But we've been through this before, so her pain is less than others in her situation. She has people fighting for her, family who understand her wishes completely and are ferocious in the face of those who try and go against them.

And yet, dying is a complicated process, especially in this digital age. We thought we'd covered everything, the eventual message on her blog, her Facebook page, her twitter account, and for the most part we have. But there's always loose ends, personal things you forget to tell people, things that matter to you but didn't realize mattered to you until you lose access to them. This happened with her twitter account. Because she could no longer type easily, she let it go for a few days and a well meaning friend closed it down for her as he mistakenly thought those were her instructions. He feels terrible that he misread her instructions, but it's too late to get it back. It's gone.

So today I've contacted some of the people she was following in an attempt to at least give her access to the progress of people she cared about. It's a surprisingly long list. I'm not trying to recreate her account but merely becoming a conduit from them to her via me and my account. Most people have been completely understanding and others are suspicious and required some reassuring words before clicking that little follow button. Others, mostly from her community of breast cancer women, appear to have fallen off the radar. Their last posts were weeks ago and they don't answer my requests. It's not for me to ask her why these people matter to her but they do.

So here's my reason for writing this. For those of you who are support, family, friends with someone who is beginning the end game, please remember there are people like my friend. You may not understand why she needs to keep in touch with people who are strangers, you may not know about the many emails she received from complete strangers moved by her blog describing her path and the lessons learned and unlearned, you may not know she also has people she followed, read and connected with on a level only those who are going through such a thing can understand, but they matter to her.

I have promised to keep her virtual family connected with updates. It doesn't take much, just a few moments to post on her blog that she is with us but unable to type, that she is transitioning and wishing everyone love and happiness and the spiritual and personal growth that develops us as human beings. It doesn't take much and yet it means so much. There is a middle path to protecting the cherished privacy, the final intimate moments of life with those we love, and yet not losing touch with those who have come to care about us.

We, at the heart of ourselves as human beings, tend to measure everything on a personal level, so if we don't understand something it somehow becomes less in importance. And one thing we often fail at is understanding why and how someone cares about us. If it isn't a personal lover, a close friend, a familiar family member, we don't always see how much we matter to someone else. That's our last obstacle to overcome as members of the upright species: learning to accept there are those who love us, who care about us, even if we barely feel them inside our hearts. Our lack of awareness doesn't lessen what they feel. It just makes our planet a more lonely place for all of us.

So today I will contact more from the list of twitter friends and help make the world a less lonely place. And one day I hope my friends and family will do the same for me because we all live in this stew together, no matter how much we cling to our individual carrot or potato self.

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Words From One Of The Carrots In The Stew

Village Idiocy

I recently spent a month recovering from the flu. It was the kind of flu that didn't allow me to do much for a couple weeks except mindless crap. Seriously, it hurt to think and it wore me out to do anything requiring more than minimal effort. I tried reading but couldn't focus. I tried to work, but after trying to put up one design several different times only to accidentally delete an hours worth of work by clicking the wrong key, I gave up. I turned to the old standby--games. I spent a couple days making the world safe from angry birds, but even that required more energy than I had , so I turned to television. Specifically, mindless tedious stupefying television, the kind most of America feeds on for most of their waking hours when they're not working.

I'm not an anti-television snob. There's some excellent shows that I usually wait until they come out on Netflix to watch, and I really am an Amazing Race junkie.  But that's about it. I've never watched many of the popular culture shows. I tried, I really did, but in the end they were about not every interesting people doing not very interesting things. And I may be old, but not old enough to get my news from television actors pretending to be journalists. I'd rather read blogs online from many different views to form an opinion, rather than have it fed to me by actors who wouldn't know a real news story if it kicked them in their partisan asses.

What I did find as I flipped from channel to channel is that American television is like the worst little inbred community of stupid people on the planet. I've lived in small towns and the news is basically the same kind of tedious gossip that passes for conversation in those horrid little communities. No one ever talks about ideas. They talk about other people. No one ever talks about the problems of the world. They talk about who's bedding whom and whose divorce is that week's meat to rip apart and feed to the hogs. No one ever talks about solutions to world hunger, the destruction of the planet, how to make a better world. They gossip instead. They say mean and horrible things about people they don't even know. They form sides. They create a world of us and them. The news on television has become the worst of these things, the worst of these people, the meanest and most shallow excuse for existence imaginable.

At first, just as I felt when exposed to this behavior in small communities populated with small-minded idiots, I was stunned that people could live this way, that they could get  information this way, that they could make real life choices based on being fed pure biased bullshit.

And then I began to understand it was all deliberate. Television feeds into the small minded idiots in these communities. It creates low information voters. It creates people who are always afraid of some boogy man or woman of the week. It makes it seem normal to have an us and them world where everything is always one person's fault, one ethnic group's fault, one country's fault. It creates the kind of fear that discourages independent thinking for herd behavior. Television tells you different people are bad. Different ideas are bad. Truth is bad.

Television is called programming for a reason. It doesn't want you to think or discuss real ideas. It wants you to gossip about each other. It wants you to always blame someone else for problems you create yourself. It wants you to live in fear and in mistrust and to always always think just like everyone else. And to severely punish those who are not like you.

And in between, they want to sell you shit. Lots of shit. Stupid shit designed just for people who no longer are able to think for themselves. Step right up, and please do use your neighbor's back to step on as you climb up the Randian ladder of disdain and privilege, because you're special and deserve to buy all the crap they're selling you.

Village Idiocy

This Weekend

The horrifying events in Connecticut were breaking as we waited to board our plane to Las Vegas. We were headed there to celebrate forty years of love, friendship, family, and community with those who hold special places in our hearts. We were going to reconnect with people we haven't seen for decades: old college friends, family, people we met along the way and who managed to stay connected even though our paths took us all over the planet. We went to celebrate old and new weddings, friendships formed in one place and finished growing in another. We went to share the gift of our love for each other with our friends and family who never met before, or who attended one of our long ago weddings, or who sat in college classes with us, or who lived in communal households during our formative and idealistic years. We went, more than anything else, to share the profound and deep love we've built together as a community. It was our gift to each other, our gift to those we loved and cherished the most.

And all over the country as we waited to board for one common destination, a horrible tragedy was unfolding. I know I wasn't the only one trying to block it out. The sound was off on the airport screens, but the images were impossible to shut out. Grief has a way of cutting through the silence, and even brief involuntary glances at the faces let us know this was a grief beyond words. It was a horror unimaginable to those of us in that waiting room together. It was the complete opposite of the reality we were living in, the life of tolerance, and love, and hope, and common dreams built and shared over decades of love and friendship.

And yet, we blocked as much of it out as possible. We were on our way to a different reality and topics such as death, dying, and tragedy were personalized to something we could take in wound by wound, sadness by sadness. There was an awareness of those in our lives who would not be there to share in this amazing adventure months in the planning. The dead had faces we knew, people we'd loved and said goodbye to in the last few years, some as recently as weeks before. We'd already shed tears for them before boarding the plane because they weren't able to board with us. To cry for strangers would have opened our own personal wounds again and we already put them on hold for the weekend.

We were also aware of the short time many of our group have left on this planet, us included. The youngest of us all have gray hair and gravity has definitely won. For some of us, it was clear that time was something we called "now or never." For every year we put this off, our group of friends and family would grow smaller. Mortality sort of creeps up on us. One day we think we have forever, and then so quickly we look in the mirror and see that forever has a shelf live and we're on the losing end of it.

As a group we have survived illnesses that would have killed the less strong. We are the ones left, the ones who get up from the chair more slowly and ache after a hike or a stroll through adult Disneyland. We are medicated, creaky, and definitely dancing on borrowed time. It's why events such as ours are so important. We are so aware they are now or never events and we hold them close to our hearts.

But the families who lost so much in that awful tragedy, they were in their forever times of life. They sent their children off to school as they did every morning and had no reason to  believe they wouldn't do the same next day and the days after for many years to come. They were parents who were giving their children a childhood, a memory to take forever into adulthood that would form the basic of bonds to come in later years.

We had that. No matter how horrible and dysfunctional our personal childhoods, we didn't fear someone coming to our schools and killing us. That was the only place we felt safe. It was a refuge. The teachers were our adult protectors. It is unimaginable to us as adults who grew up in that time, to think of our schools in any other way.

And yet, there's a whole generation of children who have grown up not feeling that sense of security,  that safe place of our childhood. The first school shooting students are now adults and it has happened so much that we now have several generations of children who don't believe they are safe at school. Sonja, one of the cherished friends who spent the weekend with us at our adult slumber party, returned home to her kids and I'm sure hugged them closer and tighter than ever before, and then she described how the world has changed in this very succinct and poignant way:

"I just demonstrated to my children what one does if one hears gunshots, and made them demonstrate what they had learned. I then gave them several boxes of Lego and instructed them to resume their childhood. I proceeded to the bathroom to cry until I barfed."

I can't imagine the grief of those parents. I have wept many tears at the loss of friends, but they were ill and their deaths were not unexpected, or they died in accidents after much of their lives were already lived. But when a group of children are murdered in such a horrible way, whether it is in war, or disaster, or murder, we lose a piece of our hope in the meaning of forever. We shut down a piece of ourselves that dares to dream of a better world, a safer and more tolerant planet, a more loving and sane humanity.

That is why it is so important to have weekends like we did where there was so much love that everyone who walked into that room was wrapped and cradled in it. It is the only way to fight back. As my young cousin Anna's shirt said: Love is the answer. We must fight back with love because that is the only power than means anything. We must fight back with tolerance because that is how we measure our personal worth as human beings. We must fight back with joy and happiness and acceptance of each other as imperfect and frail creatures doing our best to pass through this life with honor and integrity and a sense of fairness.

I really don't know how we can stop hurting each other, how we can stop killing each other. I have no answers for that. But I do know if each of us makes time to spend a weekend together with those we cherish the most, if we combine the best of our friends and family together in one place and share our love for each other without holding back, without expecting anything in return, without holding on to old wounds and stupid misunderstandings, then we create a force that can fight evil as one unified beam of love.

So send out those emails, make those calls, post it on Faceborg, tweet it until your fingers ache, but start planning your own weekend with each other. Don't tie it in with the holidays. Make it its own holiday. Celebrate being alive and loved and then take that feeling forward and help make a better world, because if we don't, then who will?

Peace.

This Weekend

Obama, Marijuana, Braces, and the Issues Voter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Strong Woman Round Clock by orsobear
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Obama, Marijuana, Braces, and the Issues Voter

Binder Full Of Women

Seriously...does anyone but serial killers have binders full of women?

And for all of you who wish you had your own binder full of women, I made a special one for you. You can customize it with your own name or you can remove all the text. Just click on the customize button and have fun. Or order it as is for your favorite serial killer candidate for President.

 

Binder Full Of Women by orsobear
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Binder Full Of Women

Message To Republicans From Women Voters

Message To Republicans From Women Voters

Me and Mr. Pissy Bossy

A few years ago I worked for a temp agency. One of the jobs lasted about two weeks and consisted of mind-numbing boring work at the cheapest rate possible for someone with my skills. I remember having to fight for an extra ten cents an hour that the company wanted to deduct for using their break room. Seriously. They wanted to charge me to sit in the buzzing white florescent hell of orange plastic chairs and a microwave that was so old you could feel it cooking from across the room, for the whole fifteen minutes of break time they were legally required to provide. I ate my lunch outside in my car in the parking lot. The air was better.

Most of the places I worked had friendly, nice people who if they didn't especially love their jobs, at least didn't hate them. In this place the workers barely smiled. They were sullen and not especially friendly. At first I attributed this to temp syndrome; they didn't want to waste their time being nice to someone who wasn't going to be there after a couple weeks. Then I noticed they treated each other the same way. I half expected to see a sign up somewhere that said Beatings will continue until morale improves.


Then I met the boss and it all made sense. He was in his mid-30's and the greatest argument for a one hundred percent tax on inherited wealth I ever met. Mr. Pissy Bossy would come strolling in around 11 am and immediately head for the time clock to check to see if anyone was late that morning. And by late, that meant anyone who failed to clock in by 8 am exactly. Early was good. One minute after eight meant your card was stapled onto the cork board in the middle of the work space so everyone could see it and the big red letters scrawled over it: LATE!

That was warning one. Warning two was someone waiting at your desk to escort you out the building, usually Mr. Pissy Bossy because he enjoyed it so much. His cheeks would get all flushy and his voice would go up in pitch as he announced to everyone: this employee chose to steal from me because time is money so they are no longer my employee. 


Besides being a total douchebag, he was also one of the dumbest and most racist jerks I've ever met. He would walk around and check computer screens and make completely uninformed and stupid comments that showed how little he actually understood about the business. One thing to note was that not once did he stop by my desk. Since I was only temporary he had no control over me and therefore no interest. I might as well have been invisible.

But everyone else cowered under his douchebaggery. They put up with his cruelty, his racism, his stupid remarks. No one ever challenged him. No one ever corrected him. No one ever suggested he might be wrong or have the facts wrong. No one ever expected him to care because everyone knew he was there just so his father could justify the fortune he spent buying him a college degree.

I say "buy" because it was clear Mr. Pissy Bossy never cracked open a book in his life. He didn't have to. If he was in danger of failing a class, daddy just donated more money to the university. He just funded another scholarship, built another building, whatever it took to make sure his dumb as a bag of rocks son got that piece of paper.

That was Mr. Pissy Bossy's life: wealth, privilege, never having to work very hard at anything, or have anything he said or did--no matter how stupid, challenged. The disdain he felt for the people he employed was so obvious that no one even gossiped about him. On their breaks they wanted away from him. To talk about him would give him far more presence in their lives than they wanted. It wasn't so much that they hated him, but more of an acceptance that this is what money did to people, this is what it filled in the places that everyone else called love, trust, tolerance, compassion, and altruism. Mr. Pissy Bossy's very pores were filled with the kind of wealth that is cheap, ostentatious, and will never make up for lack of a personality.

It would seem that with such an insignificant role in his father's company for a mere four hours a day, that he wouldn't have much impact with his presence. But Mr. Pissy Bossy wasn't content to just put in his time, torture a few workers and then go flush out his alcoholic cheeks with another round of martinis at the country club. No, he couldn't just do what daddy wanted because like many men and a whole lot of rich fucks like himself, Mr. Pissy Bossy had daddy issues. He had something to prove.

And prove it he did. While sitting through the mandatory minimum requirement for his MBA, Mr. Pissy Bossy fell in with a bad crowd. They taught him things about money daddy never taught him. They showed him how fun it was to move money around and make it hurt some people as at the same time, it made others wealthy. As dumb as he was, this was something Mr. Pissy Bossy could learn and do well because it required nothing more than seeing people, assets, money, banks, and Wall Street as one and the same. It all came down to numbers in one column and numbers in another column. Anything else, like human factors, took the fun out of the game.

For Mr. Pissy Bossy and his friend, it was a game. They would hover around the computer in his office and play move the money around games. One of their games while I was there, involved buying a block of what they called "N-word habitats" in some mid-western city and forcing the long time residents out by demolishing the building after the purchase.

Rich people don't have to sell right away, unlike those who need the money. So they held on to the land and made constant and horribly offensive jokes about the people they displaced. That was the game. Hurting people. Mocking them. Taking away the roofs over their heads. Land that would one day, ten or twenty years down the road bring them money wasn't relevant. It was just a side benefit of being born wealthy. The real fun was in making human beings suffer.

I asked for another assignment after a week and unlike most jobs, the agency didn't even ask me why. They knew. I went to work somewhere else the next day with no problem.

For several years I forgot about Mr. Pissy Bossy until Mitt Romney came along to remind me about him. You see, these gaffes that Romney makes, the insensitive comments, the stupid remarks, it's just like Mr. Pissy Bossy. No one has ever dared to tell Willard that he was wrong, or stupid, or uneducated, or cruel, or out of touch. It must come as a shock to him to even be questioned at all. Look at his reaction when anyone asks. His entire body language says how dare you!

And like Mr. Pissy Bossy, Willard has never been poor. He has no idea what it's like and he doesn't really want to know. That's the main problem. He just doesn't care and he just doesn't want to know. It's what a life of privilege and wealth does to you. It insulates you. It robs you of the requirement that you actually learn and do something of value with your life. It makes you mean. It makes you cruel. And it fills the emptiness with more money than anyone can spend in a hundred lifetimes.

This is who the Republicans are offering to the American people, a man who would turn the entire country into that desperate and sad company I once gave a week of my life to before I couldn't stomach it anymore. This is how he would treat the poor, the old, the weak, the ordinary human beings who earn nothing from the Mitt Romneys of the world but their disdain.

And if you stay home or vote Republican, you will be helping to make it happen. The choice is yours. All I ask  is that you remember those people in that office and ask yourself if that's how you want to spend the rest of your life. How you answer will tell you how you should vote.


Daily Words to Stew On: A Progressive's Daily Devotional: 2012 Election Year Edition

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Me and Mr. Pissy Bossy

Legacies of Words

 I've lived around writers, artists, and musicians for most of my life. Every event, no matter how major or minor, was immortalized, displayed, and performed. No one just died. They went out in one last superbly scripted, choreographed, and wrenched from the guts of creative angst-inspired performance art. Very often this art was created in the final months, weeks or days of life. We saw only the end result, and rarely, unless we were close to the artist, the process that created it.

But blogs changed all that, especially for writers. The personal became the painfully blogged, and the inner torment, the doubts, the rage, the fear, the sadness, and the acceptance became a shared journey. I remember the first time a friend sent me the url to what she called her Cancer Blog, there was this initial moment of horror, this feeling of voyeurism, this sense of intruding into what seemed far too personal to share.

It was also terrifying as I was still recovering from coming up against my own mortality. There were issues, fears, and doubts I was still resolving inside myself and I was afraid my own pace would be disturbed if I ran alongside someone else's race against time.

Nearly a decade later I've said goodbye to far too many wonderful writers and artists who left us way too early. Most of them kept blogs, especially the writers, and I've come to see their words, their months of describing a journey we all have to make at some time, as a valuable gift to the world left behind.

 Even though everyone approaches illness and death differently, it is the process we all seek to understand. We want to know what it feels like the moment when it becomes inevitable. We want to know the questions we would ask, the answers we would accept, the words we would struggle to say and share with our own voices. We want to know what it feels like to die.

I still feel like a voyeur, a fraud with my health, my future still ahead of me, when one of my friends starts her own personal cancer blog and asks me to read it. But I've come to understand illness and dying are two separate sides of the same goodbye and it helps them to know I am there reading their words, that there is a place all of us in their lives can go and be updated, shared with, and comforted.

 There are things that are universal, and there are things only experience can teach us. But with the amazing courage of these women who described their illnesses and then their paths to dying, we have an insight into what was once only an intellectual description found in textbooks. We now have the personal from the initial diagnosis, through treatment, through hope, through despair, through the moment when each blog entry grows closer to the end and the reality sinks in that it's not just a novel, it's not just words on a screen. It's yet another woman, another friend, another writer, another courageous human being sharing her final journey in order to make ours less lonely.

Within the despair, the tears when days have passed and there have been no new posts and then suddenly there is one, but it's a family member instead writing the last post, there is also something very important that has grown from the millions of words. Through years of writing about their experiences, the dying have left behind a library of information related to treatments, options, financial and psychological assistance, and the many details that are so important to saying a clean and uncluttered goodbye.

They've given support and much needed understanding to women who find themselves diagnosed with a serious and often terminal illness. From the blogs have grown websites with forums dedicated to the issues first written about and shared among women and a handful of friends and family. No one has to die alone anymore. No one has to feel they haven't exhausted all the options out there. There is a community of the newly diagnosed, the long term treated, the terminal, the family, friends, and left behind. We have shared something that never used to be shared so completely.

It is a form that is still evolving. One of the curious things to me as person, is how strangers start following a dying person's blog and become part of the community. As a writer I understand it perfectly. There are blogs I read just because the person is so fascinating and what they have to say so unique and educating, that it doesn't matter if I know them or not.

Usually they're not dying, but a couple times in the last year I've been directed by a dying friend or two to blogs that are followed by thousands of people. It's as if a fascinating new person has moved into the neighborhood and is a superb writer who manages to catch us all up in the fascinating process of her dying. We all sit down to tea and listen and get caught up in her life, her treatment, her dreams, her hopes, and when it all comes crashing down to the reality of death winning most of the time, it's as horrible as if she really did live next door.

And in this way, I believe the world grows a bit more human. If we can share the most intimate part of our lives in such a way, if we can leave such a gift of community behind, such a legacy of all sharing the same hopes, the same dreams of a miracle cure, the same sense of loss when the inevitable family member post appears, then maybe through our dying we can finally learn to live as one people on one planet.



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Legacies of Words

Yo, Douchebags!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Yo, Douchebags!

How T-Mobile lost a customer over less than a dollar

I've been a customer of T-Mobile for about seven or eight years, but today I'm going shopping for a new cell phone service because the "office of Jay Vanderlay" felt it was more important to collect less than a dollar each month from me rather than put any effort into keeping me as a customer. Here's the details.

I'm not one of those people who texts all the time. I prefer to talk in person or send emails. My phone is for phone calls. I'm old-fashioned that way, or maybe there's just too many mechanical things demanding my attention that I limit their access to my already overloaded brain. So I didn't sign up for nor did I want to pay for unlimited text messaging for ten dollars a month. I already pay almost a hundred dollars a month for two lines and that's already too much for what I get.

This worked fine for many years. I paid twenty cents for text message sent and received and it rarely cost me more than a couple extra dollars a month. Then a couple months ago I started receiving spam texts, several of them a week. All of a sudden I went from paying for a couple text messages here and there to over ten dollars worth a month.

First of all, there really isn't an easy way to contact anyone at T-Mobile to ask a simple question online. They appear to not want to deal with their customer complaints this way so you have to sign up for a service that is basically a forum filled with other people complaining about T-Mobile's crappy customer service.

So I dialed the 611 number and was connected with someone who didn't even know the basics of what I was complaining about. I told him I wanted to not pay for spam sent to my cell phone, which is also and has been for years, on the Do Not Call List. He told me the only way to deal with it was to sign up for the ten dollars a month unlimited text messaging service. He found it impossible to understand or accept there are people in the world who do not text everything. He ended up basically pissing me off by implying I was some kind of idiot for not wanting unlimited text.

So I filed a complaint with the Attorney General's office. This is where "the office of Jay Vanderlay" comes into the picture to totally destroy the reputation of T-Mobile. I keep my phone off when I'm sleeping or working on a customer order as do most sane people who don't want to be bothered. I received a phone call asking me to call a number and an extension. I did and kept getting through to nothing but his voice mail account. The next day I found another message on my phone saying he had tried to get hold of me and failed and if I didn't contact him soon he would tell the Attorney General's office I didn't call him back.

I logged into my account, took a screen shot of all the calls to his office that went straight to voice mail and then I called several more times, the last one telling him I'd taken screen shots of my attempts to call him. I finally got him on the phone.

Not only was he the rudest person I've ever had the displeasure of talking to, he basically said that T-Mobile is unable to distinguish between a spammer sending thousands of text spams through their service (which they get 20 cents per call both from the spammer and from me) but that  it was in their terms of service that they could do this to their customers.

First of all, a company that can't get control of its out of control text spam problem doesn't really speak well of its professional status. But the truth is T-Mobile makes lots of money from spammers. It makes lots of money customers who are forced to receive that spam. And since they racked up some huge expenses and lost tons of customers over the whole mess with At&T, then they have to recoup those costs somewhere.

So I'm going cell phone service shopping today. T-Mobile has lost a customer who pays her bill every month. They've thrown away nearly one hundred dollars a month to keep collecting those spam pennies. It would have been an easy to find a way to keep me as a customer. Give me free text messaging for a couple months to make up for the spam costs. Send me a coupon for a free cup of coffee. Apologize and admit that as a cell phone provider you just don't have the ability to keep up with the big guys. But instead they chose to be rude. They chose to be greedy. And they chose to let themselves be represented by rude, incompetent and prissy little boys. Nice job, guys. And goodbye.

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How T-Mobile lost a customer over less than a dollar

Propaganda of Titanic Proportions.

Sunday, April 14th,  was the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking and if anything typifies the disconnect between the one percent and everyone else, it was the coverage of this tragedy's anniversary. Most of the news stories focused on the rich first class passengers and their last meal, which was recreated all over the country like  this one  served in Texas that cost 12,000 dollars. When there are people going hungry in this country because of the greed of the wealthy, this was just plain disgusting and wasteful and really points out that for the rich, most of America still lives in steerage class.

The poor, then as now, were invisible, unimportant, nameless and not even worth fishing out of the sea, a forgotten class that ate and traveled away from the disapproving eyes of the rich and privileged. Many of the steerage passengers were listed as servants, general laborers, working class whose bodies were mostly never recovered, unlike the rich who not only had access to the life boats first, but it seems, if you check out the recovery of bodies here, were more important even after death. I find it hard to believe only the rich floated to the top. Someone had to make a choice of whose body to salvage and whose body would remain in the cold depths of the sea.

And the whole myth of women and children first only applied if you were poor. Check out how many first class male passengers were listed as survivors in the lifeboats in comparison to steerage class. The whole myth of chivalry and honor was just that, a myth to perpetuate an image of the wealthy that was a complete and total lie. There was no honor in their behavior nor in how they got their wealth. They didn't get rich by working. They got rich by being dishonorable, immoral thieves or they inherited their unearned wealth from parents who got rich by stealing everything they could get their greedy hands on. Most never worked an honest day in their entire worthless lives.

Today not much has changed in the way the wealthy banksters, Wall Street scum, and other parasitic gamblers view everyone else. What has changed is how the wealthy are perceived by those they disdain and look down upon with the kind of scorn the first class passengers had for steerage class. Back then people knew the real enemy were the banks and Wall Street and the politicians who sold themselves to the highest bidders.

Today, through the concerted effort of propaganda pieces in the media that perpetuate the myth that everyone can become wealthy if they only work hard enough, the modern day steerage class blames itself for being poor. It's the working class who has been brainwashed into supporting tax breaks for the super rich while their own taxes go higher as their wages go lower. It's the working class who has been fooled into thinking the rich will create jobs that pay more than minimum wage with no benefits. It's the poor, uneducated knuckledragging mouthbreathers who vote for Republicans because they believe that somehow through the miracle of trickle down, their dumb asses will be allowed a seat at the same table as the rich and they will get a chance to dine on all that opulent food.

This kind of propaganda is what has allowed the wealthy to continue to steal from the stupid and the delusional. They don't have to change anything except  how ignorant people perceive them and then they can continue to use and abuse the poor for their own purposes. It's the same kind of lies fed to the conservative base that claims Ann Romney works just as hard as a single mother trying to feed her kids while holding down two shitty jobs. I'm willing to bet these moms didn't feed their kids anything from that first class menu because even one course was more than they could afford. And yet, because they are so ignorant, they are willing to let themselves be further brainwashed into thinking Ann Romney is just like them, that she also struggles with how to put food on the table, pay the rent on her five mansions, or decide which of her many cars to drive that day while everyone else hopes gas prices don't go up any more so they can afford to drive to work.

What people don't get in the all the fluff messaging from the media is that less than a decade after the Titanic sank, the Mitt Romneys of that time were engaged in basically the same kind of thievery that is going on today. The average person could buy 100 dollars worth of stock for ten dollars and pretend that invisible, non-existent money made them rich. It was only when they had to make up the difference from their own pockets that they started throwing themselves out of their office windows. And the Mitt Romneys of that time took their money out of the banks and caused the collapse of the economy, much as the rich of today took their money out of the economy and caused the Bush/Cheney era depression that President Obama inherited.

Both times, when it was over, the rich were even richer and the poor were even poorer. That never changes. It's the pattern that occurs when the wealth is in the hands of a small percentage and it never ever trickles down, no matter how many Reagans come along to perpetuate the lie. And it's the Mitt Romneys, the Koch Brothers, the Karl Roves, the slimy congress members who take their wealth out of the country and move it to places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands to protect it from economic collapse. It's not taxes they're dodging because they pay hardly any taxes. It's the shitty economy they're running away from, the  banks they collapsed by stealing, by pushing fake money around that doesn't exist, by buying and selling assets that exist only in virtual reality. The country is their bank and they made a concerted run on it and got their money out while it was still money and not virtual fluff like everyone else got stuck with. This is how they stay rich and how the poor stay poor.

And it's the myth surrounding tragedies like the Titanic that keep the pea under the shell and away from the watchful eyes of the poor. As long as people can see the lavish meals served to the wealthy to commemorate the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic and imagine themselves at that table, as long as they can watch television shows that take them inside mansions and make them believe they can one day set foot inside these palaces, as long as shows that glorify the rich instead of portraying them as they parasites they are fill the programming schedule, the poor will be their own worst enemies, and when the ship goes down, they won't even be afforded the dignity of being fished out of the water. They'll be just another name on the manifest listed as laborer, working class, and servant. The insignificant poors.

But eventually, the rich get so fat and arrogant on their own wealth, they steal too much and create an underclass that becomes homeless, jobless,  lives under bridges and eats from food banks. Once critical mass is reached and there are hundreds of people fighting for space under those bridges and there's not enough food to go around, then revolutions happen. They're the only action that has ever affected any kind of change and it used to be that the wealthy knew just how far they could go, just how much they could steal before that mass was reached.

They don't seem to be that smart anymore. Only time will tell if they figure it out in time or if the mobs get hungry and large enough to start dragging them from their houses and cars and start stringing them up in the public squares as they strip anything of value from their lifeless corpses. I suspect if Romney wins the election, those days will come sooner than later because the army of poors are already in place and there's not much left to steal from them anymore. All they have is their anger, their hatred, and a burning desire for vengeance in their bellies that takes their minds off the hunger. It won't take much to set them off at all.

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Propaganda of Titanic Proportions.

Tree of Life, the movie

For the last several days I've been trying to find a way to put into words the feeling of continuity that weaves its way through the chaos of our individual existence. It was brought on by watching the devastation created by one of the owners of what was previously a lovely piece of land where heron nested in the trees and generations of squirrels trained new residents how to feed them their favorite treats. His reasoning for cutting down every single tree, some bigger around than many of us could embrace in one hug, was that he was building a solar house and needed to remove the trees so enough light would get through. He doesn't plan on living in it. He's building it with the intent of charging more than average to someone who is "one of them environmentalist types."

He really doesn't understand the contradiction, just as he doesn't understand how far apart he is from what nature truly is and means. He doesn't understand that those so-called environmentalist types have no interest in buying from someone who has so little respect for nature, so little understanding of what it even means to care about the environment, that he would cut down every single tree just to make his ugly devastation marketable.

In so many ways he is the poster boy for what happens when humans become disconnected from nature. And this is what I wanted to explain, the chaos that ensues when, in spite our continuity, in spite of our continual presence on this planet, we become disconnected from the part of us that is also part of the natural world. It's like trying to live without an essential organ like the heart or the brain.

Then last night I watched the movie "Tree of Life"  and something fell into place for me. I previously tried to explain the lack of compassion and shallowness of many of those on Wall Street, Congress, and heading up corporations as a lack of introspection. They are, for the most part,  mean, self-centered, materialistic excuses for human beings. They are what happens when your drugs of choice are alcohol and cocaine, drugs that numb feeling, drugs that allow you to be cruel and uncaring because you can always wipe them away with another dose. They are no different than the soldiers dosed on meth and Wagner so they could kill without conscience. One of the earliest uses of methamphetamine occurred during World War II. The German military dispensed Pervitin which was methamphetamine. It was freely administered to both tank crews and aircraft personnel.

Every generation has its drugs of choice and for mine it was LSD and marijuana, both which tend to make the imbiber more introspective. The inner landscape becomes inseparable from the outer landscape, and that is something we've lost, something that builder of the solar house has lost. It is also a theme I felt was covered in  "Tree of Life" in an especially beautiful and haunting way.

But in a clear example of how disconnected many have become from nature, I read that when the movie first aired, lots of people booed and jeered during the screening. It appears the plot didn't move fast enough for them and they were forced to endure multiple and astonishing scenes of beauty that weren't computer generated, but instead were created by so-called old fashioned  special effects techniques, like running liquid through objects and filming it.

For those of us who grew up in the 1950's and 1960's, not only did the film remind us that no matter how awful our childhoods were for the most part, there were also moments when as children we lived in a sacred world untouched by the harshness of life. We played, laughed, felt, reacted to the world around us because we didn't have the filters of television, the internet, instant access to information. We had to dream and create and imagine.

In many ways the evolution of our consciousness had to create LSD and marijuana, just as the current generation and the one before it had to create drugs like Ecstasy as part of their mental development, and also as a backlash against the numbness and cruelty of those who escaped with hard and unforgiving drugs like cocaine and alcohol.

But that numbing and disconnect is also found in the prevalence of young heroin addicts and those who can't face the day without anti-depressants. We live in a disconnected world and everyone copes according to whether they want to retreat inward or blunt what lives within the recesses of those dark places.

In "The Tree of Life" the choice is between faith or nature, and while faith seems to drive most of the characters, it does so against the powerful continuity of nature. It is a movie that demands you sit patiently and wait for events to unfold, a task that in this world of instant gratification proved too much for those who jeered in the audience. Nature always takes its time. Faith demands instant answers, instant relief to specific situations. In nature we are part of the play. In faith, we are the directors of not only our own play, but also those of everyone else. Nature connects us, faith disconnects us.

Those of my generation were raised by men who saw the worst humanity can inflict upon itself. They saw things no human can see and still keep their humanity intact. Like the father in the movie, played by Brad Pitt, they wanted to toughen us up so we could survive the horror that life would throw at us. They wanted to protect us from it and at the same time, hide it from us. It's why we grew up wanting to know more, wanting to see the source of the contradictions. If anything, we children of war survivors knew there was more to the story and so we went looking through introspection and the kind of drugs that are conducive to looking inwards. We became a generation of seekers who knew there were answers and that they would explain the chaos inside, the angst we felt at knowing we were part of something and yet not knowing how to completely be part of it.

One thing we do learn as we get older is that even introspection reaches a point where it becomes selfish and indulgent. We can't all be monks on the mountain top perpetually seeking answers. At some point we have to stop, look around us and take our place in the world. As sometimes this came too late in life to accomplish much more than survival and perpetuating our own gene pool, the chaotic pendulum shifted to children coming from us that didn't want to look so deep inside, that didn't want to feel so much, that didn't really have the chance to live in the sacred world of childhood we may have been the last generation to enjoy.

 So the pendulum got stuck on the selfish swing, the arc failed to move beyond the gimme stage of existence and we ended up with the culture of greed that now permeates the planet. We ended up letting faith kill nature because it was just easier to swallow someone else's truth rather than discover the path to our own.

The backdrop of the movie is music as Brad Pitt's character gave up a career in music to become an engineer, the ultimate betrayal of the artistic self. His failing was in not understanding he didn't have to give up one for the other, that nature can weave through both truths and music is the pulsating universe both within and without us. Compassion and altruism can be as strong as steel and concrete if you grow them from within.

At the end of the movie I just wanted to sit for awhile and absorb what I had seen because while it was familiar, it was also like entering an astonishing exhibit of beautiful art whose technical mastery seemed to mock the easy solution of computer generated imagery we've come to expect when we say "special effects." In many ways, that to me is the true message of the movie, that we've moved so far beyond the simplicity of nature we've lost the meaning of it. Just like the man destroying nature to appeal to environmentalists.


The Tree of Life (Three-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo + Digital Copy)

Earth Day Humor by orsobear
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Tree of Life, the movie

The price of hate

The Republican party has blood on its hands because it funded and supported the kind of hatemongering and stereotypical branding of human beings for their own political agenda. No one who listened to it, watched it, repeated it, spread it around like obedient little fascist monkeys can escape blame either, because without them there would be no audience, no advertisers, no reason to pollute the airways and minds with such evil crap. How many lives must be lost to senseless and stupid hate before people wake up and understand we are not born hating, that it is something we are taught and choose to keep believing.


First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.


Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.


Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.


Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

John Lennon's "Imagine" (2010 - Remaster)

The price of hate

Me and the War On Class

More and more lately I'm reminded me that I live in a country that was structured by rich white douchebags to benefit rich white douchebags long after their deaths. I imagine it sounded so perfect to them as they wrote it down on paper and passed it around for mutual approval. They were fairly certain all they had to do was will it on the masses and it would become ironclad, same as those flat earth guys a few centuries before them who were certain they could control everyone with some totally mindfuck stories they threw together after eating  moldy bread.

And like any good old power hungry waste of human skin, they killed off a few skeptics, a whole bunch of "other color" and of course, lots and lots of women to make sure no one questioned the veracity of their hallucinations. In order to get away with this they had to create the other, the bad person, the evil one, the not us that is so easy to program into the heads of the weak and terminally stupid.

My whole adult life, starting in my teens, I considered it honorable to be one of the others, and I still do. I am proud to be a Liberal because those are the principles that built the good things in this country, the kinds of things we once were admired for by the rest of the world. We took care of our own. Our leaders would have been mortified to have other countries know there were people dying of hunger in the richest country in the world, so they fought hard against the rich white douchebags to make sure those images would never be part of the image of America by passing Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, Heating assistance. We took care of our own because that is what an adult country did with its weaker citizens. No one had to ask if it was right or wrong; it was America and that was good enough for most of the country.

I am proud of my atheism because it has allowed me to question the easy answers and go straight for the best part of the questions. I can't imagine letting someone do my thinking for me or forcing me to believe what they believe simply because someone else told them they had to believe it. You can't walk upright if you're always on your knees.

I am happy for my education because it gave me an opportunity to rise above the circumstances of my early life. It taught me I could make a living with my mind as well as my body, that I had a choice which one I chose to use, or I could even use both. I had a choice because education gave me a choice. I didn't have to help build someone else's dreams once I knew I was perfectly capable of building my own. And I will fight and argue and defend everyone's right to an education because I know how the rich white douchebags hate it when people like me become educated enough to fight back. That's when they start referring to my education as class warfare, because it taught me I had the right to fight back.

These same douchebags want to take away that right to an education because they don't want people like me getting educated enough to fight back. They want trade schools, training camps, company towns where the population is grateful and never dreams of more because they know there is no more. Before the digital divide was even uttered as line creating an us and them society, there was education.

Those who learned to read in early times were the powerful, even if they were poor, even if they were not part of the elite ruling class. And it was that way and is still that way in so many parts of the country. It is shameful that in America, there are still people who can't or won't read, even more so because it is intentional.  Entertainment is sitting in front of something and letting yourself be passively entertained. Reading takes opening the book (or kindle thingie) and actively processing what is coming into your brain. That's dangerous to the douchebags because it also teaches you to think. You can't read without comprehending, and you can't comprehend without thinking.

I'm also very glad of my working class roots and the days of outright poverty I endured growing up. Since it was before food stamps and welfare, we often had to depend on the kindness and generosity of others. I learned that those who have something are always willing to share with those who have nothing. It comes natural. It's not something the one who has thinks about. They have and someone else doesn't and it doesn't feel right.

The only downside I can see to growing up poor is that I'm happy with less and so I've never had much in the way of things. I've always lived close to the edge so I could create, write, and exist without a hand on my neck demanding I get down on my knees for dollars. I've done my share of manual labor. I've worked for some of the biggest and meanest assholes on the planet. I've had to share space with the selfish, the whiny, the privileged, and the mediocre spawn of the middle class trying to claw their way to official douchebag status.

And you know what? Getting old evens it all out. I spent my life living with less so I don't miss what I never had. I give away whatever I can to those in need because I'm human and I feel their hunger, their pain, their sadness if I don't. I can't walk away from another human being in need because there's nothing of material nature out there worth giving up my humanity for. Nothing.

I see those who always wanted things, people that I spent some of my life with throughout the decades. They're getting old and they're afraid because they don't know how to survive with less. They don't know that people matter more than things, that love is worth far more than the latest anything they could possibly buy. I have so much less and yet I am far more secure because it really is true, if you have nothing you have nothing to lose. I care only about losing those I love. They are what I value and everything else is just junk store room fillers that can be replaced at any time.

This is what the douchebags just can't change or write into law to benefit them. I got away. I am me. I have survived and will continue to survive and I am fabulously wealthy with friendship, love, and the integrity of my own heart. They will never be able to say that so I can confidently say to them: yes there is a class war, and I've won you poor pitiful douchebags.

One Voice, Many Votes by orsobear
More Women Necklaces

Some recommended reading and viewing:

In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton

One Woman, One Vote

Me and the War On Class