To make up for my longer then intended absence in the blog sphere, I have two words of the week to last until the new year when I will return to regularly scheduled programming (which isn't all that scheduled to begin with).
First:
apophasis - noun: the raising of an issue by claiming not to mention it
As in, I'm not going to mention a little thing called economic depression, especially around the holidays.
Second:
jocund - adjective: marked by or suggestive of high spirits and lively mirthfulness
As in, I hope everyone's holiday time is jocund and leaves everyone ready and excited for a new year.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
Well, how about that...
Iraqi Journalist Hurls Shoes at Bush and Denounces Him on TV as a 'Dog'
This news from the New York Times today is quite something:
"Mr. Maliki’s security agents jumped on the man, wrestled him to the floor and hustled him out of the room. They kicked him and beat him until “he was crying like a woman,” said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki. Mr. Zaidi was then detained on unspecified charges.
This news from the New York Times today is quite something:
"Mr. Maliki’s security agents jumped on the man, wrestled him to the floor and hustled him out of the room. They kicked him and beat him until “he was crying like a woman,” said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki. Mr. Zaidi was then detained on unspecified charges.
Other Iraqi journalists in the front row apologized to Mr. Bush, who was uninjured and tried to brush off the incident by making a joke. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said, continuing to take questions and noting the apologies. He also called the incident a sign of democracy, saying, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves,” as the man’s screaming could be heard outside."
I guess 'democracy' comes with a side of ass kicking.Monday, December 01, 2008
Word of the Week
tes·ta·trix - noun: a woman who makes a will
As in, the rich testatrix should be wary who she names her heir. I have nothing else to share with regard to this word. I just like the way it sounds.
Completely unrelated, today is World AIDS Day, when we all consider the implications of this disease, and how to both combat and prevent it. I only have one thing to say, get tested. Actually two things, make sure the people you are sleeping with get tested also. Oh, and a third, use protection. Education is key in battling AIDS.
As in, the rich testatrix should be wary who she names her heir. I have nothing else to share with regard to this word. I just like the way it sounds.
Completely unrelated, today is World AIDS Day, when we all consider the implications of this disease, and how to both combat and prevent it. I only have one thing to say, get tested. Actually two things, make sure the people you are sleeping with get tested also. Oh, and a third, use protection. Education is key in battling AIDS.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Roof Trash
I am very intrigued by the use of the roof next door as a trash receptacle. I noticed several random discarded items appearing on the roof starting shortly after I moved in. First, I think, was the bag of oranges, which is now decayed passed recognition, followed by the rug, window screen, and dead potted plant. Today, when I looked out of my window I saw a new even more impressive addition, an actual full bag of garbage. The thing that really intrigues me about these occurrences is how and why? One possibility could be that someone is throwing the items from my building which is taller and I could easily open my window and toss something over. But I ruled out this explanation because the items are on the far side of the roof, not the side closest to us. Also, it would be impressive to throw a plant and have it land right side up with all the soil where it should be. The other option would be that someone on the top floor of the roof trash building is swinging it up on the roof, which would be a lot more difficult, and the plant still doesn't make sense. The third option is that someone is walking up onto the roof with trash and leaving it there. This is the most likely scenario. This is where I get to the why. Why on earth would someone do this? If someone is too lazy to take out the trash, it takes probably just as much energy, if not more, to walk the trash up stairs to the roof instead of downstairs to the actual trash receptacles. Maybe they are saving it for later, which would be very strange indeed. It is beyond me.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Word of the Week
apo·tro·pa·ic - adjective: designed to avert evil
As in, bailing out the US auto industry may prove to be an apotropaic move according to a wide range of pundits. I happened to catch Michael Moore's interview on Larry King Live last night and thought he made some interesting points about why we should bail out the auto industry. The number one reason is the autoworkers who will lose jobs if the car companies go down. With unemployment at an already extreme high, this is definitely something to consider. The auto industry employs huge numbers of people in the Midwest region and the loss of those jobs could spell economic disaster. On the other hand, as numerous critics, and Michael Moore, point out the auto industry has been the architect of its own disaster. Any bailout plan should come with regulations meant to maintain American jobs and improve production of cars that will actually sell in a climate of economic and environmental worries. Just say no to SUV's, GM. It is amazing how much more debate and apprehension there appears to be over a bailout for the auto industry then there was for the financial industry, who were equally as culpable in their own downfall. The current debate and apprehension would have been more appropriate in deciding to bailout white collar criminals, whose bankruptcy would not be nearly as disastrous to the average American as the bankruptcy of any of the major car companies. Yes, the execs at GM, Ford and Chrysler made some major mistakes, but we should allow their mistakes to turn the guys down on the factory floor out onto the streets.
Some further reading:
"For Detroit, Chapter 11 Would Be the Final Chapter," Spencer Abraham, NYTimes
"Congress should finalize loan to car makers soon," George Harris, Kansis City Star Reader Advisory Panel
"GM Must Re-Make the Mass Transit System it Murdered," Harvey Wasserman, CommonDreams.org
"No viable auto industry bailout plan: Democrats," AFP
As in, bailing out the US auto industry may prove to be an apotropaic move according to a wide range of pundits. I happened to catch Michael Moore's interview on Larry King Live last night and thought he made some interesting points about why we should bail out the auto industry. The number one reason is the autoworkers who will lose jobs if the car companies go down. With unemployment at an already extreme high, this is definitely something to consider. The auto industry employs huge numbers of people in the Midwest region and the loss of those jobs could spell economic disaster. On the other hand, as numerous critics, and Michael Moore, point out the auto industry has been the architect of its own disaster. Any bailout plan should come with regulations meant to maintain American jobs and improve production of cars that will actually sell in a climate of economic and environmental worries. Just say no to SUV's, GM. It is amazing how much more debate and apprehension there appears to be over a bailout for the auto industry then there was for the financial industry, who were equally as culpable in their own downfall. The current debate and apprehension would have been more appropriate in deciding to bailout white collar criminals, whose bankruptcy would not be nearly as disastrous to the average American as the bankruptcy of any of the major car companies. Yes, the execs at GM, Ford and Chrysler made some major mistakes, but we should allow their mistakes to turn the guys down on the factory floor out onto the streets.
Some further reading:
"For Detroit, Chapter 11 Would Be the Final Chapter," Spencer Abraham, NYTimes
"Congress should finalize loan to car makers soon," George Harris, Kansis City Star Reader Advisory Panel
"GM Must Re-Make the Mass Transit System it Murdered," Harvey Wasserman, CommonDreams.org
"No viable auto industry bailout plan: Democrats," AFP
Friday, November 21, 2008
Oscopy
Ladies and gentlemen, my video blog, Oscopy, is finally up and running after many months of seemingly insurmountable obstacles in my life. I've thrown up a video poetry piece that I just put together to get the ball rolling. I have set a deadline to have the other short documentary piece that I've been working on since June up by the end of next week. After that, I am hoping to update with a new video every 2-3 weeks. I plan on including everything from short docs to artsy fartsy experimental stuff. So check it out every now and then and let me know what you think.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Word of the Week
ig·no·min·i·ous - adjective: marked with or characterized by disgrace or shame
As in, it was an ignominious move by the US government to hold juveniles at Guantanamo. If you don't believe that our government would do this read "U.S. confirms it held 12 juveniles at Guantanamo." And if you don't believe that it is wrong to hold a child under those circumstances, I have to wonder about your level of moral development. According to this article, one of the juveniles committed suicide while detained in Guantanamo. Children do sometimes commit crimes (I work with them), but under no circumstance should they be put in a situation where they feel compelled to do such a thing, or are not given the necessary support if they are contemplating such an act. From what I have read, Guantanamo is not a place for anyone, let alone the fact that it is not determined whether or not many of those held there have committed any crime. A UC Berkeley study looked at the released prisoners and found them to be traumatized and shamed even though they never did anything to deserve being locked up to begin with. The article "Cal study finds ex-Guantanamo prisoners broken" shines a light on the abuses and torture that these men suffered through and that our government perpetrated. Yes, I would have to say that sending these people, especially the children, to Guantanamo is ignominious.
As in, it was an ignominious move by the US government to hold juveniles at Guantanamo. If you don't believe that our government would do this read "U.S. confirms it held 12 juveniles at Guantanamo." And if you don't believe that it is wrong to hold a child under those circumstances, I have to wonder about your level of moral development. According to this article, one of the juveniles committed suicide while detained in Guantanamo. Children do sometimes commit crimes (I work with them), but under no circumstance should they be put in a situation where they feel compelled to do such a thing, or are not given the necessary support if they are contemplating such an act. From what I have read, Guantanamo is not a place for anyone, let alone the fact that it is not determined whether or not many of those held there have committed any crime. A UC Berkeley study looked at the released prisoners and found them to be traumatized and shamed even though they never did anything to deserve being locked up to begin with. The article "Cal study finds ex-Guantanamo prisoners broken" shines a light on the abuses and torture that these men suffered through and that our government perpetrated. Yes, I would have to say that sending these people, especially the children, to Guantanamo is ignominious.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Wedding Bliss
With all the hubbub in California about Prop 8, I would like to share with you a link to an article by the SF Chronicle on the nuptials of two of my friends. I attended their wedding several weeks ago. It was great to see my friends so happy. Everyone should have the chance to have that kind happiness. I hope you agree, whatever your religious beliefs.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Word of the Week
cir·cum·loc·u·to·ry - adjective: the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea, evasion in speech
As in, politicians are particularily adept at answering questions in a circumlocutory way. I am sad to say that I never really use this word, but I am going to try from now on, because it is a fabulous, useful word. I'm sure if we all pay attention we can point out several examples everyday of someone using circumlocutory speach. Here is an entertaining article about the art of appologizing that gives as one example the circumlocutory appology.
As in, politicians are particularily adept at answering questions in a circumlocutory way. I am sad to say that I never really use this word, but I am going to try from now on, because it is a fabulous, useful word. I'm sure if we all pay attention we can point out several examples everyday of someone using circumlocutory speach. Here is an entertaining article about the art of appologizing that gives as one example the circumlocutory appology.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Election Day
Well, I just returned from my neighborhood polling place. It was a very pleasant experience. Everyone was friendly and it was nice to see a diversity of race and age participating in the process. The biggest happy surprise was the abundance of young people. There has been talk in past election about how the young people are going to step up to bat and vote, but they usually disappoint. I'd like to say that this year, based on my observations today, will be different. I guess many of us are actually civically minded after all. And to top it off, the little old ladies handing out ballots, were not all little old ladies, they were young people too! I have no reproof for those who are not going to vote based on political beliefs see my previous blog posts, but I have warm feelings towards those who do. I don't know what difference, if any, it will make (we'll see soon), but I would like to think that even small amounts of awareness and steps towards participation, will lead to greater things. I snapped a few quick pictures (which didn't turn out as well as I would have liked) outside to try and get proof of young people being there.
The polling place.
Young family on their way to vote.
Young person leaving polling place.
More young people (they couldn't have been much more then 18) leaving the polling place.
Some final campaigning happening outside polling place.
The polling place.
Young family on their way to vote.
Young person leaving polling place.
More young people (they couldn't have been much more then 18) leaving the polling place.
Some final campaigning happening outside polling place.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Word of the Week
pau·ci·ty - noun: smallness of number
As in, there is no paucity of signs both for and against Measure 8 in California. A couple of days ago, I witnessed two large groups of people with Measure 8 signs standing on opposite corners. They were, in turns, yelling "yes on 8" and "no on 8." It was quite a spectacle. I will say at this point that I do not support Measure 8. Everyone should have equal rights under the law. As far as marriage as a religious issue, I do not think that is for the state to decide. Keep church and state separate. If individual churches don't want to support same sex marriage, that is up to them. They don't have to perform ceremonies. But that does not mean that their beliefs on the subject should affect everyone else. Next thing you know there is going to be prayer in schools. Oh wait. That's already been tried. Not everyone has the same set of beliefs, and it would be wrong to impose one group's beliefs on everyone else. If two people love each other and want to make a commitment of marriage they should be able to do that. If those two people happen to be of the same sex it does not mean that everyone is going to have to participate in same sex marriage or that kids are going to be taught in school that that's how its supposed to be (some of the strange reasoning I have heard). No, it is between those two people. Rest of us don't need to get in the middle of it. There, I've had my say before election day.
As in, there is no paucity of signs both for and against Measure 8 in California. A couple of days ago, I witnessed two large groups of people with Measure 8 signs standing on opposite corners. They were, in turns, yelling "yes on 8" and "no on 8." It was quite a spectacle. I will say at this point that I do not support Measure 8. Everyone should have equal rights under the law. As far as marriage as a religious issue, I do not think that is for the state to decide. Keep church and state separate. If individual churches don't want to support same sex marriage, that is up to them. They don't have to perform ceremonies. But that does not mean that their beliefs on the subject should affect everyone else. Next thing you know there is going to be prayer in schools. Oh wait. That's already been tried. Not everyone has the same set of beliefs, and it would be wrong to impose one group's beliefs on everyone else. If two people love each other and want to make a commitment of marriage they should be able to do that. If those two people happen to be of the same sex it does not mean that everyone is going to have to participate in same sex marriage or that kids are going to be taught in school that that's how its supposed to be (some of the strange reasoning I have heard). No, it is between those two people. Rest of us don't need to get in the middle of it. There, I've had my say before election day.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Word of the Week
pres·ti·dig·i·ta·tion - noun: sleight of hand
As in, it would be an amazing act of prestidigitation if McCain won the upcoming election according to recent polls. Though, as we've seen in the past, it may happen. If so, you can use this word frequently in upcoming weeks. If you are worried about what may go wrong with the election here is a list of things to consider. Even if you are not worried, this list may be worth thinking about anyway.
As in, it would be an amazing act of prestidigitation if McCain won the upcoming election according to recent polls. Though, as we've seen in the past, it may happen. If so, you can use this word frequently in upcoming weeks. If you are worried about what may go wrong with the election here is a list of things to consider. Even if you are not worried, this list may be worth thinking about anyway.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Comfort Food
Having woken up this morning sans voice, fresh off a bicycle accident the previous evening and with the lingering pain of last week's back injury, I was miserable to say the least. So I watched t.v. episodes for a good portion of the day and when it came time to eat something, I of course went for some Comfort food. Sometimes the only thing that will do is peanut butter applesauce toast. I think everyone should give it a try and reap the benefits. Not only is it a comfort food, but it is also fairly healthy, depending on the type of peanut butter you choose. Here is the recipe.
Ingredients:
Bread- two pieces
Peanut Butter (chunky or smooth)- 4 tbs.
Applesauce- about a cup and 1/2
First put the bread in the toaster. Then, if you want to (I sometimes do it cold), warm the applesauce, microwave works best. Then makes sure you have the peanut butter and a butter knife at the ready. The minute the toast pops out of the toaster, grab it and smear on the peanut butter. Then pour the applesauce evenly over both pieces. Eat immediately.
Ingredients:
Bread- two pieces
Peanut Butter (chunky or smooth)- 4 tbs.
Applesauce- about a cup and 1/2
First put the bread in the toaster. Then, if you want to (I sometimes do it cold), warm the applesauce, microwave works best. Then makes sure you have the peanut butter and a butter knife at the ready. The minute the toast pops out of the toaster, grab it and smear on the peanut butter. Then pour the applesauce evenly over both pieces. Eat immediately.
Duh...
In a moment of stating the obvious, Alan Greenspan admitted that he "'made a mistake' in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves without government oversight."
Monday, October 20, 2008
Word of the Week
bor·bo·ryg·mi - noun, plural : intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas
As in, I haven’t eaten in a few days and now I am experiencing a lot of borborygmi. This is a word it would be useful for everyone to learn since it appears likely that many us will soon be experiencing this symptom. From most everything I’ve recently read , it looks like things are going to get worse before they get better as far as the economy is concerned. So now is the time to start tightening those belts and getting used to that sound. That way when there really isn’t anything to eat you’ll already be old hat. If you want to be even more prepared check out John Dolan’s “5 Pieces of Advice for the New Paupers.” Convinced that things really aren’t all that bad, or if they are, they won’t affect you or anyone you know? Check out these articles by Bob Herbert and Nick Turse.
As in, I haven’t eaten in a few days and now I am experiencing a lot of borborygmi. This is a word it would be useful for everyone to learn since it appears likely that many us will soon be experiencing this symptom. From most everything I’ve recently read , it looks like things are going to get worse before they get better as far as the economy is concerned. So now is the time to start tightening those belts and getting used to that sound. That way when there really isn’t anything to eat you’ll already be old hat. If you want to be even more prepared check out John Dolan’s “5 Pieces of Advice for the New Paupers.” Convinced that things really aren’t all that bad, or if they are, they won’t affect you or anyone you know? Check out these articles by Bob Herbert and Nick Turse.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
The other Palin
Apparently there was some sort of mix up with McCain's VP pick and he ended up with the wrong Palin. Watch here to find out more.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
National Rape and Pillage Day
Being laid up in bed with a bad back for most of this Columbus Day has given me lots of time to think. Like, if Columbus hadn’t discovered the Americas (after the multiple times it was discovered by others) would I be somewhere in Europe right now with healthcare so that I would be taken care in moments like this, or better yet healthcare that prevent moments like this? If Columbus hadn’t accidentally ended up in the Americas, mistaking it for Asia, would my prescription cost be covered? Of course, one has also to wonder about how the history of colonialism would change, etc. And would the genocide of the native peoples ever of happened. Maybe if Columbus didn’t initiate the whole process, someone else would have gotten around to it sooner or later. If someone other than Columbus rediscovered the Americas, would everything have followed the same course? Just some thoughts.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Everyone is a Terrorist...
...apparently. According to the Washington Post a number of nonviolent activists recently discovered that they were classified as terrorists by Maryland police. My favorite part of the story is that "the activists' names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries." So, if they can't find the right classification the default option is terrorist? This story also brings into question, surveillance methods and makes me wonder if anyone actually remembers the Fourth Amendment. But I guess that got thrown out years ago.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
SWF seeks good bank, must not have sub-prime loans
Or
Trickle down economic collapse
Well, I’m sure everyone has heard by now that Washington Mutual, a.k.a. Wamu, is defunct. If you haven’t heard (I don’t know which hole in the ground you’ve been sticking your head in) J.P. Morgan Chase bought up what remained of Wamu, with the help of the FDIC.
I could say many things about the collapse on Wall Street, including this is what no oversight or effective regulation will get you, and they’re greedy little bastards up there at the top, maybe it’s about time they had some sort of reality check. As for the $700 billion bailout, why don’t we spend it on making sure the base is solid? FDR and his advisors had a pretty good idea of how to handle this sort of situation. Make sure that the people at the bottom are taken care of and have a little extra money to spend and then you get trickle up economics. So far I have seen no evidence that trickle down economics is effective. Bailing out Wall Street isn’t going to help reduce the unemployment rate in the next month or is it going to get people who have lost their homes back into a stable position. I’m glad that the congress did not approve the bailout. Most of it would have ended up in the pockets of CEOs anyway. I’m glad that congress realizes that there need to be some restrictions and regulations to go along with that sort of bailout, but I am disappointed that there has not been a movement to reinstate the sort of regulations we used to have to prevent this sort of situation in the first place.
Deregulation has been the name of the game since Regan went wild with it in the 80s. In the name of a free market, and with a laissez-faire attitude the US government went about removing things such as Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This gave free reign for the banks and other large corporations to do what ever the **** they wanted. But the idea (allegedly) was that the market would regulate itself and everything would work out okay. I’ve always thought that was a fine idea, as long as there were no people involved, ‘cause you know, people tend to get greedy. Well, the same people who were on this deregulation and free market kick, suddenly are all for government intervention. Well, government intervention in the form of corporate welfare: it’s fine if the regulation stays gone. It’s very hypocritical and not enough people are calling them on it. If its free markets everyone wants then fine, let there be free markets and see what happens. Let the companies collapse, let them consolidate into monopolies, let them speculate and artificially raise prices. Don’t do anything to or for them, including bailouts out or FDIC brokered buyouts (the Indymac deal cost the FDIC a lot of money). I don’t think it’s going to look pretty for most of us.
Back to Wamu: my real disappointment in this situation is that I didn’t get around to writing about my horrible experience with Wamu over the past weeks before this all happened. It doesn’t have quite the same vindictive flavor or sense of warning as it would have early last week. I would hope for the newly assigned J.P. Morgan Chase customers, that Chase does not do business the same way as Wamu. But as long as banks can do as they please, who knows.
Anyway, since I no longer am no longer vengeful, I will make this short(er). A couple of weeks ago I deposited two checks. One from my insurance company, a reputable company, and my payroll check, which I have deposited on a regular basis for quite some time. I was given a receipt from the teller that showed that the money was in my account. Everything appeared to be in order. I went out and spent the insurance check, which I was waiting on for a particular purpose. Everything was still fine. I still had plenty of money in the bank according to my online bank statement. Two days went by and I went to a drugstore to get just a few small things and found that my bankcard was rejected. I went home and checked my online statement again and I had a -$1700 available balance! I had no idea what was going on, because the running total showed that I should still have plenty of money left in my account. The checks were listed there as deposited and their amounts credited towards the running total. So I went into the bank to find out what had happened. The lady who I ended up talking to told me all kinds of ridiculous things. First, my account was to new so they had to hold my checks. This was untrue. My account had been open for well over the thirty-day new account period when you have to wait a few days before checks show up in your account. And if this had been the case they would have been on hold immediately not a couple of days after already being in my account. I asked if this was the case then how come the tellers never said anything to me when I made my deposit, and why did I not find out anything about this until I came into the bank. Then I was told that they couldn’t verify whether or not the checks were good. The reason being that my payroll check was hand written. BS. My last five payroll checks have been hand written and were deposited without a problem. The woman told me that I had to get letters from the other banks to prove that the other checks were good. I actually at one point went to one of the other banks, which happened to be across the street. They told me that they don’t do that, ever. When I went back to Wamu, the woman told me there was nothing she could do. I’ll admit I was upset. I actually started crying earlier, when she told me that I wouldn’t have any money for a week. The woman was so patronizing about it too, which made me even more upset. She started saying every time she got someone new on the phone from the main office, “we have a problem situation here.” I was already stressed out, and then to find out I couldn’t buy groceries or gas to get to work for a week, yeah I was upset. But when became apparent that they were just ****ing with me, and that nothing was going to get fixed unless a made a bigger fuss, I did. I yelled. I think I actually told other bank customers to get out while they could. This whole time I kept trying to call my payroll person and my insurance claim person. It turned out that the insurance person was gone for the day, so no help there. The woman finally asked me to leave, if I was going to yell. She threatened to call security on me. So I left. At this point I finally get a hold of my payroll person who tells me that no one ever tried to reach her to find out if the check was good. She says that it very strange that they would be doing this. Usually, she says, the bank just calls her up if they have a question about a check and she verifies it end of story. She said that usually the employee never even hears about it. So I go back into the bank with her on the phone and try to hand her over to the woman to verify at least that check. She won’t at first, but I insist and finally she takes the phone and talk to my payroll person, but only gets her phone number to give to the main people. So I sit there and wait at this woman’s desk, trying to get her to do something about this. After awhile I get a call from my payroll person wanting to know what happening because she is still waiting for a call from the bank. At this point I get really upset. I start asking this woman if she is planning on buying me dinner. When she says no, I tell her that she better fix things so I can eat. I start to raise my voice again, and she says that she will see what she can do, just don’t scream in the bank. I tell her, “Don’t screw me and I won’t scream.” I also made her promise that I wasn’t going to get any over draft fees, which is what I’m sure they were counting on. How many people get screwed this way and don’t do anything about it and then end up owing the bank a couple hundreds of dollars because they got screwed. Also earlier, this important later in the story, I told her I was waiting for my rent check to go through and it shouldn’t be bounced because I technically do have the money to cover it in my account. And she told me that it was fine, there was no record of the check coming in yet. So, gets on the phone and while she is on hold, we have a few minute a stare down with her saying don’t scream, and me saying I won’t if you don’t screw me. I said it in a very nice voice. She talks to someone on the phone for a minute and she turns to me and says it’s fixed. Magically all the reasons and things I was supposed to do went away. I thanked her, wished her a better day, went home and immediately printed out a statement that showed the money in my account and the available balance matching the running total.
So a week goes by and everything appears to be fine. I am at this point contemplating getting a new bank account, but I am waiting for my rent check to clear. When I check my mail, I find a letter from Wamu, dated the same day that I was in the bank, that my rent check was bounced. I go into my rental agency the next morning and they don’t know anything about it yet, so I figure it might be a mistake, since the oh so nice woman at the bank told me that it would be fine. So I go home and to take a look at my online balance to see whether or not the check had actually gone through. But I can’t log on. So I go down to a Wamu bank to see if I can check my balance at an ATM, but all it does is spit my ATM card back out at me. I go into the bank to talk to someone to find out what is happening. The young man I ended up speaking with was very nice, but he had no idea what was going on. So he calls the main office and talks to them for just and minute and then hands me the phone saying they want to talk to me. The woman on the phone says to me in a very snotty voice, “we no longer want to do business with you.” She told me that my account had been stopped two days earlier, and that the man I was with at the bank would give me all my funds. When I asked her why all she would say was, “we no longer want to business with you, “ in a very hostile voice. I also asked her why this was the first time I was hearing about this, to which she gave me the same answer. When I asked her if it was because of the other woman I dealt with previously, and tried to explain to her what happened, during which I used the word bullshit to describe the things the other woman said I had to do, she snapped at me and said, “don’t use that language with me.” I apologized and told her I was just trying to explain the story and not trying to be rude to her. I just thought they should look into how this other woman was treating customers, and work on communication with customers so that they have time to deal with things. Otherwise you are going to have a lot of unhappy customers. Again she replied, ‘we no longer wish to do business with you.”
Three days later I received another letter from Wamu. This time it told me that as of September 26 my accounts would be closed, no reason included. This date, by the way, is two business weeks after they actually shut down my accounts.
What did I learn from this experience? If you aren’t submissive and take it up the rear, they don’t want you. Actually, what I suspected at the time was that they new they were going under and were making a last ditch effort to gain funds through creating situations where they could rack up overdraft fees. I heard somewhere, though I can’t verify it, that banks make around 35% of their revenue from fees.
As for what this has to do with bailouts and economic collapse, I think it is our governments job to make sure everything is running properly and that its citizen are being taken care of and not taken advantage of. Its job is not to pay off those who screwing it all up. By the way, the people responsible are doing just fine, and are already walking away with billions.
Trickle down economic collapse
Well, I’m sure everyone has heard by now that Washington Mutual, a.k.a. Wamu, is defunct. If you haven’t heard (I don’t know which hole in the ground you’ve been sticking your head in) J.P. Morgan Chase bought up what remained of Wamu, with the help of the FDIC.
I could say many things about the collapse on Wall Street, including this is what no oversight or effective regulation will get you, and they’re greedy little bastards up there at the top, maybe it’s about time they had some sort of reality check. As for the $700 billion bailout, why don’t we spend it on making sure the base is solid? FDR and his advisors had a pretty good idea of how to handle this sort of situation. Make sure that the people at the bottom are taken care of and have a little extra money to spend and then you get trickle up economics. So far I have seen no evidence that trickle down economics is effective. Bailing out Wall Street isn’t going to help reduce the unemployment rate in the next month or is it going to get people who have lost their homes back into a stable position. I’m glad that the congress did not approve the bailout. Most of it would have ended up in the pockets of CEOs anyway. I’m glad that congress realizes that there need to be some restrictions and regulations to go along with that sort of bailout, but I am disappointed that there has not been a movement to reinstate the sort of regulations we used to have to prevent this sort of situation in the first place.
Deregulation has been the name of the game since Regan went wild with it in the 80s. In the name of a free market, and with a laissez-faire attitude the US government went about removing things such as Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This gave free reign for the banks and other large corporations to do what ever the **** they wanted. But the idea (allegedly) was that the market would regulate itself and everything would work out okay. I’ve always thought that was a fine idea, as long as there were no people involved, ‘cause you know, people tend to get greedy. Well, the same people who were on this deregulation and free market kick, suddenly are all for government intervention. Well, government intervention in the form of corporate welfare: it’s fine if the regulation stays gone. It’s very hypocritical and not enough people are calling them on it. If its free markets everyone wants then fine, let there be free markets and see what happens. Let the companies collapse, let them consolidate into monopolies, let them speculate and artificially raise prices. Don’t do anything to or for them, including bailouts out or FDIC brokered buyouts (the Indymac deal cost the FDIC a lot of money). I don’t think it’s going to look pretty for most of us.
Back to Wamu: my real disappointment in this situation is that I didn’t get around to writing about my horrible experience with Wamu over the past weeks before this all happened. It doesn’t have quite the same vindictive flavor or sense of warning as it would have early last week. I would hope for the newly assigned J.P. Morgan Chase customers, that Chase does not do business the same way as Wamu. But as long as banks can do as they please, who knows.
Anyway, since I no longer am no longer vengeful, I will make this short(er). A couple of weeks ago I deposited two checks. One from my insurance company, a reputable company, and my payroll check, which I have deposited on a regular basis for quite some time. I was given a receipt from the teller that showed that the money was in my account. Everything appeared to be in order. I went out and spent the insurance check, which I was waiting on for a particular purpose. Everything was still fine. I still had plenty of money in the bank according to my online bank statement. Two days went by and I went to a drugstore to get just a few small things and found that my bankcard was rejected. I went home and checked my online statement again and I had a -$1700 available balance! I had no idea what was going on, because the running total showed that I should still have plenty of money left in my account. The checks were listed there as deposited and their amounts credited towards the running total. So I went into the bank to find out what had happened. The lady who I ended up talking to told me all kinds of ridiculous things. First, my account was to new so they had to hold my checks. This was untrue. My account had been open for well over the thirty-day new account period when you have to wait a few days before checks show up in your account. And if this had been the case they would have been on hold immediately not a couple of days after already being in my account. I asked if this was the case then how come the tellers never said anything to me when I made my deposit, and why did I not find out anything about this until I came into the bank. Then I was told that they couldn’t verify whether or not the checks were good. The reason being that my payroll check was hand written. BS. My last five payroll checks have been hand written and were deposited without a problem. The woman told me that I had to get letters from the other banks to prove that the other checks were good. I actually at one point went to one of the other banks, which happened to be across the street. They told me that they don’t do that, ever. When I went back to Wamu, the woman told me there was nothing she could do. I’ll admit I was upset. I actually started crying earlier, when she told me that I wouldn’t have any money for a week. The woman was so patronizing about it too, which made me even more upset. She started saying every time she got someone new on the phone from the main office, “we have a problem situation here.” I was already stressed out, and then to find out I couldn’t buy groceries or gas to get to work for a week, yeah I was upset. But when became apparent that they were just ****ing with me, and that nothing was going to get fixed unless a made a bigger fuss, I did. I yelled. I think I actually told other bank customers to get out while they could. This whole time I kept trying to call my payroll person and my insurance claim person. It turned out that the insurance person was gone for the day, so no help there. The woman finally asked me to leave, if I was going to yell. She threatened to call security on me. So I left. At this point I finally get a hold of my payroll person who tells me that no one ever tried to reach her to find out if the check was good. She says that it very strange that they would be doing this. Usually, she says, the bank just calls her up if they have a question about a check and she verifies it end of story. She said that usually the employee never even hears about it. So I go back into the bank with her on the phone and try to hand her over to the woman to verify at least that check. She won’t at first, but I insist and finally she takes the phone and talk to my payroll person, but only gets her phone number to give to the main people. So I sit there and wait at this woman’s desk, trying to get her to do something about this. After awhile I get a call from my payroll person wanting to know what happening because she is still waiting for a call from the bank. At this point I get really upset. I start asking this woman if she is planning on buying me dinner. When she says no, I tell her that she better fix things so I can eat. I start to raise my voice again, and she says that she will see what she can do, just don’t scream in the bank. I tell her, “Don’t screw me and I won’t scream.” I also made her promise that I wasn’t going to get any over draft fees, which is what I’m sure they were counting on. How many people get screwed this way and don’t do anything about it and then end up owing the bank a couple hundreds of dollars because they got screwed. Also earlier, this important later in the story, I told her I was waiting for my rent check to go through and it shouldn’t be bounced because I technically do have the money to cover it in my account. And she told me that it was fine, there was no record of the check coming in yet. So, gets on the phone and while she is on hold, we have a few minute a stare down with her saying don’t scream, and me saying I won’t if you don’t screw me. I said it in a very nice voice. She talks to someone on the phone for a minute and she turns to me and says it’s fixed. Magically all the reasons and things I was supposed to do went away. I thanked her, wished her a better day, went home and immediately printed out a statement that showed the money in my account and the available balance matching the running total.
So a week goes by and everything appears to be fine. I am at this point contemplating getting a new bank account, but I am waiting for my rent check to clear. When I check my mail, I find a letter from Wamu, dated the same day that I was in the bank, that my rent check was bounced. I go into my rental agency the next morning and they don’t know anything about it yet, so I figure it might be a mistake, since the oh so nice woman at the bank told me that it would be fine. So I go home and to take a look at my online balance to see whether or not the check had actually gone through. But I can’t log on. So I go down to a Wamu bank to see if I can check my balance at an ATM, but all it does is spit my ATM card back out at me. I go into the bank to talk to someone to find out what is happening. The young man I ended up speaking with was very nice, but he had no idea what was going on. So he calls the main office and talks to them for just and minute and then hands me the phone saying they want to talk to me. The woman on the phone says to me in a very snotty voice, “we no longer want to do business with you.” She told me that my account had been stopped two days earlier, and that the man I was with at the bank would give me all my funds. When I asked her why all she would say was, “we no longer want to business with you, “ in a very hostile voice. I also asked her why this was the first time I was hearing about this, to which she gave me the same answer. When I asked her if it was because of the other woman I dealt with previously, and tried to explain to her what happened, during which I used the word bullshit to describe the things the other woman said I had to do, she snapped at me and said, “don’t use that language with me.” I apologized and told her I was just trying to explain the story and not trying to be rude to her. I just thought they should look into how this other woman was treating customers, and work on communication with customers so that they have time to deal with things. Otherwise you are going to have a lot of unhappy customers. Again she replied, ‘we no longer wish to do business with you.”
Three days later I received another letter from Wamu. This time it told me that as of September 26 my accounts would be closed, no reason included. This date, by the way, is two business weeks after they actually shut down my accounts.
What did I learn from this experience? If you aren’t submissive and take it up the rear, they don’t want you. Actually, what I suspected at the time was that they new they were going under and were making a last ditch effort to gain funds through creating situations where they could rack up overdraft fees. I heard somewhere, though I can’t verify it, that banks make around 35% of their revenue from fees.
As for what this has to do with bailouts and economic collapse, I think it is our governments job to make sure everything is running properly and that its citizen are being taken care of and not taken advantage of. Its job is not to pay off those who screwing it all up. By the way, the people responsible are doing just fine, and are already walking away with billions.
Gimme Shelter
According to the Associated Press, tent cities are growing fast. The housing crisis is more than a few foreclosed homes and greedy banks going under from bad loans. It's time for our government to step it up, and I'm not talking about a bail out, unless it's directly for those without homes, who can't find work because jobs are disappearing left and right. More later.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
I am fascinated by wikiHow. It is a collaborative how-to website with the most bizarre range of how-tos. I've been clicking on the link to a random article and so far have read how to: "Help Prevent Forest Fires," "Make a Gift Bag," "Hand Draw a Maze," "Get Low Cost Dental Work," and "Lean Like a Cholo." My favorite so far is how to "Make a Mini House in Your Backyard," in case you want to move out of your parents house, but not too far. It is recommended to add a roof if you don't want to be rained on. Check it out.
Monday, September 22, 2008
It has come to my attention that I have recently been using the word "hell" too frequently in my posts. What the hell does that say about my upbringing (and my tendency towards repetition)? I will henceforth only use the word hell when speaking of the actual location, as in, "I am planning a nice trip to hell this weekend." I will decide on a replacement expletive when the occasion arises.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Just another little something...
When I close my eyes I see visions of last night’s dreams. An endless, expansive night, swimming though temperature-less pools with you standing there watching, and as I wander down dark pathways, you follow, accosting me in empty corners. When I open my eyes again it is all gone.
When I awoke this morning, I realized once again that you were gone, still. I lay in bed unmoving, closing my eyes again trying to recapture those fleeting moments of subconscious.
Eventually, I had to move again. Return to my life, my reality.
Everyone has their own narrative for their life. A story that they tell themselves that makes sense, that leads them where they want to go. This may change over time. You may think now that five years from now you’ll have a family with three kids and working a full time job. But next year you might decide, “in five years I think I want to be sailing around the world.” But the day-to-day narrative generally stays the same: this is who I am, this is what I do, and if I continue to be and do these things this is where I’ll go. Yesterday, I was at work. Today, I’m going to work. Tomorrow, it’s the weekend, so I think I’m going to do projects around the house. The fact that you have a house is part of your narrative. The fact that you work is part of your narrative, and all of it is carefully described in your mind so that it’s understandable and controllable. The problem happens, not when things change subtly over time, but when they change suddenly. When that narrative is broken, when a trauma occurs. Suddenly things are no longer understandable. Things aren’t under control. You have no idea what you’re going to be doing tomorrow or the day after that. There is no concept of five years from now. Where you were yesterday has no relation to where you are today and tomorrow. That is what the human psyche cannot deal with. There needs to be a concept of continuous, linear identity and story. When that changes there is a sense of being lost. Being in an uncontrollable situation. Which drives a lot of people mad.
The key to recovering from a sudden break, a sudden trauma, is to be able to reincorporate it into the narrative, to make it part of who you are, to claim it as who you are, and integrate it into who you were before, and were your story was going previously. That’s why changes over time, those subtle changes about where you are going, don’t really have much of a negative effect. The fact is that we’re constantly integrating, reintegrating and reevaluating and we have time to figure these things out, to make it part of our story to write, and rewrite our story. The sudden break the break in the story causes the most problems when it’s not recovered, when the story line isn’t picked up again and linked to the past.
There is also the mass narrative that we have to contend with, the societal narrative. What it is to be a member of this society? What is an appropriate story to have? What’s an appropriate identity? Where should you be going and where should you have been from? These are all issues to contend with. When there’s a break in the narrative, there is also often a break with the mass narrative. Reintegrating that trauma into your story and picking up the pieces, picking up the story line again is difficult when it doesn’t quite match with that overall narrative, when you are constantly faced with the idea that your story is no longer their story. The human instinct is a tribal one, we all want to fit in, we want to be a part of this group, and we want to be accepted by others. When you no longer fit in and when you have something that’s off, that doesn’t connect with that larger story, it makes it even harder to integrate your own story, because it sets you apart. But if the trauma is denied if it isn’t integrated then the person is not whole.
The worst thing that could happen is to forever be caught in that moment, forever be obsessed with that point in time. For those who continue dwell, living only in that moment unable to integrate it into a whole identity, it becomes their identity. That moment in time becomes their story. They become the victim, not just someone who was once victimized, always repeating that role of the victim. They are always reliving, maybe not in the exact same way, but reliving the trauma, the break, there is no continuation, just an endless cycle. Until they can figure out how to break the cycle and pick up where they left off and start over again, well not start over again, but integrate, integrate is the key word.
This is my theory, at least, and this is what I’ve been trying to do. And it might be a little easier if it weren’t for the damn dreams.
It was the third time in two weeks that I was late for work. Fortunately, I have an overly understanding boss. Though, my plan is to not push it with a fourth time. Getting over the urge to curl up in a little ball and stay in bed has been the hardest part of this whole ordeal.
This morning I was just in time for an HR meeting. I don’t mind meetings, especially now. I’m not that important to the proceedings, so I can let my mind wander. But maybe that’s not such a good thing.
“Cady…Cady?”
“Hmmm…oh, yes?”
“I just wanted to know how long before that performance report is going to be done,” said my boss, Linda.
“I think I can have it to you by the end of the day.”
“Good. Sarah, how are we on the development side?”
The meeting continued around me as I drifted back into my thoughts of things not right. I would get the report done. Most of it was finished already. I was working on it before, when I was in my old reality.
After the meeting it was time for lunch. Like I have done since I started working in my current position, I took my bag lunch that I had put together the night before, and went to the park two blocks down and one block over from the office. It’s a tiny little park, maybe half a square block. It has a curvy cement path that cuts it diagonally and on either side is grass and a couple of large trees that have probably been there forever. Alternating sides down the edge of the path are benches, the metal coated in black plastic kind, with the tiny crisscross pattern, so that if you sit on them with shorts you’ll have crisscrosses on the back of you thighs when you stand up. I like to sit on the very first one, right when I enter the park. It is a good place for people watching. I can see the people walking past the park, through the park, and into a tiny little café across the street. On nice days the café has tables outside on the sidewalk.
When I got to the park, I sat down on my usual bench. I opened up my lunch bag and pulled out my juice box, the 100% juice kind that are supposed to be for kids, and my turkey and cheese sandwich. I left the piece of the fudge my grandmother gave me in the bag for later. It was the same piece of fudge I had been leaving in the bag until later since my grandmother brought it over a couple days after it happened. Well, at least she would be happy I was eating the sandwich. I remembered how difficult it was to eat anything for the first couple of days.
I sat there taking bites of my sandwich and sips from the juice box, watching the people across the street. The tables were out at the café today. I wondered what their stories were. Were things going as they planned? Or had any of them, like me, experienced sudden stops along the way? I’m sure they had. As I’m sure we’ve all been told, things happen. I know things happen, but it knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. There was a woman sitting alone at one of the small round tables reading a book, and sipping something from a small white mug. At her feet was a small terrier of some sort, sitting quietly, appearing to do what I was doing, watching people walk by. The woman was pretty with long sleek blonde hair, good bone structure, and, by her bare arms, a muscular body. She was very well dressed and was wearing fashionable sunglasses. I couldn’t tell from where I sat if they were designer or not. I imagined things were going well for her. Her life was probably going exactly as she had always planned right down to the well-behaved dog to carry around in her tote as she went around town pretending to do errands for her well off husband. But I suppose she could have had some tragedy in her life as well. Maybe she couldn’t have children and that’s why she got the dog.
Another person caught my eye walking up to the café, an older man. As he walked into the café I could see that he was tall and husky, a little on the chubby side with signs of good beer drinking showing on his belly. A blue truckers hat, the kind with snaps on the back, covered his graying hair. His blue t-shirt was faded, but looked fairly clean. His cotton shorts were also faded, green, with what looked like small bleach stains and small holes speckled over the front. He went inside and came back out a couple of minutes later with a mug and sat down at one of the tables. He was facing me and I could see his face clearly, though he didn’t seem to notice me looking. His face was like one you’d often see somewhere on a Midwestern farm, and his 80's style glasses were changing from clear to tinted, underlined by a mustache any man would be proud of. He crossed his legs and I could see that his white socks were speckled by gray lint. Or maybe that was just the design. The socks climbed halfway up his bare calves, the bottoms of which were covered by sturdy looking brown shoes. His life I imagined not exactly full of roses. He was trying. His clothes were clean if worn, and he liked to treat himself to a cup of good coffee when he had his lunch break, or maybe he didn’t work. I tried to imagine what kind of job would let you dress like that, probably not a corporate office. Maybe he was an artisan, fine woodworking maybe, with his own little shop down the street. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t seem to fit but I thought for sure he looked like someone who had had a lot of bumps along the way. I don’t know why, but for some reason I feel better after imagining hardship in someone else’s life.
I finished my sandwich and juice, picked up my brown bag, and headed back to the office. I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing the performance report. It felt like tedious mindless work that didn’t really mean anything, which was perfect. I couldn’t really put my all into anything yet. I was finished with it by five and emailed it to my boss. I walked down the hall to her office to make sure she had received it.
“ Just a second, let me check. Yup, there it is,” she said, “I’ll look it over first thing in the morning and let you know what I think.”
“Thanks.”
“How are you holding up, Cady? You know, if you need to take another day or two off, I’ll be happy to sign off on it. I know how tough it can be.”
“I’ll be okay. I’m going to try not to be late anymore,” I said.
“Well, I’ll let it slide for another week and then we’ll talk. But remember to take care of yourself. Go home and get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said as she turned back to her computer.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said and then head back to my desk to get my things.
At home I fixed myself a small salad and then sat down in front of the T.V. It had definitely been a good friend recently. I never appreciated mindlessness so much before. When it was time for bed I got up, turned the T.V. off, and put my dishes in the kitchen sink. I went and put on my pajamas, and brushed my teeth. All the routine things. Then I got into bed and here am thinking.
I wonder if Linda really does know how tough it can be. She is an attractive woman in her late 40's. Beautiful shoulder length dark brown hair and a perfect complexion. She is very successful in her work. Everyone loves her. She has a good husband and children. It’s a story that I’m sure many people are aspiring to. Did she have a different story once upon a time? And what happened to break it? Well, obviously she recovered quite well. Me? I’m still working on my theory, on integrating, on recovering my story line. I doesn’t seem to be going too well at the moment. I still feel lost. I’m just happy I made it through the day. And I’m hoping I won’t have any more dreams tonight.
When I awoke this morning, I realized once again that you were gone, still. I lay in bed unmoving, closing my eyes again trying to recapture those fleeting moments of subconscious.
Eventually, I had to move again. Return to my life, my reality.
Everyone has their own narrative for their life. A story that they tell themselves that makes sense, that leads them where they want to go. This may change over time. You may think now that five years from now you’ll have a family with three kids and working a full time job. But next year you might decide, “in five years I think I want to be sailing around the world.” But the day-to-day narrative generally stays the same: this is who I am, this is what I do, and if I continue to be and do these things this is where I’ll go. Yesterday, I was at work. Today, I’m going to work. Tomorrow, it’s the weekend, so I think I’m going to do projects around the house. The fact that you have a house is part of your narrative. The fact that you work is part of your narrative, and all of it is carefully described in your mind so that it’s understandable and controllable. The problem happens, not when things change subtly over time, but when they change suddenly. When that narrative is broken, when a trauma occurs. Suddenly things are no longer understandable. Things aren’t under control. You have no idea what you’re going to be doing tomorrow or the day after that. There is no concept of five years from now. Where you were yesterday has no relation to where you are today and tomorrow. That is what the human psyche cannot deal with. There needs to be a concept of continuous, linear identity and story. When that changes there is a sense of being lost. Being in an uncontrollable situation. Which drives a lot of people mad.
The key to recovering from a sudden break, a sudden trauma, is to be able to reincorporate it into the narrative, to make it part of who you are, to claim it as who you are, and integrate it into who you were before, and were your story was going previously. That’s why changes over time, those subtle changes about where you are going, don’t really have much of a negative effect. The fact is that we’re constantly integrating, reintegrating and reevaluating and we have time to figure these things out, to make it part of our story to write, and rewrite our story. The sudden break the break in the story causes the most problems when it’s not recovered, when the story line isn’t picked up again and linked to the past.
There is also the mass narrative that we have to contend with, the societal narrative. What it is to be a member of this society? What is an appropriate story to have? What’s an appropriate identity? Where should you be going and where should you have been from? These are all issues to contend with. When there’s a break in the narrative, there is also often a break with the mass narrative. Reintegrating that trauma into your story and picking up the pieces, picking up the story line again is difficult when it doesn’t quite match with that overall narrative, when you are constantly faced with the idea that your story is no longer their story. The human instinct is a tribal one, we all want to fit in, we want to be a part of this group, and we want to be accepted by others. When you no longer fit in and when you have something that’s off, that doesn’t connect with that larger story, it makes it even harder to integrate your own story, because it sets you apart. But if the trauma is denied if it isn’t integrated then the person is not whole.
The worst thing that could happen is to forever be caught in that moment, forever be obsessed with that point in time. For those who continue dwell, living only in that moment unable to integrate it into a whole identity, it becomes their identity. That moment in time becomes their story. They become the victim, not just someone who was once victimized, always repeating that role of the victim. They are always reliving, maybe not in the exact same way, but reliving the trauma, the break, there is no continuation, just an endless cycle. Until they can figure out how to break the cycle and pick up where they left off and start over again, well not start over again, but integrate, integrate is the key word.
This is my theory, at least, and this is what I’ve been trying to do. And it might be a little easier if it weren’t for the damn dreams.
It was the third time in two weeks that I was late for work. Fortunately, I have an overly understanding boss. Though, my plan is to not push it with a fourth time. Getting over the urge to curl up in a little ball and stay in bed has been the hardest part of this whole ordeal.
This morning I was just in time for an HR meeting. I don’t mind meetings, especially now. I’m not that important to the proceedings, so I can let my mind wander. But maybe that’s not such a good thing.
“Cady…Cady?”
“Hmmm…oh, yes?”
“I just wanted to know how long before that performance report is going to be done,” said my boss, Linda.
“I think I can have it to you by the end of the day.”
“Good. Sarah, how are we on the development side?”
The meeting continued around me as I drifted back into my thoughts of things not right. I would get the report done. Most of it was finished already. I was working on it before, when I was in my old reality.
After the meeting it was time for lunch. Like I have done since I started working in my current position, I took my bag lunch that I had put together the night before, and went to the park two blocks down and one block over from the office. It’s a tiny little park, maybe half a square block. It has a curvy cement path that cuts it diagonally and on either side is grass and a couple of large trees that have probably been there forever. Alternating sides down the edge of the path are benches, the metal coated in black plastic kind, with the tiny crisscross pattern, so that if you sit on them with shorts you’ll have crisscrosses on the back of you thighs when you stand up. I like to sit on the very first one, right when I enter the park. It is a good place for people watching. I can see the people walking past the park, through the park, and into a tiny little café across the street. On nice days the café has tables outside on the sidewalk.
When I got to the park, I sat down on my usual bench. I opened up my lunch bag and pulled out my juice box, the 100% juice kind that are supposed to be for kids, and my turkey and cheese sandwich. I left the piece of the fudge my grandmother gave me in the bag for later. It was the same piece of fudge I had been leaving in the bag until later since my grandmother brought it over a couple days after it happened. Well, at least she would be happy I was eating the sandwich. I remembered how difficult it was to eat anything for the first couple of days.
I sat there taking bites of my sandwich and sips from the juice box, watching the people across the street. The tables were out at the café today. I wondered what their stories were. Were things going as they planned? Or had any of them, like me, experienced sudden stops along the way? I’m sure they had. As I’m sure we’ve all been told, things happen. I know things happen, but it knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. There was a woman sitting alone at one of the small round tables reading a book, and sipping something from a small white mug. At her feet was a small terrier of some sort, sitting quietly, appearing to do what I was doing, watching people walk by. The woman was pretty with long sleek blonde hair, good bone structure, and, by her bare arms, a muscular body. She was very well dressed and was wearing fashionable sunglasses. I couldn’t tell from where I sat if they were designer or not. I imagined things were going well for her. Her life was probably going exactly as she had always planned right down to the well-behaved dog to carry around in her tote as she went around town pretending to do errands for her well off husband. But I suppose she could have had some tragedy in her life as well. Maybe she couldn’t have children and that’s why she got the dog.
Another person caught my eye walking up to the café, an older man. As he walked into the café I could see that he was tall and husky, a little on the chubby side with signs of good beer drinking showing on his belly. A blue truckers hat, the kind with snaps on the back, covered his graying hair. His blue t-shirt was faded, but looked fairly clean. His cotton shorts were also faded, green, with what looked like small bleach stains and small holes speckled over the front. He went inside and came back out a couple of minutes later with a mug and sat down at one of the tables. He was facing me and I could see his face clearly, though he didn’t seem to notice me looking. His face was like one you’d often see somewhere on a Midwestern farm, and his 80's style glasses were changing from clear to tinted, underlined by a mustache any man would be proud of. He crossed his legs and I could see that his white socks were speckled by gray lint. Or maybe that was just the design. The socks climbed halfway up his bare calves, the bottoms of which were covered by sturdy looking brown shoes. His life I imagined not exactly full of roses. He was trying. His clothes were clean if worn, and he liked to treat himself to a cup of good coffee when he had his lunch break, or maybe he didn’t work. I tried to imagine what kind of job would let you dress like that, probably not a corporate office. Maybe he was an artisan, fine woodworking maybe, with his own little shop down the street. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t seem to fit but I thought for sure he looked like someone who had had a lot of bumps along the way. I don’t know why, but for some reason I feel better after imagining hardship in someone else’s life.
I finished my sandwich and juice, picked up my brown bag, and headed back to the office. I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing the performance report. It felt like tedious mindless work that didn’t really mean anything, which was perfect. I couldn’t really put my all into anything yet. I was finished with it by five and emailed it to my boss. I walked down the hall to her office to make sure she had received it.
“ Just a second, let me check. Yup, there it is,” she said, “I’ll look it over first thing in the morning and let you know what I think.”
“Thanks.”
“How are you holding up, Cady? You know, if you need to take another day or two off, I’ll be happy to sign off on it. I know how tough it can be.”
“I’ll be okay. I’m going to try not to be late anymore,” I said.
“Well, I’ll let it slide for another week and then we’ll talk. But remember to take care of yourself. Go home and get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said as she turned back to her computer.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said and then head back to my desk to get my things.
At home I fixed myself a small salad and then sat down in front of the T.V. It had definitely been a good friend recently. I never appreciated mindlessness so much before. When it was time for bed I got up, turned the T.V. off, and put my dishes in the kitchen sink. I went and put on my pajamas, and brushed my teeth. All the routine things. Then I got into bed and here am thinking.
I wonder if Linda really does know how tough it can be. She is an attractive woman in her late 40's. Beautiful shoulder length dark brown hair and a perfect complexion. She is very successful in her work. Everyone loves her. She has a good husband and children. It’s a story that I’m sure many people are aspiring to. Did she have a different story once upon a time? And what happened to break it? Well, obviously she recovered quite well. Me? I’m still working on my theory, on integrating, on recovering my story line. I doesn’t seem to be going too well at the moment. I still feel lost. I’m just happy I made it through the day. And I’m hoping I won’t have any more dreams tonight.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Just for the hell of it, an old school paper...
In his book An All-Consuming Century, Gary Cross tells us that “visions of a political community of stable, shared values and active citizenship have given way to a dynamic but seemingly passive society of consumption in America, and increasingly across the globe”(1). It seems, though, today we live in a society where consumerism has not only replaced the idea of the ‘active citizen,’ but also has come to be equated with it. This can be seen in the growing importance of the consumer in the political world, as well as the way the consumer approach to life has come to dominate other aspects of life as well.
The beginnings of our movement towards citizen as consumer can be seen in the 1930s with the realization of the importance of the consumer. Maintaining the ability of people to consume was seen as the way to a healthy economy. This meant keeping the consumers happy, giving them some voice in how things were run.
Consumers, Lizabeth Cohen explains in A Consumers’ Republic, were a recognized category of American citizen’s before this time. The Progressives of the late 1800s and the early 1900s had as a part of their campaign what could be considered the beginnings of a consumer protection movement. But, as Cohen says, “few Americans during these years considered consumers a self-conscious, identifiable interest group on a par with labor and business whose well-being required attention for American capitalism and democracy to prosper”(23). The recognition that consumers did need attention came during the Great Depression of the 1930s and grew steadily more important as time went on.
The 1930s saw the birth of several government agencies set up, as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal plan to deliver the country from depression, to deal with the issue of consumer protection. Among these agencies were the National Recovery Administration and the Consumer Advisory Board, both of which were created to “include representatives of the ‘consuming public’ along side business and labor”(Cohen 19), and give these consumers a voice in the government. Cohen places these organizations in a category she calls the ‘citizen consumers.’ She says that they “were regarded as responsible for safeguarding the general good of the nation, in particular for prodding government to protect the rights, safety, and fair treatment of individual consumers in the private market place”(18).
This category also included non-government groups of citizens, such as the National Consumers’ League. They used their power as consumers to make sure manufacturers were not abusing their employees. They advocated buying only products that assured they were manufactured “under morally acceptable and sanitary conditions”(Cohen 22). Other groups organized boycotts and helped strikers against corporations they felt to be in violation of these standards.
At the same time as the notion of ‘citizen consumer’ sprang up, so did the notion of ‘purchaser consumer,’ people who contributed to the welfare of the nation and economy simply through consuming. This was a role that corporations promoted, because it was not critical of their role in production and it was easily made attractive with the promise of higher standards of living through consumer goods. Mass consumption was also seen as the real way to revive the economy. “It was the buying power of consumers in the aggregate, not the protection of the individual consumers in the marketplace, that manufacturers like General Motors, along with a growing number of economists and government officials by the late 1930s, thought would bring the United States out of depression and ensure its survival as a democratic nation”(Cohen 20).
Through the development in American ideology of the consumer as the savior of the economy, we can begin to see the primacy it takes in the list of responsibilities of the citizen. Cohen explains that, “by the end of the depression decade, invoking ‘the consumer’ would become an acceptable way of promoting the public good, of defending the economic rights and the needs of the ordinary citizens”(Cohen 23). Consumerism is both the way for citizens to assert themselves politically, like through boycotts, and to improve the economy and raise the standard of living for everyone. The main goal of the New Deal was to bring our country of depression by making sure that more people had this ability to consume, saving democracy and making sure everyone had better things. Robert S. Lynd, a member of the Consumer Advisory Board established in 1933, reflected this view. Cohen quotes him saying, “Nothing less than the viability of American democracy was at stake, Lynd insisted. ‘The only way that democracy can survive… is through the quality of living it can help the rank-and-file of its citizens to achieve,’ not simply an adequate standard of living”(19).
Consumption was not what everyone was thinking about during the 1930s. Gary Cross says that the depression put in many people’s minds the value of frugality. He says, however, that, “many Depression-era Americans were unwilling to abandon the ‘luxuries’ of the 1920s”(69). He cites the fact that many Americans continued to take vacations in their cars, even though money was tight and gasoline prices were rising. For Cross the fact that consumerism was able to develop in such a significant way during economic depression was a sign of the power it has over Americans. He says that “the Depression led to a frustrated consumerism more than a rejection of the capitalist system”(71), which had allowed the economic collapse to occur in the first place. It was also this power of consumerism that, perhaps, allowed the government to be so successful in promoting programs to increase the ability to consume and promote the purchaser consumer.
Cohen writes that “the new expectations that Americans developed during the Great Depression for how consumers should contribute to a healthy economy and polity would leave a legacy for World War II and the postwar era”(20). During the postwar era mass consumption reached a new level of expansion. In order to transfer from a war economy, where the demand for military supplies fueled production, to a peace economy, where there was no longer that demand, the government once again began to promote the idea of the purchaser consumer. Mass consumption was once again seen as the savior of the economy and the duty of American citizens.
At the same time, with the dawn of the Cold War and the rise of anti-communist sentiment, consumerism was used as a way to show America’s superiority to Communist nations. The consumers’ freedom of choice was equated with the democratic principles of political freedom. In 1959, Richard Nixon, then vice-president, proclaimed that “the variety of goods available to American consumers” was “symbolic of ‘our right to choose’”(Cohen 126). This equation of consumer freedom with the rights of citizens and the push for people to consume as part of their American duty led to a consumer fervor that Cohen says resembled a sort of religion. Cohen claims that, “faith in a mass consumption postwar economy hence came to mean much more than the ready availability of goods to buy. Rather, it stood for and elaborate, integrated ideal of economic abundance and democratic political freedom, both equitably distributed, that became almost a national civil religion from the late 1940s into the 1970s”(127). Indeed, at this point we can see how, as Cross says, “consumer sovereignty in the market place had replaced consumer rights in political life”(139).
As people began to embrace their roles as consumers, they also began interacting with other areas of civic life in the same manner as they did when consuming. Politics itself began to look like a function of the market. People began to vote for candidates as if they were deciding between consumer goods. And politicians, in response, began campaigning using the techniques that advertising used to promote consumer goods and consumption. A telling sign of this development is the statement that, as Cohen quotes Rosser Reves as saying,“ ‘a man in a voting booth hesitates between two levers as if he were pausing between competing tubes of toothpaste in a drug store. The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice’”(332). I believe this shows literally the equation of consumer with citizen. Politicians looked to the markets to tell them what people wanted and how to approach and sell themselves to these consumers.
In the 1980s, the voice of the consumer became the preferred method of interacting within the political and civic arena. Thanks to the deregulation efforts of President Reagan there was hardly any alternative. He dismantled many of the government agencies set up to regulate the industry in order to protect consumers. Instead, the market was supposed to be the regulator. The way for Americans to voice discontent with the corporate world was through the market, through how they chose to consume. Cohen says that through this process citizen/consumers “increasingly related to government itself as shoppers in a market place”(396).
Today we have the citizen consumer, not the one described by Cohen as striving for the protection of the people from the corporations, but as described by Toby Miller, in The Well Tempered Citizen, as “loyal citizens who learn[ed] to govern themselves in the interests of the cultural-capitalist polity”(ix). These are citizens that don’t question their roles as consumers or the ideologies behind consumerism, and faithfully accept the freedoms of consumerism, to choose between products, as the replacement for the freedoms of a citizen. This is what it means to be a citizen in the United States. Miller says that for a capitalist democracy, with a need to generate industry and a preference for the private sector and management, to continue it must produce two kinds of citizens, “the selfless, active citizen who cares for others and favors a political regime that compensates for losses in the financial domain; and the selfish, active consumer who favors a financial regime that compensates for losses in the political domain”(130). Our society has certainly succeeded in producing the latter kind of citizen.
Cross is right when he says “consumerism redefined democracy, creating social solidarities and opportunities for participation that transcended suffrage rights or political ideologies”(2). What the government, and the industries it supports, want us to believe is that consumerism is the best way for us to be citizens. “In the context of consumerism, liberty is not an abstract right to participate in public discourse or free speech. It means expressing oneself and realizing personal pleasure through goods”(Cross 3). It will keep our economy strong.
Works Cited
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic. Vintage, 2003.
Cross, Gary. All Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. NY: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citzenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993.
The beginnings of our movement towards citizen as consumer can be seen in the 1930s with the realization of the importance of the consumer. Maintaining the ability of people to consume was seen as the way to a healthy economy. This meant keeping the consumers happy, giving them some voice in how things were run.
Consumers, Lizabeth Cohen explains in A Consumers’ Republic, were a recognized category of American citizen’s before this time. The Progressives of the late 1800s and the early 1900s had as a part of their campaign what could be considered the beginnings of a consumer protection movement. But, as Cohen says, “few Americans during these years considered consumers a self-conscious, identifiable interest group on a par with labor and business whose well-being required attention for American capitalism and democracy to prosper”(23). The recognition that consumers did need attention came during the Great Depression of the 1930s and grew steadily more important as time went on.
The 1930s saw the birth of several government agencies set up, as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal plan to deliver the country from depression, to deal with the issue of consumer protection. Among these agencies were the National Recovery Administration and the Consumer Advisory Board, both of which were created to “include representatives of the ‘consuming public’ along side business and labor”(Cohen 19), and give these consumers a voice in the government. Cohen places these organizations in a category she calls the ‘citizen consumers.’ She says that they “were regarded as responsible for safeguarding the general good of the nation, in particular for prodding government to protect the rights, safety, and fair treatment of individual consumers in the private market place”(18).
This category also included non-government groups of citizens, such as the National Consumers’ League. They used their power as consumers to make sure manufacturers were not abusing their employees. They advocated buying only products that assured they were manufactured “under morally acceptable and sanitary conditions”(Cohen 22). Other groups organized boycotts and helped strikers against corporations they felt to be in violation of these standards.
At the same time as the notion of ‘citizen consumer’ sprang up, so did the notion of ‘purchaser consumer,’ people who contributed to the welfare of the nation and economy simply through consuming. This was a role that corporations promoted, because it was not critical of their role in production and it was easily made attractive with the promise of higher standards of living through consumer goods. Mass consumption was also seen as the real way to revive the economy. “It was the buying power of consumers in the aggregate, not the protection of the individual consumers in the marketplace, that manufacturers like General Motors, along with a growing number of economists and government officials by the late 1930s, thought would bring the United States out of depression and ensure its survival as a democratic nation”(Cohen 20).
Through the development in American ideology of the consumer as the savior of the economy, we can begin to see the primacy it takes in the list of responsibilities of the citizen. Cohen explains that, “by the end of the depression decade, invoking ‘the consumer’ would become an acceptable way of promoting the public good, of defending the economic rights and the needs of the ordinary citizens”(Cohen 23). Consumerism is both the way for citizens to assert themselves politically, like through boycotts, and to improve the economy and raise the standard of living for everyone. The main goal of the New Deal was to bring our country of depression by making sure that more people had this ability to consume, saving democracy and making sure everyone had better things. Robert S. Lynd, a member of the Consumer Advisory Board established in 1933, reflected this view. Cohen quotes him saying, “Nothing less than the viability of American democracy was at stake, Lynd insisted. ‘The only way that democracy can survive… is through the quality of living it can help the rank-and-file of its citizens to achieve,’ not simply an adequate standard of living”(19).
Consumption was not what everyone was thinking about during the 1930s. Gary Cross says that the depression put in many people’s minds the value of frugality. He says, however, that, “many Depression-era Americans were unwilling to abandon the ‘luxuries’ of the 1920s”(69). He cites the fact that many Americans continued to take vacations in their cars, even though money was tight and gasoline prices were rising. For Cross the fact that consumerism was able to develop in such a significant way during economic depression was a sign of the power it has over Americans. He says that “the Depression led to a frustrated consumerism more than a rejection of the capitalist system”(71), which had allowed the economic collapse to occur in the first place. It was also this power of consumerism that, perhaps, allowed the government to be so successful in promoting programs to increase the ability to consume and promote the purchaser consumer.
Cohen writes that “the new expectations that Americans developed during the Great Depression for how consumers should contribute to a healthy economy and polity would leave a legacy for World War II and the postwar era”(20). During the postwar era mass consumption reached a new level of expansion. In order to transfer from a war economy, where the demand for military supplies fueled production, to a peace economy, where there was no longer that demand, the government once again began to promote the idea of the purchaser consumer. Mass consumption was once again seen as the savior of the economy and the duty of American citizens.
At the same time, with the dawn of the Cold War and the rise of anti-communist sentiment, consumerism was used as a way to show America’s superiority to Communist nations. The consumers’ freedom of choice was equated with the democratic principles of political freedom. In 1959, Richard Nixon, then vice-president, proclaimed that “the variety of goods available to American consumers” was “symbolic of ‘our right to choose’”(Cohen 126). This equation of consumer freedom with the rights of citizens and the push for people to consume as part of their American duty led to a consumer fervor that Cohen says resembled a sort of religion. Cohen claims that, “faith in a mass consumption postwar economy hence came to mean much more than the ready availability of goods to buy. Rather, it stood for and elaborate, integrated ideal of economic abundance and democratic political freedom, both equitably distributed, that became almost a national civil religion from the late 1940s into the 1970s”(127). Indeed, at this point we can see how, as Cross says, “consumer sovereignty in the market place had replaced consumer rights in political life”(139).
As people began to embrace their roles as consumers, they also began interacting with other areas of civic life in the same manner as they did when consuming. Politics itself began to look like a function of the market. People began to vote for candidates as if they were deciding between consumer goods. And politicians, in response, began campaigning using the techniques that advertising used to promote consumer goods and consumption. A telling sign of this development is the statement that, as Cohen quotes Rosser Reves as saying,“ ‘a man in a voting booth hesitates between two levers as if he were pausing between competing tubes of toothpaste in a drug store. The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice’”(332). I believe this shows literally the equation of consumer with citizen. Politicians looked to the markets to tell them what people wanted and how to approach and sell themselves to these consumers.
In the 1980s, the voice of the consumer became the preferred method of interacting within the political and civic arena. Thanks to the deregulation efforts of President Reagan there was hardly any alternative. He dismantled many of the government agencies set up to regulate the industry in order to protect consumers. Instead, the market was supposed to be the regulator. The way for Americans to voice discontent with the corporate world was through the market, through how they chose to consume. Cohen says that through this process citizen/consumers “increasingly related to government itself as shoppers in a market place”(396).
Today we have the citizen consumer, not the one described by Cohen as striving for the protection of the people from the corporations, but as described by Toby Miller, in The Well Tempered Citizen, as “loyal citizens who learn[ed] to govern themselves in the interests of the cultural-capitalist polity”(ix). These are citizens that don’t question their roles as consumers or the ideologies behind consumerism, and faithfully accept the freedoms of consumerism, to choose between products, as the replacement for the freedoms of a citizen. This is what it means to be a citizen in the United States. Miller says that for a capitalist democracy, with a need to generate industry and a preference for the private sector and management, to continue it must produce two kinds of citizens, “the selfless, active citizen who cares for others and favors a political regime that compensates for losses in the financial domain; and the selfish, active consumer who favors a financial regime that compensates for losses in the political domain”(130). Our society has certainly succeeded in producing the latter kind of citizen.
Cross is right when he says “consumerism redefined democracy, creating social solidarities and opportunities for participation that transcended suffrage rights or political ideologies”(2). What the government, and the industries it supports, want us to believe is that consumerism is the best way for us to be citizens. “In the context of consumerism, liberty is not an abstract right to participate in public discourse or free speech. It means expressing oneself and realizing personal pleasure through goods”(Cross 3). It will keep our economy strong.
Works Cited
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic. Vintage, 2003.
Cross, Gary. All Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. NY: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citzenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993.
Friday, September 12, 2008
This is outrageous!
According to the Michigan Messenger, in Macomb County, Michigan, if you happen to unlucky enough to be dealing with a home foreclosure, you are also unlucky enough to not be considered a real citizen. The G.O.P. is planning on blocking people in foreclosure from voting. And isn't the right to vote a key part of being a citizen? So basically, here is the Republican philosophy, if you are suffering from economic woes, you don't count. I know, I know, this isn't anything new, but it's still outrageous.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
If a group of people could collectively go through Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief, I wonder where our nation would be in terms of 9/11? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance? Certainly not real acceptance? Would a group that had reached the stage of acceptance continue to allow the Bush administration its continuing use of the event for warmongering and jingoism? Or would they instead look for real understanding and peace? Seven years later we are still hearing Bush’s battle cries of “Evil doers” and “war on terrorism,” without any concrete or even slightly substantial evidence that continued war is actually protecting us or bringing us or the rest of the world any closer to peace. A day of remembrance is a good thing, because, hopefully, remembrance also means reflection. But as I listen to the speeches of politicians and the pontificating of pundits on the news, I don’t hear any real reflection, or even true remembrance of the lives lost. I just hear more of the same thing I’ve been hearing for the last seven years: We’re gonna get them! You’re with us or against us! Let’s get them before they get us again! (This is paraphrasing of course.) They say that they are remembering the lost, but then they say aren’t we glad we went to war. Is that really remembering? Could a nation still caught up in these rallying cries be said to still be in the anger stage?
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, from the New York Times, wrote this about the President’s speech:
“Mr. Bush’s speech was short, just seven minutes, and the president used it to declare the memorial ‘an everlasting tribute to 184 innocent souls,’ and to remind his audience that ‘there has not been another attack on our soil in 2,557 days.’ His words served as a parting message, of sorts, from a president who, after two wars, believes fiercely that he has done what was necessary to keep the country safe."
Obviously, there is still more on his agenda then remembering the victims of 9/11. I don't necessarily agree with her wording that he "believes fiercely ." It should be he "appears to believe fiercely."
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, from the New York Times, wrote this about the President’s speech:
“Mr. Bush’s speech was short, just seven minutes, and the president used it to declare the memorial ‘an everlasting tribute to 184 innocent souls,’ and to remind his audience that ‘there has not been another attack on our soil in 2,557 days.’ His words served as a parting message, of sorts, from a president who, after two wars, believes fiercely that he has done what was necessary to keep the country safe."
Obviously, there is still more on his agenda then remembering the victims of 9/11. I don't necessarily agree with her wording that he "believes fiercely ." It should be he "appears to believe fiercely."
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Read this article, "Poverty, Health and Political Priorities: 2000 to 2007," for a better understanding of economics and health care issues.
I am unable to sleep with the fan running and only a sheet to cover me, but not necessarily because of the heat. It’s just that sometimes reality gets to me. I should stop watching the 9 o’clock news. The unemployment rate is at a five year high (though our government is still insisting that our economy is “resilient”), the rate of foreclosure and people behind on mortgage payments are up to 9.2%, there were a couple more murders in the mission yesterday, and right at the start of the news there was an earthquake. Not such a big earthquake, but enough to realize that no matter what else is going on, the earth has her own agenda. I’ve been worried about all kinds of things this past month, but at least I still have a job and don’t have to worry about losing a home, and if there was a “big one" tomorrow none of it would matter anyway. It’s just one of those moments when I have to stop worrying, wallowing, etc., and realize what’s good in my life. Though, I’m not going to dismiss the trouble either, especially if it can be fixed. But in case anyone is interested here are some things in my life that I am thankful for: Parents that I can talk to, friends I can count on, a boss(es) that I like, a place of my own to lay my head at night, access to good beer on occasion, that fact that there is no one currently in my life who I feel like yelling at as much as my neighbor does, creativity, long walks around the lake, being able to read, having a body healthy enough to do most of what I ask of it, BBC’s Mystery on Sunday nights, living in a place with so many interesting people, and I guess I’ll end with the fact that I am still alive and have not died in a horrible accident or earthquake. Now I suppose I should try getting to sleep again.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
I found a link to this story on my friends Sparky's website, and I have to agree with her "Gah!" remark. According to Dante Moore, the best way for a woman to get and keep a man is to put up with all his bullshit and do everything he says. He gone so far as to write a book for women explaining this concept. Though, I have to wonder, for the men who take this disrespectful approach to dating, what kind of woman are they actually going to end up with? Probably not the girl they've been dreaming of (unless they are really into submissives with no self esteem). I'd like to think that any self-respecting woman would say "F that," and get the hell away from those men. Of course there is compromise and questions about power in any relationship, but there is a difference between that and complete disrespect for a woman as a competent human being who deserves to be part of a partnership.
Monday, August 25, 2008
First off, I have to say that I know plenty of bicyclists who are fine upstanding people. I often ride a bike around town myself, though without the special outfit. I think it's great to bike instead of drive when you can. But I am sure most of us have had those moments of grumbling while we are driving ten miles an hour behind a bicyclist we can't pass because they are riding down the center of the lane when we have somewhere to be. If you've had that experience read Tommy Wayne Kramer's column "Assignment Ukiah - Pedaling Baloney." I thought it was entertaining.
Monday, August 18, 2008
So, I was called by the local army recruiting office this morning. Not particularly who I want to hear, or waste my cell phone minutes on, but I answered anyway because the call came from a private number, which is usually what it says when my boss calls. It was easy enough to say, "No, I don't to talk about army recruiting. Thanks anyway. Bye." But there was one bit of information that I got before that happened which made me a little upset. The gentleman on the other end of the line told me that they called me because they were calling previous and current Laney College students. Yes, I occasionally take classes at Laney College because its cheap and fun to occasionally learn new things there. However, I don't ever remember giving them permission to give out my personal information to the army recruiters. There was no check box on the admissions application that said "yes, please share my information." Nor were there any disclaimers telling me that they were planning on doing this with or with out my permission if I decided to be a student. I have the right to know these things, or at least I should, prior to their happening.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Here's a heartwarming story from the Contra Costa Times about giving people a hand when they need it most: "Scholarships keep ex-offenders on the right path."
Monday, August 11, 2008
Just a little something...
Gravity is a mutual agreement and death is an institution, not an inevitability. That is why dear Mrs. Amelda Leed continued to stay on the ground, but no longer aged. She realized these facts at some point while her husband, the late Mr. John Leed, was in the process of dying. He had no other cause other than old age. He was 82 when he died, 16 years her senior. He had a good run of it, but still she somehow didn’t see the point of his death. He had given up. And left her behind simply because he was old. And what did it mean to be old anyway. She was old, but felt great. She could still run, and fall without breaking a hip. Death was something that people did simply because they thought they had to and to get to death they aged. That was how she saw it. So she stopped because what was the point. Now, gravity on the other hand made sense, it would be awfully hard to keep track of things if they simply floated away whenever they wanted, so if everyone continued to agree that gravity existed that suited her just fine.
So Mrs. Leed, now a widow, went on living in the same small town where her husband left her. She continued to get older in years, but she really didn’t age. She was old, but she had given up counting birthdays quite sometime ago. Everyone in town speculated about her age, because most of them had known her their whole lives, but she always looked the same, acted the same, had the same spring in her step. But nobody really knew how old she was.
She had a job. She had had a series of jobs over the past decade, the latest being at the florist shop around the corner from her house. Every morning, as part of her exercise routine, she would get up at dawn, get dressed, and start walking. She would walk in the opposite direction from the florist shop, turning left or right as the mood hit her and eventually she would end up at the shop. By the time she got there another employee would be taking care of the morning shipment. She would put on some music, Artie Shaw, Billie Holiday, or maybe even some Bela Bartok. And then she would start making arrangements for the window display.
This morning she was working with a young girl by the name of Penelope. People around town called her Nelly. Nelly finished high school a couple of months ago and was planning to leave for college in a couple of weeks. Mrs. Leed liked working with Nelly. The minute she came through the door Nelly would start talking. She would talk about getting ready for college. She would talk about the parties she went to. And she would gossip about everyone in town. Mrs.Leed often wondered how Nelly knew so much about everyone, but never questioned her. She liked hearing Nelly’s stories. The town never changed much, and the lives of each generation looked a lot like the generation before. Hearing Nelly’s stories made the town seem predictable and comfortable. Mrs. Leed liked that.
“…And then Mrs. Martin said that she would tell Missy’s Mom what we were up to. And I was, like, it’s not as if we were doing anything illegal. And besides, it’s not like Missy’s mom would listen to her anyway. She hasn’t liked Mrs. Martin since that whole incident with the dog…”
Mrs. Leed was trying to remember if Nelly had told her about the dog incident when Nelly asked, “so what’s your story?”
She looked up, “hmmm?”
“I was just thinking that I’ve worked with you all summer and I don’t know very much about you. So, were you born here?”
Mrs. Leed thought to her self that she didn’t know very much about herself either. Most of her life had been so long ago that she was starting to forget it. “No. I moved here with my husband shortly after we were married. He was from here.”
“How long ago was that?”
“So long ago, I can’t remember.”
“There a rumor around town with the kids that you are, like, two hundred years old. No offense. I mean you know how kids are. I never believed it anyway. I mean, my grandmother is eighty and you look half her age.”
The old woman smiled. “Have you ever considered that it could be true?”
“Nah…You’re joking right? Anyway, nobody lives to be that old.”
“Sometimes I wonder. Everything seems so long ago. I’m starting to forget it. I can’t remember which year I was born anymore.”
The truth, which she never mentioned to anyone, was that she was well into her hundreds. And it was also true that she didn’t know exactly how far in to her hundreds. She had lost count somewhere along the way. After a hundred years she figured that it really didn’t matter anymore. She couldn’t remember the last birthday she had celebrated. She stopped celebrating when her last surviving child stopped surviving. There was no longer anyone to share a birthday with, or even to remind her that it was her birthday. She did remember the date, February 13, occasionally falling on a Friday. That made her sign Aquarius. She was having a memory of someone explaining to her what that meant. It was a woman. As an Aquarius you are prone to deep and profound thoughts…
“You should write it down.” She realized that Nelly was still talking to her.
“Write what down?”
“Your life story, you know, like a memoirs or something, before you start forgetting more stuff. Michael Kealy is writing his memoirs, which I think is silly because he’s only twenty. I mean what could he have to write about. I always thought he was weird anyway.”
“Maybe he is planning on it being a life time project.”
“Yeah, maybe. He’s going to the school I’m going to go to. I hope I don’t run into him very much. I can’t wait to get away from some of the people in this town. I think I’m going to try to get people at school to call me Penelope. I’m tired of being called Nelly. I figure this is a good opportunity to dump that name.”
“Would you like me to start calling you Penelope?”
“That would be great.”
The rest of the morning was pleasant for Mrs. Leed. Penelope stopped asking about her life and instead started gossiping about the affair that the high school English teacher and the school principal were supposedly having. And about how the fact that her neighbor smoked pot was becoming more and more obvious. Every time he stepped out of his house “he just reeked.”
So Mrs. Leed, now a widow, went on living in the same small town where her husband left her. She continued to get older in years, but she really didn’t age. She was old, but she had given up counting birthdays quite sometime ago. Everyone in town speculated about her age, because most of them had known her their whole lives, but she always looked the same, acted the same, had the same spring in her step. But nobody really knew how old she was.
She had a job. She had had a series of jobs over the past decade, the latest being at the florist shop around the corner from her house. Every morning, as part of her exercise routine, she would get up at dawn, get dressed, and start walking. She would walk in the opposite direction from the florist shop, turning left or right as the mood hit her and eventually she would end up at the shop. By the time she got there another employee would be taking care of the morning shipment. She would put on some music, Artie Shaw, Billie Holiday, or maybe even some Bela Bartok. And then she would start making arrangements for the window display.
This morning she was working with a young girl by the name of Penelope. People around town called her Nelly. Nelly finished high school a couple of months ago and was planning to leave for college in a couple of weeks. Mrs. Leed liked working with Nelly. The minute she came through the door Nelly would start talking. She would talk about getting ready for college. She would talk about the parties she went to. And she would gossip about everyone in town. Mrs.Leed often wondered how Nelly knew so much about everyone, but never questioned her. She liked hearing Nelly’s stories. The town never changed much, and the lives of each generation looked a lot like the generation before. Hearing Nelly’s stories made the town seem predictable and comfortable. Mrs. Leed liked that.
“…And then Mrs. Martin said that she would tell Missy’s Mom what we were up to. And I was, like, it’s not as if we were doing anything illegal. And besides, it’s not like Missy’s mom would listen to her anyway. She hasn’t liked Mrs. Martin since that whole incident with the dog…”
Mrs. Leed was trying to remember if Nelly had told her about the dog incident when Nelly asked, “so what’s your story?”
She looked up, “hmmm?”
“I was just thinking that I’ve worked with you all summer and I don’t know very much about you. So, were you born here?”
Mrs. Leed thought to her self that she didn’t know very much about herself either. Most of her life had been so long ago that she was starting to forget it. “No. I moved here with my husband shortly after we were married. He was from here.”
“How long ago was that?”
“So long ago, I can’t remember.”
“There a rumor around town with the kids that you are, like, two hundred years old. No offense. I mean you know how kids are. I never believed it anyway. I mean, my grandmother is eighty and you look half her age.”
The old woman smiled. “Have you ever considered that it could be true?”
“Nah…You’re joking right? Anyway, nobody lives to be that old.”
“Sometimes I wonder. Everything seems so long ago. I’m starting to forget it. I can’t remember which year I was born anymore.”
The truth, which she never mentioned to anyone, was that she was well into her hundreds. And it was also true that she didn’t know exactly how far in to her hundreds. She had lost count somewhere along the way. After a hundred years she figured that it really didn’t matter anymore. She couldn’t remember the last birthday she had celebrated. She stopped celebrating when her last surviving child stopped surviving. There was no longer anyone to share a birthday with, or even to remind her that it was her birthday. She did remember the date, February 13, occasionally falling on a Friday. That made her sign Aquarius. She was having a memory of someone explaining to her what that meant. It was a woman. As an Aquarius you are prone to deep and profound thoughts…
“You should write it down.” She realized that Nelly was still talking to her.
“Write what down?”
“Your life story, you know, like a memoirs or something, before you start forgetting more stuff. Michael Kealy is writing his memoirs, which I think is silly because he’s only twenty. I mean what could he have to write about. I always thought he was weird anyway.”
“Maybe he is planning on it being a life time project.”
“Yeah, maybe. He’s going to the school I’m going to go to. I hope I don’t run into him very much. I can’t wait to get away from some of the people in this town. I think I’m going to try to get people at school to call me Penelope. I’m tired of being called Nelly. I figure this is a good opportunity to dump that name.”
“Would you like me to start calling you Penelope?”
“That would be great.”
The rest of the morning was pleasant for Mrs. Leed. Penelope stopped asking about her life and instead started gossiping about the affair that the high school English teacher and the school principal were supposedly having. And about how the fact that her neighbor smoked pot was becoming more and more obvious. Every time he stepped out of his house “he just reeked.”
Sunday, August 10, 2008
A good day...
Today was a great bay area day for me. First off the weather was beautiful. I started off by meeting up with friends at the Thai temple in Berkeley for Thai brunch. We got there a little too late for it to be an ideal experience (I would recommend arriving before 10:30), but sitting on the back porch of one of the temple buildings drinking Thai ice tea, eating mango sticky rice, and chatting with friends is always pleasant. Then one of my friends and I wandered over to the Ashby flea market, which is only a few blocks away. I bought a great new pair of sunglasses for only five dollars. Then another friend came and picked us up and the three of us drove over to the city to go to Ocean Beach. (We were going to take public transportation, but my friend reasoned that it would be cheaper with three of us to drive. Though I try to use public transit as much as possible I do have many issues with the way BART operates that I will address at some later date.)
We took the long way, driving through golden gate park, which was beautiful as always. We ended up over by the Beach Chalet and the windmill. We stopped in at the Beach Chalet to grab some of their jugs-o-beer. I forget what they call them, but the jugs are cheaper then getting a pitcher, and you get to keep the jug. I think the jug and beer is twelve and if you bring the jug back the refill is only eight. My friend brought hers to refill and I got a new one. Mine is in my frig right now with the left over beer.
The great thing was that right before we ordered one of the people behind the bar dropped a champagne glass nearly on top of me and shattered glass every where I was sitting so he gave us a new one and a refill for the price of one.
After my third friend finally got the food to go that she had ordered (I would not recommend eating there on a Sunday. It was way too busy and took way too long.), we walked across to the beach. We lounged in the warm sand, drank our jugs of beer and snacked on my friends potato chips that came with her food. Unfortunately, it was gray along the shore, but it was still nice to be near the water, watching people with their children, dogs or footballs, and the seagulls waiting for said people to give them food. We finally had to move because of the call of nature (btw, the beach chalet is a great place to use the restroom). And then we wandered over to the
Dutch Windmill, which has a fabulous flower garden surrounding it. We sat on one the benches there and drank some more from our jugs-o-beer (I don't know if it is legal, but no one bugged us).
On our way home we found the freeway traffic stopped. So, we got off and ended up at the Atlas Cafe, which has good coffee drinks, decent pastries, and good soups, all of which tided us over until we thought the freeway had cleared. And last, but not least, we happened to pass a "yard" sale just a few blocks from the cafe where my friend found a great little art deco bedside table for hardly any money. Yes, it was a good day. I would highly recommend this trek to anyone.
We took the long way, driving through golden gate park, which was beautiful as always. We ended up over by the Beach Chalet and the windmill. We stopped in at the Beach Chalet to grab some of their jugs-o-beer. I forget what they call them, but the jugs are cheaper then getting a pitcher, and you get to keep the jug. I think the jug and beer is twelve and if you bring the jug back the refill is only eight. My friend brought hers to refill and I got a new one. Mine is in my frig right now with the left over beer.
The great thing was that right before we ordered one of the people behind the bar dropped a champagne glass nearly on top of me and shattered glass every where I was sitting so he gave us a new one and a refill for the price of one.
After my third friend finally got the food to go that she had ordered (I would not recommend eating there on a Sunday. It was way too busy and took way too long.), we walked across to the beach. We lounged in the warm sand, drank our jugs of beer and snacked on my friends potato chips that came with her food. Unfortunately, it was gray along the shore, but it was still nice to be near the water, watching people with their children, dogs or footballs, and the seagulls waiting for said people to give them food. We finally had to move because of the call of nature (btw, the beach chalet is a great place to use the restroom). And then we wandered over to the
Dutch Windmill, which has a fabulous flower garden surrounding it. We sat on one the benches there and drank some more from our jugs-o-beer (I don't know if it is legal, but no one bugged us).
On our way home we found the freeway traffic stopped. So, we got off and ended up at the Atlas Cafe, which has good coffee drinks, decent pastries, and good soups, all of which tided us over until we thought the freeway had cleared. And last, but not least, we happened to pass a "yard" sale just a few blocks from the cafe where my friend found a great little art deco bedside table for hardly any money. Yes, it was a good day. I would highly recommend this trek to anyone.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Why I Hate Beauty has an interesting perspective on men's perception of women, and why so many of them can't find fulfilling relationships. Whether or not it is true or even partially true, it's an interesting read.
Monday, August 04, 2008
"A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day."
~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
I was very sad to hear today that one of my favorite authors died this weekend. So I went and pulled his book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, from my shelf for the umpteenth time. I've noticed that the pages are starting to come loose from the paperback binding, but I suppose that is a sign of love. This book has been influential in my life in many ways, from understanding human nature to understanding history. Solzhenitsyn was an important, influential figure in the Soviet Union, using his writing to both speak truth to power and to give testament to the struggles of many.
The New York Times has an interesting story about how Russia today has lost touch with the work of this great author titled Reverence but No Outpouring for Solzhenitsyn that I would highly recommend reading. I would also recommend Truthout's transcription of an address Solzhenitsyn gave in 1978 called A World Split Apart.
I was very sad to hear today that one of my favorite authors died this weekend. So I went and pulled his book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, from my shelf for the umpteenth time. I've noticed that the pages are starting to come loose from the paperback binding, but I suppose that is a sign of love. This book has been influential in my life in many ways, from understanding human nature to understanding history. Solzhenitsyn was an important, influential figure in the Soviet Union, using his writing to both speak truth to power and to give testament to the struggles of many.
The New York Times has an interesting story about how Russia today has lost touch with the work of this great author titled Reverence but No Outpouring for Solzhenitsyn that I would highly recommend reading. I would also recommend Truthout's transcription of an address Solzhenitsyn gave in 1978 called A World Split Apart.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
A Homily for the Homeless
I thought I saw Jesus pass me in the street last week.
He just passed me by.
He was followed by an angel in disguise,
Who smiled and tossed me a dime.
Is that all the salvation I get,
All the love you can afford?
I saw him again this past Tuesday.
He tossed a cigarette butt at my feet.
His angel buddy laughed and I was ignored.
What’s that all about?
I was told Jesus loves me.
I don’t believe that now.
All I believe in is dirty streets,
Polluted air,
And assholes everywhere.
Next time I see you in the street,
Or, God forbid,
You come to my door
I’m going to pretend I don’t see you.
Screw that.
I won’t pretend,
I just won’t believe.
He just passed me by.
He was followed by an angel in disguise,
Who smiled and tossed me a dime.
Is that all the salvation I get,
All the love you can afford?
I saw him again this past Tuesday.
He tossed a cigarette butt at my feet.
His angel buddy laughed and I was ignored.
What’s that all about?
I was told Jesus loves me.
I don’t believe that now.
All I believe in is dirty streets,
Polluted air,
And assholes everywhere.
Next time I see you in the street,
Or, God forbid,
You come to my door
I’m going to pretend I don’t see you.
Screw that.
I won’t pretend,
I just won’t believe.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
This is stupid, as all things written in moments of emotion are, and I will probably delete it tomorrow. But it is amazing how much time someone can spend with you and how little he actually knows about you, or how much he thinks he knows about you that is wrong. And how he will misinterpret everything you say just to make him look and feel better. So here's about me if anyone cares. I don't expect to save the world, I just want to help out a few kids, and feel like I am making a difference in somebody's life. And yes it is a real job. I like my job. There are some things about it I don’t like. Most people have at least one thing they would change about their jobs. But overall, I really like my job. My boss is fabulous. Though I would like to get back into some journalism, which I am working on, because I find learning about new things all the time interesting. I hate politics. I write about politics with disgust. I care about people and politics is not about people. And honestly I don’t care whether or not people vote. It is a personal choice. My brother was a non-voter for years. And most of the time I question whether I should vote or not. Does it really matter, and why would I vote for people I can’t stand, especially when they are the only choices. I am not always late; in fact I am often early to things I think are important. And if someone tells me they would very much like me to be on time I will make an extra effort. I like a lot of sports, and sporting events. I don't like Maroon 5 at all, but I tolerate them for some friends' sake. I will buy Street Spirit from a homeless person occasionally. I actually find it an interesting publication. The rest of the time I try to refer them to a program like B.O.S.S. I definitely don't hold anything against them. Everyone has their own reasons for being where they are in their lives at the moment. Who am I to judge? They are probably decent people for the most part. I laugh at everything, especially myself. I think religion is a big mistake most of the time. It often creates more conflict then good. But I would like to think there is something else out there, but it is not the center of my life by far. I haven't done drugs in a long time, except for caffeine and alcohol. I absolutely hated The Secret. I thought it sounded a bit too much like a pyramid scheme. I am okay with weird, offensive humor; I grew up hearing it. I like to travel, but it is something I do for myself when I get a chance. I don't expect everyone else to be into it, or want to go where I want to go. And I would never harass anyone to go with me. I have plenty of friends who like to travel with me, and I also like traveling alone. I don't always remember dates unless I write them down. But I have an excellent memory otherwise. I can remember most events very clearly, but maybe not the precise date they happened on. I don't care if anyone remembers my birthday. That is why I always do something for myself. It's the one day I take to be truly selfish and do things just for me, and the friends who decide they want to come along. I love music with a passion. And I think I have incredibly good taste. I may not know all the facts about a band or even remember the name of the song, album, or the band itself, but it’s the music that is important. I have never actually listened to Sufjan Stevens, and as such don’t have an opinion about his music one way or another. I wish I had the time and money to go to more shows. Overall I am a completely (way to much maybe?) compromising and forgiving person. I don't expect apologies from people. Apologies are often insincere. What I do expect is behavior changes. That is how you know a person is actually sorry about what they've done. I try to be very honest with people, and often find myself in trouble by expecting the same from others. But I have told lies occasionally. Most notably when I used to cheat on spelling tests in third grade. And more recently when I said I don't think about the future. I constantly think about the future. But I also know that the future is constantly changing, so I try to be open to all possibilities and see what happens, but make decisions based on what I hope the outcome will be. I try to enjoy now as much as possible, no matter what the future might bring. And I am confident in myself and my ability to survive whatever life brings my way. I definitely don’t need a man to survive. I am independent and I like myself. I am okay with my body, but I wouldn’t mind losing a few pounds, not because of what other people think, but because I think I might feel a little healthier that way. I like to be active, and if I spend too much time sitting around it makes me unhappy. I am smart and funny when people around me allow the space for it. I am a good conversationalist if you try me. Just have a topic you really enjoy talking about. Most of all I think friendship is important, which is probably why I have more friends then I can actually spend quality time with. That is all for now.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Here is my life in a nut shell:
Have a great idea, start working on it, get distracted by some other great idea (or sometimes just an okay one), a month goes by and nothing is done. Since shortly after my last post, not quite a month ago, I have had a slew of things that I have wanted to write about, some of them started, some not, but none finished. Needless to say there have been many distractions this month. Interesting articles I read inspired most of the things I wanted to write about. So instead of taking the time to write out a commentary on every topic, I'm just going to list all the articles, which you should read, with just a sentence or two to accompany them. That way at least I have posted something. Maybe later I will come back and expand upon certain themes, but probably not.
"Senate Approves Bill to Broaden Wiretap Powers" (NYT) This is one of my favorite parts: "There is nothing to fear in the bill, said Senator Christopher S. Bond, the Missouri Republican who was a lead negotiator, 'unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.'" Hey, I thought he was just the pizza guy.
"Midwest floods spotlight decrepit infrastructure" (Reuters) What the government's job again? Oh yeah, war. We don't need functioning roads, bridges, or anything like that anyway.
"House of Cards: You thought the housing crisis was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet." (LA CityBeat) Something to think about.
"Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube" (NYT) To Tube or not to Tube.
"Bush-Led 'Disaster Capitalism' Exploits Worldwide Misery to Make a Buck" (Alternet) Naomi Klein is always a good read and I find this piece particularly interesting.
"Fuel for Inequality" (NYT) Who would have thought, it's the poor getting screwed again. Excellent op-ed, brings up a lot of points not much heard in the din about oil prices.
I think that's enough for right now. I will try not to get so distracted in the future.
"Senate Approves Bill to Broaden Wiretap Powers" (NYT) This is one of my favorite parts: "There is nothing to fear in the bill, said Senator Christopher S. Bond, the Missouri Republican who was a lead negotiator, 'unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.'" Hey, I thought he was just the pizza guy.
"Midwest floods spotlight decrepit infrastructure" (Reuters) What the government's job again? Oh yeah, war. We don't need functioning roads, bridges, or anything like that anyway.
"House of Cards: You thought the housing crisis was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet." (LA CityBeat) Something to think about.
"Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube" (NYT) To Tube or not to Tube.
"Bush-Led 'Disaster Capitalism' Exploits Worldwide Misery to Make a Buck" (Alternet) Naomi Klein is always a good read and I find this piece particularly interesting.
"Fuel for Inequality" (NYT) Who would have thought, it's the poor getting screwed again. Excellent op-ed, brings up a lot of points not much heard in the din about oil prices.
I think that's enough for right now. I will try not to get so distracted in the future.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
A new ceasefire agreement was announced today between Israel and Hamas…
Hamas: We agree to stop as soon as they stop.
Israel: We agree to stop as soon as they stop.
Hamas: You first.
Israel: No, you first.
Hamas: We agree to stop as soon as they stop.
Israel: We agree to stop as soon as they stop.
Hamas: You first.
Israel: No, you first.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Here’s a story that roiled my blood.
CNN.com’s article “FEMA gives away $85 million of supplies for Katrina victims” is just the thing to make Friday the 13th luck seem not so bad. It is my impression that it is common knowledge that the plights of many Katrina victims are far from over. Stories are still coming out of the New Orleans area about families displaced and homeless, communities still trying to rebuild. Yet FEMA claims to not have known the supplies were needed. I find this highly suspicious. Another story by ABC News, “FEMA Boots Katrina Victims From Trailers,” leads me to believe that FEMA is in some way actively impeding the recovery of the area, either that or extreme incompetence. According to the ABC story the reason for asking displaced families to leave the trailers set up as temporary homes is because they cannot withstand hurricane season. If that is the case why are these families still in these trailers almost three years and two hurricane seasons later? The other explanation is that the formaldehyde used in making the trailers is making people sick. If the levels of formaldehyde were that high, then why were these trailers used in the first place? Some of the families may be able to find homes, but as ABC quotes ‘ “The government had no plan for long-term planning of folks, and this is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis that the country has never seen the proportions of,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a legal action group founded by a team of civil rights lawyers in 1998.’ The article postulates that many will end up in the infamous tent city under the I-10 interstate where many displaced individuals and families are already living.
It seems to me that there never was much intention of helping out these victims of Katrina, who are mostly the poor and minorities. FEMA didn’t do much in the first days of the disaster, and they are continuing to not do all they should. Instead, the burden falls on individuals and NGOs willing to help out and give their time, which I’m sure is much appreciated. But isn’t the duty of our government to maintain the well-being and sense of security of its people (and by security, I mean knowing that I’ll have a roof over my head tomorrow, not protection against some ambiguous terrorist threat). Isn’t that what we pay tax dollars for? Where do all our tax dollars go to? Oh that’s right, to Iraq. I hope the Iraqis are enjoying the services our government has to offer them.
It seems to me that there never was much intention of helping out these victims of Katrina, who are mostly the poor and minorities. FEMA didn’t do much in the first days of the disaster, and they are continuing to not do all they should. Instead, the burden falls on individuals and NGOs willing to help out and give their time, which I’m sure is much appreciated. But isn’t the duty of our government to maintain the well-being and sense of security of its people (and by security, I mean knowing that I’ll have a roof over my head tomorrow, not protection against some ambiguous terrorist threat). Isn’t that what we pay tax dollars for? Where do all our tax dollars go to? Oh that’s right, to Iraq. I hope the Iraqis are enjoying the services our government has to offer them.
Monday, June 09, 2008
This is worth looking at.
http://www.freepress.net/node/41347
States what many of us know, but eloquently. Let me know what you think of Dan Rather's overview of the state of mainstream media today.
States what many of us know, but eloquently. Let me know what you think of Dan Rather's overview of the state of mainstream media today.
Monday, June 02, 2008
Here's another example of the absurdness of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. The New York Times published an article today entitled "State Dept. Reinstates Gaza Fulbright Grants."(If you are not signed up for a NYT online account, you might as well. It's free.) Apparently , Palestinian recipients of the Fulbright were told last week that they were not going to receive the grant after all because of Israel's ban on travel for Palestinians in the Gaza strip. Fortunately, the State Department saw the error of this fairly quickly and got special permission for travel for the Fulbright scholars, after they go through rigorous security checks (who knows what that will involve). But, as the article points out, there are still close to 600 other scholars in the Gaza strip who have received scholarships to study abroad, who are, as it currently stands, unable to take advantage of these prestigious opportunities they have been offered. If Israel is looking for ways to escalate violence and garner support for Hamas, this is certainly a good stepping stone towards that goal. Imagine working hard for an opportunity such as a prestigious scholarship to study abroad, receiving it, then being told you can't use it because you happen to be a Palestinian student, who also happens to live in Gaza. That might piss me off a little. How about you?
Monday, February 04, 2008
Today, Women's Magazine on KPFA put together a fabulous show on the election around race and gender issues. It is worth a listen. My favorite interview is with Elaine Brown, the last on the show. Elaine Brown is someone I have long admired for her work for social change, and this interview reinforced my admiration. When asked about the campaigns of Hillary and Obama and the issue of race and gender, she responded by saying there aren't any issues of race and gender being discussed, and neither candidate actually represents, or is looking out for, the interests of women or black people. Both of them are "ordinary democrats white washing" these issues. Exactly. She is right on with everything she says. Who should we vote for? That's a conundrum she says. Whether we vote or not at this point, does it make a real difference where we are at right now? I'm going to vote tomorrow, but I'm sure most would say that I am wasting my vote because I am going to vote for who I actually think would make a good president, not who I think will be more popular against the opposing side. It seems like everyone is placing bets rather then voting these days.
Please listen: http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=24639
Please listen: http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=24639
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