Elephants

 

Welcome to episode #5 of Life Under the Rainbow Oak, today’s episode is about Elephants, those things we know exist at some level or another, but often dismiss because we seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge.

 

We, as Americans, have certain things we like to believe about ourselves… about how we have continually improved ourselves and shed the negative aspects of our past, like racism & misogyny, when we all we have really done it to paper over the holes in the walls without repairing the holes the invading elephants made.

 

And the elephants remain in the middle of the room, too. We tiptoe around them because we don’t want to upset them and have them make new holes or tear off the pretty wallpaper…. Because then we might actually have to do the harder work of fixing the holes.

 

So, let’s recognize some of our collective elephants…. And I’m not talking about the GOP, well not exactly…

 

The other day, I was listening to a podcast and the announcer and his guest were discussing the differences about Biden & Hillary Clinton and why older voters like Joe better. Mind you, both commenters were men so they missed an elephant that any woman will see and many men will simply deny the existence of.

 

Mind you, Hillary Clinton wasn’t my #1 choice in 2016 for president, she had a great deal of baggage, especially thanks to the Right. They hated her as First Lady, they hated her as a Senator, they hated her as Secretary of State, no matter what she did, she couldn’t do anything right. She also had a lot of referred ick from being married to Bill Clinton. But no matter the baggage, she was certainly the most qualified of the candidates. She wasn’t considered “likeable” and people couldn’t “connect” with her, she was considered cold, aloof, & distant or aggressive & power-hungry. All of this may have been true, but given the generation that Hillary came up in, to advance, women had to develop a certain tough demeanor…  but they did so at their peril. Women still walk a tightrope between their feminine sides and tougher sides, and meeting the competing expectations is pretty much impossible. All women want is to be recognized as full human beings first. The biggest issue that nobody want to talk about with the Hillary problem is that she is a woman.

 

Controlling women is possibly the oldest elephant the human race has tried to paper over. And US likes to think that women getting the vote in 1920 fixed that… but the truth is that by 1970, women still couldn’t have a credit card or own property without a co-signer, or could get fired for being pregnant. These were finally fixed over the course of the 1970s, but that was OVER 50 years after the 19^th amendment. Married women weren’t allowed birth control until 1965 and it took until 1972 for all women to be allowed access to contraception. Congress didn’t even remove references to contraception from federal anti-obscenity laws until 1970. And the there is the eternal fight over Roe v Wade. I’m not going to litigate it here, because it’s just a piece of the women’s rights battle.

 

So how did I get here after talking about Hillary Clinton, credit cards, and then reproductive rights? Because it’s all the same thing. Women are not seen as full human beings. The fight for reproductive rights is about the control of women, hence the fight against birth control and abortion. Women are considered at a fundamental level to not be capable of making decisions about their lives or their own bodies, like children, we can’t be responsible and need to be controlled. Additionally, our value is measured by our reproductive ability: women get married and the first thing they are asked about is when they will have a baby, women who have had several children or who decide they don’t want children are often **not allowed** to have their tubes tied or other sterilization procedures. My own daughter had a doctor who “allowed” her to have her tubes tied based on his on calculation of her age + the number of children she had had…. It wasn’t because she wanted to stop having children, but because of some rubric he had made up. A friend of mine knew she didn’t want kids and was married, and her spouse was 100% with her… but the surgeon had to sit down with *both of them*.

 

Beyond all of this is the way that women are treated in the business and professional fields, often talked down, accused of being aggressive for wanting to advance (or accused of sleeping her way to the top). Per Leftronic.com (https://tinyurl.com/y3ho3a96), 29% of senior management is female, 33 Fortune 500 companies are led by female CEOs, 31% of senior roles are held by women in the U.S., 12.5% of American women are employed as Chief Financial Officers in Fortune 500 Companies, and female CEOs are more likely to be fired than male CEOs. These type of statistics are often blamed on having children, not being engaged enough, no giving enough, etc. rather than looking at the structures that either block or support women in the workplace. Women have different needs that are often not incorporated into corporate culture, what they are really saying is that they don’t want to change.

 

All of the things that I have mentioned here are all examples of how women are controlled, and the major mechanism is via her sexuality. If she dares to step outside the appointed box, she is called demeaning names or accused of demeaning acts, all to shame her and silence her. So we continue to talk about pay gaps, abortion, birth control, but never get to the discussing the elephant of misogyny.

An amazing woman I follow is Dr. Bandy X. Lee, MD, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.  Her specialty is violence prevention, and she edited and contributed to the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (https://tinyurl.com/y4xud4e7).  She and her colleagues have predicted much of what we have seen Trump do and the pathologies he has exhibited as his presidency as gone on.  She was accused by right wing website of “not being licensed” (https://tinyurl.com/y4pdhwfu) and of violating the Goldwater Rule by the APA. She has accused the APA of having her blacklisted, as evidenced by her inability to get booked on most mainstream media outlets including Rachel Maddow. She has been outspoken in her discussion of Donald Trump’s pathological narcissism and how as the walls close in, he will become worse as he tries to save what shreds of his psyche remain (https://tinyurl.com/yxadptyq). She and her colleagues have warned, quite rightly, in my opinion, that Trumps mental health would keep spiraling out of control, possibly eventually taking the country, and perhaps the world, along with him. His uncontrolled & worsening mental state infects those around him, and the country as a whole. He will do anything for his psychic survival… all while having access to the largest military & nuclear arsenal in the world. He also makes clear how he does not care about others, and is incapable of doing so. She posits frequently on her Twitter account (https://twitter.com/BandyXLee1) that until we, as a nation, address Trump’s mental health, analyzing his actions and treating him appropriately from the mental health standpoint, we will get nowhere.

 

However, Dr. Lee is also Asian and has faced both racist and misogynistic attacks for her speaking out from her expertise.

 

Here we have to tiptoe around 2 additional elephants, racism and Trump’s mental health. Trump’s mental health has been nibbled at around the edges by the mainstream media, but has rarely confronted the issue head-on, perhaps under pressure from the APA and other groups, but she remains another female, and Asian, voice that is being actively silenced by the powers that be.

 

The last amazing women I am going to bring up, are Sarah Kendzior (https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior) and Andrea Chalupa (https://twitter.com/AndreaChalupa). I have mentioned them in previous podcasts, they have called nearly every step of the US descent into autocracy under Trump. Their podcast, Gaslit Nation (https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/), is a study of where we are as a country every week. They too have not been widely listened to, or taken seriously, until now… all while being faced with threats to their families and persons, up to and including death. And lately I have seen more experts on rising autocracies on the news as the mainstream media seems to finally be cottoning onto the concept that our country might actually be in danger. However, more often than not, those voices are male and not female. But these brave, bold women have been trying to tell us what has been coming for the last 5 years.

 

So we have some huge elephants sitting in our national living room… and they can’t be ignored anymore. Like so many problems, we have to recognize them for what they are and listen to the people affected by them to begin unravelling the toxic effects they have on us all.

 

The first and most urgent has to be Trump’s pathological narcissism. This is the most looming danger we face, partly because over 1/3 of the country is it on and taking the rest of us down with them, the problem is that they cannot see where this is heading and they really think this is what they want, please listen to my first podcast “Watch What You Wish For” (https://anchor.fm/jennifer-schmidt2/episodes/1-Watch-What-You-Wish-For-ejs10l) . We are on the USS Trumptanic and we are all locked in steerage. If we don’t deal with this, any semblance of the America we know and love will be gone. The road ahead isn’t easy going to be easy, no matter who wins the election in a month. However, understanding that we are dealing with a very ill individual from a mental health framework will make taking the next steps as a country easier, because we will have a grounded understanding of what is happening vis a vis the president.

 

The misogyny and racism elephants must also be dealt with squarely and forthrightly. The place to start is by listening to women and communities of color about what THEIR needs are. Don’t assume anything. Don’t treat any gender or community as monolithic. White men are treated as individuals, that is all women and people of color are asking. Nobody has to give up anything, this is not a zero-sum game.

 

America is an Abuse Victim Fighting For Survival

 

I watched as much of the first Trump/Biden debate as I could stomach, honestly I have a headache and feel queasy. I saw a man standing at a podium, but I FELT a man stalking the stage, raging like a drunk abuser in an a-shirt with his kids and wife cowering at his feet after he has beaten them.

As a woman, I experienced rage, fear, sadness, & humiliation that reminds me of those times I was bullied in high school… but mostly I am filled with rage. I wanted to reach through my computer screen and punch Donald in the face.

I feel white hot rage… for our entire country, but especially for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ+ folks, frontline & essential workers, and anyone else Trump deems “disgusting people”. Sadly this describes many of his supporters and they hear his call to “Stand Back & Stand By”; they will heed his call to civil war should he lose the election. White Supremacy & Racism aren’t even being hidden anymore. Those “proud boys” back him and will die for him, and he really couldn’t care less. We are all just the shit his money grows in.

The Trump threat is real, this man has been telling us since before 2015 who he is and what he wants to do. He wasn’t taken seriously until now because he was viewed as a buffoon. But Sarah Kendzior, author of The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight, as well as scholar of authoritarian states, saw what he was and warned us. In her 2016 essay (https://thecorrespondent.com/5696/were-heading-into-dark-times-this-is-how-to-be-your-own-light-in-the-age-of-trump/1611114266432-e23ea1a6), she quotes Trump as saying, “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.” In her eyes, “This is what “Make America Great Again” means to Donald Trump.” She also posits that Trump and kleptocrat class want to “strip our country down for parts, often using ethnic violence to do so.” And given what we have seen in the last 4 years under Trump, she was right. She and her counterpart, Andrea Chalupa, host the Gaslit Nation Podcast (https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/) and have been warning of everything we have collectively been experiencing.

Tonight more of the country saw who Trump really is. He is mean, cruel, sadistic, uncaring, and fucking unhinged. It was all about him, what he wants and what he needs. The debate, if you can call it that, became yet another episode of the Donald Trump show that has become a fixture we have been unable tune out for the last 4 years. I really appreciated Joe Biden just telling him to shut up. Trump is a bully and he hates it when someone tells him the truth and when he can’t control the narrative. He acts like an out of control toddler and lashes out trying to regain control. He’s the poster child of “arrested development” and his antics communicate loud and clear to his fellow arrestees. The large swath of men and women in this country who never learned to deal with the emotions in a healthy way, I would say far too many… believe only weaklings show emotions, thanks to the stew of toxic masculinity we have all been steeped in. Our country is emotionally stunted and it’s really no wonder we are so fucked up… Kids get ridiculed for attempting to find emotional wellbeing. And yes, I resemble that remark.

Another important point to consider is the input of Dr. Bandy X. Lee, the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. She and the other contributors to the book likewise warned us that Trump’s pathology would become a national pathology, as well as pose a danger to the country as a whole. She makes a strong case that as a country, we need to deal with Trump’s mental health issues, because those coupled with the immense power of the presidency, will more than like yield deadly consequences for our fellow citizens, country, and world. Surely they already have, as evidenced by his blasé attitude about the 205,000+ dead from coronavirus and. And conditions like his worsen over time at an acerating pace.  Do we really want him near the nuclear codes? (https://medium.com/@bandyxlee/the-accelerated-unraveling-of-donald-trump-702dec03330e)

Biden maintained and exuded a presidential demeanor as best he could tonight, but unfortunately, debating Trump in anything near “normal” is nigh impossible. Biden’s connections came through when he ignored Trump and just talked into the camera to the American people about his own life, about our families’ lives. Biden isn’t perfect, but damnit, we have to get this jalopy of a country back on the road if we are ever going to get to the dream country dealership.

I’m not surprised at how the debate went tonight, not really even shocked. Many of us knew who he was, deep in our bones, our Black sisters and brothers were trying to tell us, as were those who knew what they were looking at….

So really, the question before us is… **What can we do?!?!** This is not the time to sit on the sidelines and assume everything will take care of itself. Donate money up and down the ballot if you can. Donate time if you can: volunteer as a poll worker, write letters, drive people to the polls, hand out snacks and water for those waiting to vote, gather ballots in your state and take them to drop boxes (but check your local laws first!), phone bank, text bank, talk to friend and neighbors, do what you can where you are and with what means you have.

Personally, I hate calling people, but I plan to start textbanking later in the week… and I’m going to be a monitor on social media. I have also written 20 lettesr to voters in Ohio and 200 postcards to voters in Florida. I live in a vote by mail state and plan to grab all the ballots from my household and walk them to the dropbox at the library. A great guide is here at the Gaslit Nation website, https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/2020-survival-guide.

The one thing that is certain is that if we stand up as a country and tell Donald “NO!” & “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” in numbers too big too ignore, he will disappear like cowards & bullies do.

Stand up! Vote!

Cheeto Mussolini & the Magic Sharpie vs. the Notorious RBG

I woke up before the alarm this morning, wracked with anxiety. RBG’s passing last Friday, may her memory always be a blessing, has thrown so much more doubt into an already doubtful time. I don’t think many people, myself included, understood viscerally what she stood for, all she had done, and what a bulwark she was … and how much we were depending on her.

Honestly, she reminded me of my mom, seemingly able to absorb every blow and come back fighting… until her frail body just couldn’t take it anymore.

Now with McConnell and Trump working as hard as we knew they would to fill her seat with an anti-RBG, to all intents and purposes, their motivations and lies are laid bare.

For all those who think they want an a world without all that Libtard shit, 40 hour work weeks, weekends off, osha protections, the ACA, a functional CDC, environmental regulations, clean water, freedom to live that “gay lifestyle” (including marrying the one you love, working without fear of being fired, and other “minor” considerations), women’s rights to have a credit card or mortgage without a co-signer, to take birth control without consent of her partner, not lose her job just because she gets pregnant, to have an abortion, equal rights for black people and people of color, trans-rights, and so many other things we have come to enjoy and count on.

The list is voluminous, but the point is that she worked for us all.

The amount of damage our institutions, norms, and laws have sustained under Cheeto Mussolini and his Magic Sharpie in not even 4 years is amazing … unthinkable is how much more he will be able to do with his packed courts and a win in November. Nothing that we have known is safe, especially if you aren’t white or male or straight or Christian.

These movements are like an ever-tightening circular firing squad, with continuous purity testing. It happened in the French Revolution, it happened in Nazi Germany, it’s happening with Trump. As the Dear Leader gets bored or tired or disaffected with a given person, they get tossed aside and the circle gets smaller and the purity tests get harder to pass.

And the faith that so many had in our institutions is now recognized as a false hope. Certainly, those loyal to the rule of law and the constitution remain, but the agencies have been co-opted and corrupted by Trump. The CDC, DOJ, USPS, have all been Trumpified to some level or another… and many other agencies as well.

The rule of law and the constitution are only as strong as our collective belief in the ideals they represent. This includes our elections. Trump has been sowing doubt about the elections, which have been a sterling hallmark of our country since its inception, especially as the franchise has expanded… and now that founding principle is thrown into doubt. He has successfully brainwashed his minions into believing that voting by mail is fraudulent, even though, according to former Republican strategist Rick Wilson, absentee voting has long been the “secret sauce” the GOP used to help secure wins in states like Florida.

And now, tonight, Trump made his plan clear… pack to the Supreme Court with a 9^th justice favorable and (most likely beholden) to him and refuse to accept any election results. Then he will use that favorable supreme court to throw out all mail-in ballots and declare the election null and void so he can just continue on. That’s it. That is the plan.

And the Democrats, after years of bringing tea sets to gun fights, are finally waking up to fact that the old norms and rules were scrapped long ago. Unfortunately, while they were clutching their pearls, and sending scolding letters to Republicans, the playbook fundamentally changed and they have been stripped of many powers. Additionally, they refuse to use the powers that they do, such has the subpoena & contempt powers of the House. It’s just not decorous, it’s not bipartisan, it’s not seemly…. “here have a cup of tea… and be careful not to get it on your lace gloves.” It’s also way past time trying to shame the shameless.

The Democrats have got to get it through their heads that the tea set needs to stay at Grandma’s house, and while dropping it off, they should grab Grandpa’s shotgun. As former Congressman Joe Walsh said on his Monday (9/21) “F*ck Silence” podcast, the question Democrats need to answer is “What are you prepared to do?!”, referencing Sean Connery’s character in The Untouchables. It’s a valid question that deserves an answer.

The death of Notorious RBG has made an already complex situation worse for this country. As has been said in several places on social media, it’s a hell of an indictment in this country that the laundry list of things I mentioned earlier were being held up by one 87-year-old woman in frail health. She can’t save us, Pelosi & Schumer can’t (or won’t) save us, Mueller didn’t save us, the Electoral College didn’t save us, Hillary didn’t save us.

Again from Pogo, “We have met the enemy & he is us”.

All we really have left is the vote. This is our last chance to save our Democracy. And we must do in numbers too large to be ignored.  And if they try to nullify the election, we must be ready to lay ourselves on the line… just like the Civil Rights fighters in the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter protesters today.

VOTE!

 

 

200,000 

& Inconvenient Truths

200,000. Dead. Small by percentages as far as total US population goes, but huge to those who have lost loved ones… in some cases, almost entire families wiped out… only kids left behind… and the ongoing health effects for the “long-haulers” and those with ongoing heart and memory problems. And the incredibly high impact on communities of color makes COVID-19 even more horrifying. Per the CDC, when compared to whites, the case rate for Black communities is 2.6x higher, 2.8x higher for Native American populations and Hispanic/Latino populations. Death rates are, 2.1x higher for Blacks, 1.4x higher for for Native Americans, and 1.1x higher for Lantinx people.

But after the initial push in March for lockdowns and masks, we pass the 200,000 dead mark with a blasé sigh and seemingly collective national “Whatever”… unless you are out protesting masks and lockdowns as against your rights. Nevermind, the concept of personal responsibility and consideration for others, ie duty to society.

I am a former Public Health RN, I worked in a small county health department in Missouri for 7 years, but continued funding cuts and crappy pay finally forced me out of a job that I loved… and we saw people from the community from birth to death almost. From the WIC program to immunizations to injections for community members and so many other services, what we were able to do diminished over time.

I was primarily the Communicable Disease nurse and did the contact tracing for disease reports and outbreaks. When I see how the Coronavirus Pandemic has been screwed up, I feel it deep in my soul. I know the hard work of the invisible battlefront that nobody appreciates… and used to ask where we were when things got bad. But Trump’s absent leadership now calls into question the very function of public health from those who have no clue of its vital role in healthy communities.

If you don’t know where the disease is coming from, who has come into contact with the infected, or where they have been, controlling the spread is nearly impossible. When messaging is muddled or incorrect, it further diminishes the credibility of any advice, even from the most respected institutions like the CDC. And we have lost any sense of civic duty, rather like the Dear Leader.

So, thanks to the lack of national leadership on the Coronavirus Pandemic, 200,000 is not so much a milestone as a speedbump at this point.

One of those inconvenient truths that Cheeto Mussolini likes to obscure with other scandals, like he does.

The Inconvenient Truth is that we have long surpassed the total number who died in every conflict from Vietnam to present (63,418) AND World War 1 (116,541)… total 179,934… and taking out the 5 years of WW2 at 405,399, it took us 98 years to wipe out that many people in war. We lost an estimated 675,000 to the 1918 Flu Pandemic. (https://tinyurl.com/yb9sz5e2) (https://tinyurl.com/y33v84me)

Or another way to look at it: it’s like the population of Salt Lake City has disappeared over the last 6 months. But many of us are lucky, because we are untouched by the heartbreak of this disease… often because we are white. And these lives have been slipping away slowly, outside our sphere of experience

And it’s not because whites live inherently better lives than people of color, it’s because healthcare isn’t a right in this country and accessibility and affordability is unequally distributed. 

Racism is such a part of our entire governmental system, and we have been divided to such a point as to make it impossible for poor people of color to join with poor whites to fight together to make the system more equitable for all of us.

The Dear Orange Leader has an evil cunning for manipulation. As I wrote in 2016, “Trump is a master showman & fraudster ... He builds big shiny skyscrapers, casinos and hawks steaks, wine, his “university”, clothing line, et cetera… All flashy, status-ey things with his name slapped on them… but, truthfully, the core is hollow and the glitter is just spray paint. …Then the spray paint & reality got conflated, and here we are, unsure of objective reality vs. spray paint fumes. …Stuck in the dystopian theme park we can’t leave.” (https://tinyurl.com/y5kbkbar)

His favorite “secret sauce”, if you will, is racism. He knows he can play on the base fears of the rubes, but he doesn’t care about them, unless he can squeeze more money out of them. Per Olivia Troye, who served on the White House Coronavirus Task force, the president said: “Maybe this Covid thing is a good thing. I don’t like shaking hands with people. I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people.” (https://tinyurl.com/y39gpbau)

Additionally, he lives in a demented fantasy world, one in which he believes he can obscure the rising death toll by just talking his way out of it, or ignoring it, or obfuscating by creating other scandals… he has managed to do for most of his life. He said repeatedly that the virus would just go away and after said cases would drop from 15 to zero, he started equating “a good job” to 50,000-60,000 deaths, then 100,000, etc. Now he just says that he has done a great job and prevented “millions of deaths.” He has also said that he takes no responsibility.

This is the same man who ridicules those who wear masks and practice social distancing…. While packing crowds together at venues all over the country… but at a recent appearance in Nevada, he actually told a reporter that he doesn’t worry about catching coronavirus because “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away”. He also told the same reporter, “I’m more concerned about how close you are, to be honest.” (https://tinyurl.com/y5et7wsl) He expressed no concern for his followers packed illegally into the privately own airplane hangar.

Trump is not particularly book-smart, but has a twisted cunning, as mentioned earlier. In addition to his manipulative cunning, he has a strong sense for self-preservation & short-term gain, but no concept of long-term consequences or strategy. For months, controversy raged about whether Trump understood the severity of COVID-19 and was thusly carelessly bumbling along, but the Bob Woodward tape made it obvious that he DID know and made a conscious choice to play the pandemic down, doing essentially nothing, knowing that people would die…. all to preserve his image. Acting again purely in the moment, again looking only at short-term gain. (https://tinyurl.com/yyhm86fb)

His conscious decision to let people die coupled with his absolute disregard for those lives only leads to the conclusion that there is something seriously wrong with him.

Trump does not care about anyone but himself. People are the shit his money grows in (Ukrainian saying, Andrea Chalupa, Gaslit Nation)… or an easy piggybank he can tap with his never-ending cons.

The other part of his culpability in how badly the Federal COVID response has been is how he knowingly disregarded the roadmap left by the Obama/Biden administration, which was built on a sound foundation created post-9/11 by the Bush II administration. But his absolute narcissism, jealousy, and incurable malice against those who don’t kiss his ring run through everything he does as well. So he put Jared Kushner in charge of the response, and didn’t bat an eye blue states were left to fend for themselves, because they refused to bow down to him.

Additionally, he delusionally thinks he knows everything, including epidemiology. So with his “leadership”, real scientists and scientific knowledge has been sidelined, ignored, blocked, or covered up.  And now he has Scott Atlas,  a radiologist, advising him about a vastly different type of medicine. He’d probably be able to read an MRI and tell us about Trump having deterioration in his brain, but he would only have the most general knowledge of epidemiologic principles. Hint: neither herd immunity nor herd mentality are sound plans right now.

Trump has created, in-effect, a slow-moving genocide of the inconvenient, no gas chambers required. Ironically, many of those likely to die are his own supporters.

As of 16 September 2020, per Rachel Maddow, there were about 6.6 million cases and almost 198,000 dead. And Trump’s “herd immunity” (read as: genocide) strategy will see approximately 215 million – 231 million Americans infected (65-70% of total population). Our current fatality rate is 2.97% of those infected and if that follows, we can expect 6,385,500 – 6,860,700 deaths. (https://youtu.be/UVfxjS1DnBc).

Trump and his sycophants have decided that over 6 million of us are expendable.

The Inconvenient truth is that it didn’t have to be this way.

 

Watch What You Wish For

First they came for the Communists 

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

I first learned this piece in junior high, and it has haunted me ever since. I’m a lifelong history/news/politics junkie, thanks to my parents, who considered themselves “dumb old country kids.”

I am glad they aren’t alive right now to see Trump, a wannabe dictator, tearing our country limb from limb all for his own advantage. He incites “patriots” to civil war, incites their territorial imperative, paranoia, and deeply ingrained racism… all to protect himself from his many legal entanglements… but it is never about country, it’s always about Trump

The Confederates in 1861 thought they’d start a Civil War & be home in a month, after they licked the Yankees... 4-5 years later, and nearly 620,000 dead, some of them returned to a ruination of what was. Trump’s cultists exhibit similar sentiments.  Trump wants to be a dictator, and he will use any means to that end, even civil war.

Per my fave YouTuber, Beau of the Fifth Column, the US Army insurgency manual states that a civil war is a minimum 6 year commitment. Not days, weeks, or months… but years. How many *more* will die? Trump has already thrown 200K Americans into the ground to protect his fragile ego.

So we really come down to it now.

Watch what you wish for…

You think you want a civil war?

You think you want to go to war for him?

If Trump wins, he will continue to kill us all and sell the whole country for parts, as Sarah Kendzior says.

He doesn’t give a shit about you, you are just the shit he & his oligarch buddies grow their money in.

And watching the un-uniting of the former United States is Putin’s wet dream… and just like Syria, you know they will be happy to sell arms to any and all factions.

You think I’m hallucinating? You think I’m mad?

You still think he cares about you?

He called those who serve in the military losers & suckers.

He asked why our military members serve, since they didn’t get any obvious personal gain from it.

When interviewed after his recent Nevada rally, he worried more about getting COVID-19 from the interviewer and expressed no concern regarding spread amongst the crowd from which he was socially distanced.

So you think a civil war is an easy answer… and you will go out and own the libs in a month and return home….

As stated before… Plan to be committed for 6 years. 6 YEARS.

Not 6 hours, 6 days, 6 weeks, 6 months, but SIX YEARS.

And what happens in that SIX YEARS?

1.       People starve b/c they can’t get groceries
2.       There’s no electricity b/c the power grid is gone
3.       Cell phones will become distant memories
4.       Refugees will flee the fighting in droves

Really I could go on… but why? You think you will go home to your Keurig, Mountain Dew, Cheetos, Netflix and Amazon deliveries?

No.

Look at Syria. Maybe talk to a scary Syrian refugee… they will tell you what it is like to watch their children starve, or have loved ones die in bombed out shelters & hospitals. Only the very rich are protected in their enclaves and even know what electricity, cell phones, food supplies, or any of the things you currently take for granted, are.

I’d urge you to talk to real people who have lived through civil wars… oh, but they aren’t human, they are Muslim Scum, like the Libtards, you love to hate. You want to kill them all, just to make yourself feel better.

Also, you don’t want to have your dreams of manly glory messed up by the truth of how Uncivil war is, any war. It sure isn’t something to be glorified, unless you are insane… or just don’t care.

And make no mistake, your Dear Orange Leader doesn’t care. You are just a tool to him… and if you piss him off, he or his minions will come for you too.

Hell, they have already come for immigrants, locked children in cages, rolled back environmental protections, workers’ protections, they are attacking free speech on the streets of Portland, Chicago, Washington, Minneapolis with unmarked federal troopers. Who will be next? If you aren’t useful, or if you are complaining too loud, it may well be you. If the least of us isn’t safe, none of us are safe.

We have also reached the 14th point of fascism, elections interference, as our democracy fights for its life in possibly our last election.

When we have lost what is left of our democracy, it will be too late.

Watch what you wish for.

You just might get it.

BLACK LIVES MATTER

I am a White woman of privilege, not hugely wealthy, but I don’t have to worry about much, financially speaking. I don’t think I have personally had a bad experience with the police, per se. And I DO NOT know what it is to be a Black person in the United States. I cannot, from my position in this highly unequal and systemically racist society, say that I do.

That said, I know what my eyes see. I know that my heart reaches out to both my Black friends and all Black people. I cannot imagine the fear they feel of the police. I cannot imagine the years of racism and the constant messaging they receive from our society that they are lesser than. The years of anger, frustration, and stress are unimaginable to me.

Equally I cannot fathom White people who cannot get it through their heads that the America they experience is not the same one that Black people live in. Honestly, I am getting sick and tired white people as a whole… both by volition or just plain being obtuse. This includes my own brothers, ¾ of whom just don’t get it. One of them said that he doesn’t worry about law enforcement, nor should others, if they follow the law. Another brother of mine called Ferguson a “flapdoodle” when I tried to discuss it with him. Just too many white people are under the impression that if black people followed the commands of the police, they won’t get shot.

Classic white privilege talking. That concept often doesn’t work for Black people, if they are even given a chance to comply… and if they do comply, there is no guarantee that they won’t end up in a jail cell, or dead. Black parents have to have “the talk” with their kids on how to try NOT get killed by police, and that includes specific instructions on how to comply. 400+ years of that submission to merely survive isn’t healthy or sane…. but that is what we white people have created: a system that has driven our Black citizens to survival mode. And yet we expect them to keep putting up with things that we would never put up with. We ask our Black citizens to bear all of our shit and all their own, that has largely been created BY WHITES.

There have been so many lives lost through police violence. I know so many names, I wish I DIDN’T know them… because that would mean they were still alive, being loved and moving through life with their families and friends, and adding to the richness of the fabric of the United States. The list is too long. The point is that these were living, people who have been removed from their lives and the lives of those who knew and loved them.

-        Philando Castile: Worked in a cafeteria in Minneapolis, had a gun permit & told the police about it during a traffic stop. He was shot to death in front of his partner and child, after telling the officer he was reaching for the weapon.

-        Tamir Rice: 12 yo with a toy gun in park: the police car pulled up and shot him to death without warning. His sister was hysterical and was held, handcuffed, in the back of the police car.

-        John Crawford: young man was shopping in a Walmart, he had picked up a BB gun that he intended to purchase, police shot him without questions or warning

-        Michael Brown: 18 year old with his hands up and unarmed, shot in head, his body lay in the street for hours

-        George Floyd: Minneapolis: possibly used counterfeit $20 bill, suffocated by an officer who knew him

-        Breonna Taylor: Louisville: aspiring RN, dedicated EMT, shot in own bed while sleeping, no-knock warrant for person already in custody who lived 10 miles away.

However, the way that white people refuse to understand or listen to the ongoing trauma of the Black community, just shows how white privilege works. White people are shot by police & probably in greater raw numbers than Black people, but that is a function of us being a greater percentage of the population. When comparing percentages by race, Black people are much more likely to be shot by police. Additionally, white people are more often taken into custody peacefully, even if armed; one glaring example is the murderer of 9 Black parishioners at the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston… the police took him through drive through fast food before taking him to jail.

Then we come to discussing the police themselves: perhaps there are only a few “bad apples,” as we often hear, but the system protects them through qualified immunity and union contracts. And that “thin blue line” sure gets thick when their own are threatened with investigation of wrongdoing, or anything else. Good officers tend to keep their mouths shut, for fear of their jobs… or retaliation… or being forced out. The “bad apples” are spoiling the barrel. There will always be need for some police, but they don’t need leftover military equipment like MRAPs or AR-15s. Screening of potential police recruits needs to include psychological profiling and training needs to include de-escalation training. Misconduct needs to be met with real repercussions. Also pairing the police with community-based social services created with community input.

The racial divide in this country is as old as the country itself, but the breach can only be healed with deep, systemic change and a lot of soul searching & honest listening by the White population.

BLACK LIVES MATTER.

The Omega Glory meets Willy Wonka: aka A Lost Plot with Half a Map

Watching my twin grandsons, aged 3, play and frolic is a delight. Suffused with so much energy and joy, they remain blissfully sheltered a world where a nigh-invisible organism is stalking and culling the human race. We work hard to shelter them as much as we can in Trump’s United States of Fascism. I envision my grandchildren as fully actualized human beings – not just cogs in some dystopian corporate machine.

The Black Plague birthed the Renaissance – what will be born out of our current Plague? In the United States and worldwide, the inflection point is now and our ultimate disposition depends on whether the oligarchs wield enough power to keep the rest of us under their yoke, or not.

How do you wake up the tired/overworked/overmedicated/somnambulating masses in this country? How do you spur them to collectivize and fight? How to teach them that together they are strong? I DO NOT blame the people for their situation… the Powers That Be work tirelessly to undermine collective action, and have since the 1960s by “any means necessary.” Good old-fashioned fear knits together racism, sexism, tribalism into a tool that divides us and keeps us punching down, rather than punching up, and finding out what is really going on. Xenophobia, fear of job loss, fear that we can’t afford the plastic pretties that measure our worth, fear of missing out, fear of pain, fear of change, all feed into a desperate populace, trying to just maintain mental health. Adding in lack of healthcare, addiction issues (a side effect of living in a toxic stew), drugging the masses (with actual drugs, with things, with unreasonable expectations, etc.) just makes this country more toxic.

The Republicans manipulate these fears masterfully, to be honest. The COVID-19 pandemic naturally ratchets fear up to 11, and the GOP is grabbing power behind the curtain (ie. Suspending environmental regulations, attempting to suspend constitutional rights, ad nauseum…). The question remains… how long can they continue with the body count climbing exponentially every day. When/if the populace wakes up (ie. when the drugs stop working), will we 1) end up like Syria… a wartorn wasteland with factions fighting over rubble, 2) end up like The Handmaid’s Tale, 3) begin to rebuild the United States into a truly more perfect union, or 4) end up as several smaller countries based on regional affinities, which may already be underway.

I wish the answers were clearer, but the road ahead is dark.  The 1918 Influenza pandemic guides us for part of what we are experiencing, but very little precedent exists for the concurrent constitutional crisis. Never have we seen one political party almost completely abdicate constitutional duty in pursuit of power.

The Constitution only has as much value as we collectively give it, through real faith in the tenets of which it is comprised. I am reminded of the original Star Trek Omega Glory episode in which the constitution has become “sacred words” but whose real meaning has been lost. When the Constitution becomes words on paper that nobody understands and to which only lipservice is paid, the precarious historical precipice on which we stand is clear. When an amendable, living document of governance is treated as sacred, inviolable, and unchangeable, the plot is lost.

So, for now, we muddle through as best we can with a vile, despotic, dementia-riddled madman as the titular figurehead of this country. The States have effectively become sovereign unto themselves – haggling on the open market for supplies and equipment to aid our frontline medical personnel in saving as many lives as they can. Unless the madman decides we are all equal and deserving, we are headed for battlefield triage conditions without help and control measures.

And yet a third of the country supports him and the more his daily lies are televised, more people seem to think he is worthy of praise… but will his political aspirations for a second term survive the coming body count?

And these came up in my mix in Spotify today, randomly... 

https://youtu.be/4mam3iJLvCs

https://youtu.be/YSZf0yIx1ec

Emotional Labor, Toxic Masculinity, Trump

I feel compelled to write about emotional labor this week. On Wednesday I read several news stories that really impressed on me how unequal the distribution of emotional labor is between men & women, black & white, rich & poor and the depth to which it is embedded in our social power structure.

I’d like to start with a quick definition, but that is much harder than it sounds. Emotional labor is a relatively new term in scheme of things, but it deals a lot with things like fake friendliness service industry workers have to put on, and the way we (especially women) are expected to BE when interacting with the world.

A good primer appeared in this blog post by Leah Fessler: “While the term emotional labor was originally coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, her description of the need for workers to regulate their emotions (so to satisfy their customers) feels a bit academic. Personally, I’m more disposed toward Hy’s definition of emotional labor as “shit someone does that goes unrecognized,” but again, that’s pretty general.”

She also references Adam Grant’s Worklife podcast about faking emotions . Emotional labor is likened to receiving a crappy gift from Aunt Bernadette and having to pretend you like it, but the concept is extrapolated out to having to be nice at work to everyone to assure everyone else’s comfort and ease, and the exhaustion that follows on that from having to wear a mask.

Now that the definition is out of the way, we can really get started. Emotional Labor has been widely adopted in feminist circles since women bear the unequal yoke, if not the whole yoke, of emotional labor. We bear the expectation of making others feel comfortable, of not burdening others with our troubles, and so on… women are often the ones who send the birthday cards, arrange the kids’ birthday parties, etc. while the men just show up. Emotional labor exhibits many nuances and definitions. However, I think the division of emotional labor illustrates a lot about the power structure in our society and also serves as a springboard to beginning to really understand and solve the problem.

A couple of articles and general trends of discourse in our country really sparked my thoughts on this topic this week and led me to extrapolate the emotional labor concept beyond just men and women…

1) From Raw Story: “Judge scolds four men who raped drunk teenage girls in Myrtle Beach instead of giving them jail time” My outrage meter maxed out, beginning with this story. We have seen this same story repeatedly, the young men are allowed to walk free with very little, if any punishment, and with every concern for their futures. In the meantime, the victims are blamed & shamed, and left with the entire emotional toll of being sexually assaulted. The emotional labor borne by these women includes the aforementioned shame & blame, then compounded by the fact that they did everything right (by reporting what happened & undergoing the experience of rape kit creation, which may or not be tested in all-too-many cases) and then have to watch their attackers walk off mostly unscathed and care free.

The young men receive the clear message that their actions aren’t so bad and they needn’t worry their little heads about it. The pervasive message of “boys will be boys” infuses our culture, absolving them of blame & responsibility. Emotional wreckage is left to the women they assaulted. In this case there is NO YOKE, as opposed just an unequal one. They probably experienced remorse for being caught, but the judge told them that they were just bad little boys and sent them on their way.

The womens’ burden isn’t considered because women aren’t considered whole human beings. Only straight white men are whole human beings.

2) From the Bradenton Herald: “Parents complain about ‘militant’ dress code at Lakewood Ranch middle school” In this story, a 12-year-old middle school girl chose to wear a sports bra to school, and this school has a “no visible bras” policy. The assistant principal actually had to move the girl’s hair to even see the bit of bra “peeking out”. She was then pulled from class and taken to a “holding room” until her mother could come and bring her “more appropriate clothing.” And, per the story, this young woman wasn’t the only girl pulled from class, as there were other girls changing clothes and mothers leaving with the “offensive” clothing.

A quote from the article states, “Young women are disproportionately cited for dress code violations, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which contacted the school district after Martinez’s story went viral. While she was accused of being a distraction to students, the organization said Martinez’s peers should learn to control their gaze.”

So again, we have emotional labor falling on women. Time and again, young girls and women are being burdened with boys & men being unable to control their feelings. So instead of teaching males to police themselves and control themselves, that labor is being put on females to do the policing… of what they wear, what they say, how they act, etc… to prevent inciting male emotions. Then you add in the fact that it’s usually the mothers having to bring the change of clothing for their daughters, often having to take time off of work, simply adding to the burden.

Males are again allowed to walk free with no emotional consequences or responsibilities because the women are carrying that load, as expected… another “no yoke” situation in which boys will be boys.

3) From the NY Post: “Nurse killed herself after being bullied at work, probe finds” This article served as my extrapolation springboard from emotional labor as just a feminist issue. I am a Registered Nurse, and have been MOSTLY lucky enough to work in places where the bullying hasn’t been that bad. A friend shared this article on Facebook, so I read it very quickly after the previous two. It really got me thinking how bullying is really someone with an inability to handle their own emotional labors trying to pass that work onto others. How that inability is acquired doesn’t matter.

However, I think the key is that these people have a deficit and addressing it is key. These are people who don’t feel a responsibility to their own emotional health or that of others. They believe and act (for whatever reason) like their emotional work and burdens are for others to bear. The thought of them ever being to blame for their actions is really beyond their base capacities, so they blame everyone else.

These stories are illustrative of trends that we are seeing in over media overall. These examples are mostly feminist, obviously, but I think of examples from my own life and our national discourse, and it seems to me there are some solutions embedded in the questions themselves.

Most personally, apart from the bullying that I suffered all from grade school through high school, the worst bullying and gaslighting lasted for 3.5 months. I took a job halfway across the country with great expectations, only to find myself in the most toxic work situation I have ever experienced. The place was the very definition of gaslighting, with moving goalposts, and blame for everything bad placed on my shoulders. I don’t know what the issues were there, but the emotional burden others had was happily dumped on the new person (me) by those who apparently couldn’t deal with their own issues.

My daughter recently divorced an emotionally abusive man. They lived with us for several years and the level of gaslighting he tried to use on us was apparently a small fraction of what he put her through. I never felt he particularly emotionally well-developed. He was always very good at coming up with blame and excuses when confronted. He would make great pronunciations about how he was going to change, over and over, but he never did. I knew she was carrying a lot of burden in that relationship, but only after it was over did I begin to appreciate all that he put her through. She carried the emotional water for a good number of years until she decided she’d had enough. She is now healing and moving forward with her life.

In our national political discourse, we have a man-baby in the White House who reminds me greatly of my former son-in-law, who was never taught or expected to do his own emotional labor. That is for the peons and little people to do, so he can stand there, living out his vision of being a “big man’. However, the blame for all of his failures falls on the string of ex-wives, mistresses, affairs, brown people, those who disagree with him, etc. And he is happy to tell us all about it in his tweets, ad nauseum. As I like to say, he has the self-reflection of a brick.



He really is the epitome of toxic masculinity and racism and misogyny, etc. Problem is, what he does and says is not being met with resistance from those who count, and those who idolize him take his words & deeds as tacit approval. Now brought to the fore, we see white straight males fighting back against being asked to do their own emotional work. They were so long relieved of that burden by social norms… giving it to women, blacks, other minorities who were all expected to serve without question. In that imaginary-world-that-never-existed, white men were unburdened, able to follow their noble pursuits without burden of care. This is where they want us to return, as the proper place for the “not-them” is wherever they say it is and the “not-them” is bound to act as they dictate.

Apparently, emotional labor is for the weak and those who have no choice.

The answer to the problem is fairly simple, start taking emotional health & labor seriously, start teaching others how to be emotionally healthy and to take responsibility for themselves. But first, we need a society that takes emotional well-being seriously for everyone and the basic recognition that emotional labor is a thing. Unfortunately while the cartoonish vision of men ala Toxic Masculinity remain the norm, we can't even begin to change.

It's not about the children, it's about you.

A conversation from when I was a teenager, probably about age 16, with my friend and her father has stuck with me a long time. The argument that was made against mixed race couples having children struck me as wrong then, and has bubbled up in my thoughts occasionally over the many intervening years. I finally figured out why.

The argument was that mixed race couples shouldn't have kids because we should think of "how the children would be treated."

It dawned on me this morning just how wrong that argument was, and in so many ways. Maybe the memory bubbled up due to the sociopolitical upheaval we find ourselves in currently; namely the horrendous resurgence of hegemony of white, cis-gendered, straight maleness.

By stating that people shouldn't have the freedom to marry those they love and shouldn't have children because of how they will treated infuriates me, for many reasons:
1) It puts the responsibility for any abuse on the victim
2) It basically states the status quo is always right
3) It absolves the one holding that position from needing to change

That (now former) friend recently accused me of being hateful because I was not willing to just roll over and let her walk all over me. I wasn't all-accepting of her intolerance, and really hadn't even responded to her much. When I'd gone to respond, she had apparently blocked me. Then she inblocked me and lobbed a hate bomb at me... I blocked her in response at that point; there was no real reason to respond or argue with her.

I have unfriended a lot of people in the last year. If they have been silent/equivocal, I have quietly unfriended them. If they have exhibited support for the other side, I have not tolerated it. I don't care. I cannot and will not have that energy in my life.

Trumpmerica Day 5: The Bill of Goods with a “special secret” menu

I think the time for recriminations, finger-pointing, division and blame re. “why Hillary lost” needs to stop at least yesterday. With enough blame to go around, we don’t need a circular firing squad; we need to quickly learn from what happened and begin the hard work of reimagining and rebuilding our broken country. Trump’s election stands as both a symptom and product of the deeper ills plaguing the United States.

Trump is a master showman & fraudster – solidly evidenced by his businesses, successful or not – specifically, regarding the KIND of businesses he gravitates toward. He builds big shiny skyscrapers, casinos and hawks steaks, wine, his “university”, clothing line, et cetera… All flashy, status-ey things with his name slapped on them; all of touted to be biggest, the best, and the glitziest; truthfully, the core is hollow and the glitter is just spray paint. We accepted the scam & sham as part of his persona until the 2016 election; he was a kind of national joke, “that’s just Donald Trump.” When he descended the golden, of course, escalator at Trump Tower to his (paid) adoring crowd, he remained a joke, and was treated by the media as a reality TV star, not a real presidential candidate. Then the spray paint & reality got conflated, and here we are, unsure of objective reality vs. spray paint fumes. The run for the presidency legitimized the scam, and people bought it lock, stock & barrel. Welcome to Trumpmerica, the dystopian theme park we can’t leave.

The Bill of Goods chosen for all of us by about 25% (not even the majority vote) of the entire electorate is full of a lot of big, and likely empty, promises. Let’s look at a few of the biggies:

1. Trump promises to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Interestingly, the cast being chosen to play the principals in the tragicomedy are long-time residents of the swamp… hanging around in varying levels of marginalization, especially in recent years. Now they slither right up to lick their new master’s boots to ensure their parts of the swamp aren’t drained.

2. Trump promises to repeal & replace Obamacare with “something terrific”. Well, if he means terrific in the archaic sense, “causing terror,” he is probably closer than if is trying to use the modern meaning. While Obamacare isn’t perfect, it’s better than what we didn’t have before, but we know that it will be repealed in short order come 20 January. Replacement details are vague, including elements about Health Savings Accounts and buying insurance across state lines. Beyond that, no plans for transition or implementation are out there. The Republicans have bitched about Obamacare for over 6 years, but have never given us any more than vague generalities – exactly zip, zilch & nada. Sadly those who bought into the scam are most likely to be the hardest hit or simply continue as they were, particularly if they live in a state that didn’t take part in the Medicare expansion.

3. Trump promises to have Mexico pay for the wall he wants to build, and deport all 11 million illegal immigrants. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said clearly in July that Mexico will not pay for Trump’s estimated $7.8 trillion boondoggle. So, if Mexico won’t pay for it, who will? Will Congressional Republicans agree to it, considering how they prefer to take money from programs for the needy and redistribute it to their corporate masters? They might go along with it if their buddies can have a piece of the pie. It might be a great jobs program, along with hiring all the new deportation/corrections officers for the 11 million they plan on removing or incarcerating, starting 20 January.

4. Trump promises to bring jobs back to the country. As mentioned above, his wall and deportation program may well be the cornerstone of his plan. Sadly though, his big plans are covered in that same flaky gold spray paint. The manufacturing jobs lost across the Midwest and South since the 1970s have devastated those regions. These very people are those who have hitched their wagon to Trump’s star power. These people have been largely taken for granted by the Democratic Party as a demographic, with no real help offered to help them pivot from the economy of the 1950s to the realities of today. In the meantime, the Republican Party simply disposed of them as just the “cost of doing business.” However, Trump’s slithery cast of characters marching in time with the Corporate Congress isn’t likely to help them. More corporate tax breaks, laissez-faire governance, lax labor laws, will only lead to lower wages, more offshoring of jobs and higher unemployment.

5. Trump promises registration and surveillance of Muslims. Blatantly unconstitutional (for now), this will be fought in the courts as long and hard as people are able. Again there is the question of cost, and perhaps it’s another part of the shiny new jobs plan.

These are some of Trump’s biggest and baddest promises in the Bill of Goods. One need only look at the Corporate Republican Congress and the swamp dwellers slithering onstage to see what is happening. The corporate elites will enjoy even greater license to influence the halls of power. More of our tax dollars will flow into their pockets, while worthy social service programs will continue to face cuts under the guise of the welfare mother and all the tired old tropes that paint the poor as lazy, unworthy, et cetera. (Read as people of color.) Additionally more of the taxes that are to support the military will flow into the coffers of defense contractors, not service members.

None of this has even touched on the inherent racism, misogyny, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim rhetoric in his campaign. To a one, Trump and his surrogates have united in their message disavowing any of the above. He asserted that African Americans and Hispanic American communities are “living in hell” and vowed to help them (again shiny spray painted words) while saying that known African American communities like Chicago, St. Louis and Philadelphia should be watched for signs of fraud on election day. This isn’t even a dog whistle unless you are denser than dog snot, it’s a fucking flashing red neon sign that says, “Racism Here.” Couple that with his big plans for Muslims… oh boy.

The other flashing red neon sign says “Misogyny Here.” While Trumps claims to be more respectful of women than probably anyone ever, his boasts about being able to grab women by the pussy anytime he wants paints a different picture. When that revelation is followed by 12 women coming forward, his only form of denial is to call them all liars and threaten to sue them.

The racism, misogyny, and hatred of anyone not a white straight male is sort of like the secret menu that everyone knows about on the Bill of Goods. If you voted for Trump out of pure intention, you purchased the whole bill of goods, including the secret menu stuff. Your vote shows that you accept it. You knew it was there, you cannot say you didn’t see it. It was part and parcel of his campaign from day one. You did this, you cannot blame anyone else. You made this choice for the whole country and you have been had. All of us will have to live with the aftermath of your actions, some already are, especially the “others”, minorities, women, LGBTQ folks, non-Christians, et cetera. Thank for caring more about yourself than the country as a whole. Most of us didn’t choose the ticket to Trumpmerica.

Marshmallow fluff vs. raw broccoli

This election season has been long, hard, and difficult to watch. The cockroaches of racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, etc.(!) have all felt comfortable enough to come out into the light. Mind you, the seeds of this emergence have been planted and carefully nurtured for the last 50 years by one political party in particular. The democrats, however, got complacent and lazy, and did nothing but to weakly yell “s-t-o-p” like a traffic cop on Quaaludes; allowed themselves/choosing to be drug further and further away from their core values in search of votes, especially after Reagan, attempting to regain the votes of the Reagan Democrats.

Additionally, it must be acknowledged that our educational system has been steadily gutted by Republican policies. The emphasis has been on education that will help our youth become cogs in a greater machine, but not necessarily become well-rounded citizens capable of critical thinking. Civics education, in which I got a good grounding, as recently as the 1980s, seems to be all but gone in our schools; my own children seemed woefully uneducated about it in the early 2000s. The “person-on-the-street” interviews in which people are unable to answer very basic questions about our democratic system are funny, but also frightening, especially when you realize these people are going to vote. It’s true that some people just really don’t care, but A LOT of people DO care, but haven’t been given the knowledge or tools that encourage critical thinking. They are more interested in the Dancing With the Stars, Snookie, or the Real Housewives of Schmuck City. Government and civics aren’t shiny or fun, but that knowledge is fundamental to a healthy republic. Education funding has been gutted, standards denigrated, and vouchers & testing raised up as the answers to all the problems, but our schools continue to worsen. Also, teachers bear all the blame (and get no respect) for all that is wrong with the education system; they continue to be loaded down with more and more regulation with little or no increases in pay, and are regarded in many quarters as lazy drains on the system. This has led to a wholesale hollowing out of our education system.

So, after years of dog-whistle politics by the Republicans, and the Democrats refusing to really fight strongly for their core beliefs, we arrive at where we are today. Combined with a deliberate dumbing down of society, this is a recipe for disaster. People look at their twitter & facebook feeds, shut out the things they don’t want to hear and allow themselves to be spoonfed lies, or absorb them through osmosis. It almost seems that the more outrageous the lie, the more they want to belive it, rather than taking the effort to go out and research the truth… and then even if they find the truth, if it doesn’t fit their views, they will ignore it anyway. I’d like to say that one side does it more than the other, but I mostly have created my own echo chamber too.

The election this year has boiled down to two choices. Most people don’t like the choices that feel forced on us. The Republicans are doing their best to maintain a semblance of unity, but it’s apparent that the chewing gum and baling wire is about ready to give at any time. The Democratic side hasn’t been without its issues. Bernie Sanders enthused a lot of people who wanted real change, who felt like he understood their concerns. But Hillary Clinton won out on the Dem side, and not without a lot of funky finagling that raised some very valid questions. However, like it or not, Hillary became the Democratic nominee, and Bernie Sanders has rallied to the cause and even managed to drag her quite a ways back towards the traditional issues of the left.

Interestingly, Donald Trump tapped a similar type of voter to those who rallied to Sanders, mainly those who have felt left behind by the real but sometimes painfully slow economic recovery since the crash of 2008. So the appeal of both Trump & Sanders is understandable, however their approach is sort of like comparing mini pineapples to hand grenades. Whereas Sanders took a message of equality, increased minimum wage, peace, education, equal pay, and came up with relatively realistic ways to achieve his agenda with a message of building to a better brighter future; Trump has painted a picture of a dark now and darker future, always dragging us back to a past that we need to get back to achieve greatness again, and he has dwelt on blaming the “other”, which in his mind anyone who opposes him or who is not white & male.

Trump is marshmallow fluff, it's fun to eat now but makes you sick later. He’s also a false fronted old building with a beautiful chair gold chair behind a fancy wooden desk inside (in reality, the chair is spray-painted gold and upholstered with cheap polyester velvet & the plywood desk is covered with wood patterned contact paper). He spouts and repeats lies ad nauseum about how he is the only one who can fix things.

Clinton is raw broccoli without cheese sauce or salt, the thing you know you should be eating. She is a stodgy cinder-block building with a beat up wooden straight-backed chair behind an equally beat up wooden desk. Her message encourages people working together to effect change, but she promises no quick fixes.

Sometimes you have to eat the broccoli and take the long term and thousand mile view because it’s the best thing to do.

two and a half years of post morteming...

It's been an interesting week. I have finally put the bulk of the King Co. experience behind me. I think spending the weekend with Susan, who was there with me and pretty much is the only person who knows and understands completely how bad it really was. That much validation helps alleviate the insidious effects of the personally targeted gaslighting that they practiced with almost surgical precision. I have long had a habit of post mortem-ing events that go wrong to try and have a good understanding of what went wrong, and what I can learn about it. I have spent far too much time over the last 2.5 years in post-mortem mode... and the only thing is that it really was personal, it is the only thing that even makes sense.  Especially considering that I went into that opportunity with a solid 7 year run and an Army Commendation Medal for my year in Texas. For the first time in my life, I don't think I made any glaring mistakes apart from simply being myself. And if there is one thing that I have learned about myself, trying to change to fit in with others doesn't work... I did try to conform... and it didn't work, yet again... Funny that. "It wasn't me, it was them." So this week has had several unasked for affirmations of my value to people who DO count in my life. It also made it easier for me to cut loose some ties that I was maintaining out of (what I thought was) mutual respect and affection... which were apparently not the case, as I found out via a backdoor source. It's sad but I do not deserve to have so-called friends 2K miles away gossiping away behind my back. So the unfriending shears came out. They don't have anything to gossip about, if they even notice. I could be hurt, but there really isn't a reason, just let it go. We had known diffs, but again, "it isn't me, it's them." As I get older, I am getting feisty... and my deep seated anger is coming out. It's not uncontrolled, but is being carefully channeled... and I am using it to establish myself in the world. I have spent most of my life sitting down and shutting up. Honestly I am sick of it. I am pretty much single handedly supporting my family plus some other folks, I joined the Army as an officer and had  great run with that as well. It also got me to where I am now, as did the King Co disaster. I am glad to be where I am now, and I think the rough journey has made success now even sweeter.

When rose-colored glasses lose their bloom

I'm in a strange limbo right now.  I have amazing news I want to share with the world, but can't until everything is officially official... and after the false start with the VA offer last year, I'm a little gun shy.  

So I'm sitting with a job offer contingent  upon passing the background checks and urine test. I know I have nothing to worry about, as far as I know.... but there is always the niggling worry that I missed something.  But all the information I gave was given in good faith and as completely as I could do.  But "VA debacle" echoes in my mind... with the caveat that the VA digs a helluva lot deeper than most usual jobs who call and verify dates of employment... or just rejected me due to a box mis-checked somewhere. I chose to not find out, it was just too much last year.

Overall I've been really happy at CUP, but when things went south,  they did so with a vengeance... I've been accused (directly & indirectly) of procrastination, bad time management, too much chatting... basically being blamed for all that is wrong in this work situation...  I'm not blameless, because no one ever is... but management has set this system up for failure.

Let's set the stage a bit: a small (mostly)  managed Medicaid company trying to really become a player in a bigger market and is expanding lines of business rapidly including trying to become an early adopter for behavioral health integration... which will have to be done now or later. However, the push for this has led to the neglect of existing programs and personnel, most of which are state-audited. The program that I work, Health Homes, was pretty much seen as "flavor of the month"  for most of the first year, but has since become the premier model for care management as far as the state is concerned.

The next piece is that the State of Washington has no single documentation system for the program, thus leaving it up to each Health Homes lead agency to come up with their own system as long as they can meet requirements. Enter in my company: we were under one company in 2013-14 and then switched to another in 2015. They knew this was happening and assured us that the switch in  systems should be smooth and no data would be lost. Can you say "famous last words"? Sure, knew you could...  Anyway, the rollout went worse than anyone could have imagined... We just got full access to everything we need a few weeks ago... Member services just got their access for making appointments in May... We didn't get all existing member lists completely loaded until early April... We still haven't gotten old charting imported... Mind you, my compatriot was asking questions in every meeting about many of the problems that have come to pass...

Add in the fact that we have lost 2 people working the program, one of whom was full time and the other who is sure that her preterm labor was from the stress.  Also, include that my job entails all the  utilization review, several call attempts monthly, hospital visits, follow up calls for transition, calls to doctors for members, concurrent review when hospitalized, intake of new members, crisis  &  general calls, and quarterly face to face visits... For nearly 70 members. I'm finding out that at most health insurance companies, these jobs are split out over a team...

So, this is what we have been scrambling to deal with since the beginning of the year.  We have had periodic moments of "get this done now" and "Help this other group! They are swamped!" while being told not to worry about health homes... Until the last few weeks with the state audit coming up.

So now they are freaking out and denying time off, stating that it's due to people not being caught up... funny that the audit is coming up and management had the reporting requirements in hand on 25 May. But we paeans didn't get the  directions & our directives until June 11th (Thursday) to be completed by June 15th (Monday). By placing the blame on non-management, they are trying to deny their own culpability.

I just see a lot of planning for the next big expansion and not a lot of routine maintenance type activities. There has pretty much been little or no support from management for the program I have been working. My fellow coworkers are amazing.... they are what makes working there worthwhile... and I love my clients and the work that I'm doing.  I feel like I'm making a difference.

But, things have started going south, as previously mentioned, but I am determined to not go down the same road as I did with King Co. This hasn't even gotten close to that bad, but I have been paying close attention to my gut and the situation was irretrievably broken when our amazing admin let my compatriot and I know that she'd been told to only communicate with us via e-mail since her coming over to talk to us would "distract us" from our work.  That level of BS was intolerable, considering I'd spent the greater part of the previous 2 months working through lunches and spending several hours, sometimes up to half the day, usually three days weekly, out of the office on member visits for follow up or new patient assessments. It just pissed me off.  It's hard to get all your work done when you aren't in the office to get it done.  

So, I had my interview for the new gig on Tuesday, I went out feeling like there was a good rapport, but it was short... and I kept thinking about what I should have said, asked, etc. It was a first round interview, I was just hoping it went well enough to get to the 2nd round.  It was interesting, though, since they were all taking careful notes about exactly when I was going to be in Kentucky and when I might want to start. I thought it was a little unusual for a first round interview, but let it be what it was. The next morning, just 25 hours 45 minutes after I left the interview, I got a call and was offered the job at a substantial pay increase. I accepted it straight away and admitted I was a little stunned and she said that they usually don't move so quickly, but they also super impressed with me and didn't want me to get away.  My start date is the Monday, 20 July after I get back from Kentucky. 

Giving notice will be interesting. I don't want to give notice until I have the officially official word, which should be Tuesday or Wednesday this week.  It will be a fitting revenge for my massively passive aggressive supervisor, who has been described by another coworker with Katy Perry's help.

I have also kept myself from Unravelling ala Deb Talan:

The other song in my head is:

 

Another good one is: