From the Archives. (October 2006) 25 years and 4 months, adjusted to 19 years and 2 months with good behavior and the requisite “Hi, my name is Jeff and I am an alcoholic” confessional.
Yep, that’s the punishment our judicial system meted out to ENRON mastermind Jeffrey Skilling.
The judge commented that Skilling’s “crimes have imposed on hundreds if not thousands a life sentence of poverty.”
First, if that’s a crime, then why ain’t George in jail?
Second, don’t you worry that former ENRON employees will still be bagging groceries in 2025 when Jeffrey is released back into the world?
So. I’ve been pondering the phrase life sentence of poverty ever since I read that line this morning.
Have also been mulling over the reality that so many news stories demonstrate our levels of cultural, environmental, intellectual, and soul-depriving poverty.
Example: have you seen what former Louisiana legislative candidate David Duke has been up to lately?
The guy’s copying Ralph Reed and his ilk and urging racist people to run for office.
Now I respect David Duke more than I respect Ralph, because at least he states what he believes out loud, whereas Ralph advises folks to run as stealth candidates in order to increase the likelihood that they can force their extremist views on everyone else.
But John Ubele has gone a step further and is encouraging his flock to form a national pro-White political party.
Meanwhile, Foley’s subterfuge and David Kuo’s timely confessional and Bush's "taking the Lord's name in vain" have left the Christianists aghast with the reality that, golly gee, people might actually make fun of them while kow-towing to them for political advantage.
So now they want their own party.
Church. Politics. What’s the difference anymore? (Except for those handy tax breaks)
I suggest that these 2 groups have a confessional lovefest wherein they collectively state their intention to control the lives of the rest of us. Then they can form their own party and see how far they get.
I know. Let’s call them the Bigocrats!
Mistuh Big ...
Anyway, Writergrrrl spent 15 long and head-banging years involuntarily committed to those fundies and untold numbers of hours under the judgmental vice of Baptist camp counselors and can tell you with confidence that submitting to those purportedly Jesus-inspired strictures, particularly if you are a woman, is the equivalent of accepting a life sentence of spiritual poverty.
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Thursday, November 15, 2007
183. KLEPTOCRACY, AMERICAN-STYLE, OR ANOTHER DAY OF ARMCHAIR ÜBERLIBERAL RANTING
From the Archives
(January 2006) MLK Jr. Day 2006, so most businesses are closed. I am perched in a rocker with a nice cup of tea, looking out the window at the remnants of a two-day snowstorm that is now being washed away by a gentle rain.
“It’s easy to be an armchair überliberal,” a Sun magazine letter writer notes, but “out in the confusion and hubbub of the world, people of different races are living flush up against one another, doing what they can to build bridges of understanding and create small spaces of kindness in their daily lives.”
I want to believe that is true. And I know that is sometimes true.
I know that people who have very little can be incredibly generous, that a few brave souls will eventually rise up, refuse to sit in the back of the bus or organize Freedom Rides through KKK territory, that, every once in a great while, humanity will make an incremental step forward.
I also recognize that I am talking about kindness in the era of Abu Ghraib, in a year in which the VP of our democracy is lobbying Congress on behalf of cruel and unusual punishment.
When my pal Rosa was a peace corp volunteer in Africa, a woman whose younger sister died told her matter-of-factly that her deceased sister’s infant twins would now die too. This is reality in a place where scant resources and massive starvation are the norm.
Resignation in the face of atrocity is ocassionally the norm in the underbelly of US culture too, where families struggle to survive —sometimes for generation after generation and sometimes by learning to work the system—but the twins would have had a much better chance of surviving in this country.
... so let’s all sing oh oh your worries ain’t like mine now, shall we, and turn back to our reality TV shows because, as Barbara Bush says, look how well those poor people are doing!
Meanwhile, it is almost certainly no coincidence that MLK was assassinated when he began to criticize capitalism.
The twins fought to survive in a landscape in which the strongest takes the food and therefore thrives.
In our landscape, the ones with the most resources claim others’ resources as their own—through business transactions and increased profit margins and decreased benefits for workers and abysmally low minimum wages and diminished workers’ rights and confiscated pensions, through supply and demand.
The rich rob the poor legally because they have the resources necessary to do so.
If you grew up among poor but honest Americans, as I did, then you scrimped and saved and did without and followed the Golden Rule and lived in accordance with the tenets of the bible—that disastrous tome that has helped so many politicians and ambitious popes and robber barons keep generation after generation of people compliant—while you kept your eyes fixed firmly to the afterlife.
(Sounds like a bad spam subject line, doesn’t it?)
It’s no coincidence that, when I lived in DC, it was the drug dealers who bought the shoeless children their shoes, not the government or any of those money-laundering nonprofits that Republicans open right and left.
Talk to dealers and gang members and you will learn that many recognize the social structures that oppress them and they’re understandably infuriated by the fact that our society allows members of their extended family to roam the glass-strewn streets barefoot while others have so much.
In some ways, the drug dealers and gang members who sprout in our squalor are the true entrepreneurs, the disenfranchised who somehow discover a way to achieve the American dream.
Listen to good rap music or good indy music or good art or, well, many things and you will discover an undercurrent of unrest along with a determination to deviate from the predetermined suburban script for having it all.
•
So okay I’ll jump topics again and end with a poem:
(January 2006) MLK Jr. Day 2006, so most businesses are closed. I am perched in a rocker with a nice cup of tea, looking out the window at the remnants of a two-day snowstorm that is now being washed away by a gentle rain.
“It’s easy to be an armchair überliberal,” a Sun magazine letter writer notes, but “out in the confusion and hubbub of the world, people of different races are living flush up against one another, doing what they can to build bridges of understanding and create small spaces of kindness in their daily lives.”
I want to believe that is true. And I know that is sometimes true.
I know that people who have very little can be incredibly generous, that a few brave souls will eventually rise up, refuse to sit in the back of the bus or organize Freedom Rides through KKK territory, that, every once in a great while, humanity will make an incremental step forward.
I also recognize that I am talking about kindness in the era of Abu Ghraib, in a year in which the VP of our democracy is lobbying Congress on behalf of cruel and unusual punishment.
When my pal Rosa was a peace corp volunteer in Africa, a woman whose younger sister died told her matter-of-factly that her deceased sister’s infant twins would now die too. This is reality in a place where scant resources and massive starvation are the norm.
Resignation in the face of atrocity is ocassionally the norm in the underbelly of US culture too, where families struggle to survive —sometimes for generation after generation and sometimes by learning to work the system—but the twins would have had a much better chance of surviving in this country.
... so let’s all sing oh oh your worries ain’t like mine now, shall we, and turn back to our reality TV shows because, as Barbara Bush says, look how well those poor people are doing!
Meanwhile, it is almost certainly no coincidence that MLK was assassinated when he began to criticize capitalism.
The twins fought to survive in a landscape in which the strongest takes the food and therefore thrives.
In our landscape, the ones with the most resources claim others’ resources as their own—through business transactions and increased profit margins and decreased benefits for workers and abysmally low minimum wages and diminished workers’ rights and confiscated pensions, through supply and demand.
The rich rob the poor legally because they have the resources necessary to do so.
If you grew up among poor but honest Americans, as I did, then you scrimped and saved and did without and followed the Golden Rule and lived in accordance with the tenets of the bible—that disastrous tome that has helped so many politicians and ambitious popes and robber barons keep generation after generation of people compliant—while you kept your eyes fixed firmly to the afterlife.
(Sounds like a bad spam subject line, doesn’t it?)
It’s no coincidence that, when I lived in DC, it was the drug dealers who bought the shoeless children their shoes, not the government or any of those money-laundering nonprofits that Republicans open right and left.
Talk to dealers and gang members and you will learn that many recognize the social structures that oppress them and they’re understandably infuriated by the fact that our society allows members of their extended family to roam the glass-strewn streets barefoot while others have so much.
In some ways, the drug dealers and gang members who sprout in our squalor are the true entrepreneurs, the disenfranchised who somehow discover a way to achieve the American dream.
Listen to good rap music or good indy music or good art or, well, many things and you will discover an undercurrent of unrest along with a determination to deviate from the predetermined suburban script for having it all.
•
So okay I’ll jump topics again and end with a poem:
WATER PRAYER
by Stuart Kestenbaum (From The Sun magazine (12.2005)
And this morning I awoke to rain, which makes
its own rhythm on the window, and the world is full
of these rhythms, rhythm of water, rhythm of the heart,
which sounds like an underwater pump, the lub-dud
of all it knows, which is making all I know possible,
and on the roof rain falls and turns to hail, then snow,
then rain again, running down the shingles to the gutters,
the gathering-up that makes rivers and lakes and oceans,
from cloud to drop to torrent, how nothing is lost.
LISTENING TO: the tea kettle starting to boil
READING: The Sun magazine
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
171. HYMNS FOR THE SORTA-COMMITTED, OR, ONWARD CHRISTIAN RESERVISTS
From the Archives
(November 2005) And now is the time to post Muhammed Ali’s famous quote outlining why he refused to serve in Vietnam:
(November 2005) And now is the time to post Muhammed Ali’s famous quote outlining why he refused to serve in Vietnam:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.
I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.... If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn't have to draft me, I'd join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail, so what? We've been in jail for 400 years.
Seeing a picture of a New Orleans resident of African descent holding up an anti-war protest sign that read No Iraqi ever left me to die on a roof. (which references Ali’s No Vietnamese ever called me “nigger") is a good reminder of why this sentiment is still relevant.
So, turns out John Edwards focused on an issue that could actually weaken the Republican Party, especially because he was fortunate enough (well) to have a hurricane showcase his cause. Our TV screens have been filled with evidence of just how the 37 million impoverished Americans live while our president gives tax cuts to the super rich, and let’s hope that shows up at the polls.
Americans are suddenly aware of poverty again and embarrassed by the fact that our government can’t (or won't) take care of its own struggling citizens
(Well, actually, it’s more accurate to say that our government stalks the poor in order to reward the wealthy in a kind of reverse Robin Hoodism.)
Meanwhile, I’ve had Baptist hymns whispering in my skull all day after attending a co-worker’s mother’s funeral and so am pasting some sarcastic new hymn titles below. They’re funny, especially if you grew up with the Broadman hymnal:
HYMNS FOR THE SORTA-COMMITTED
• I Surrender Some
• There Shall Be Sprinkles of Blessings
• Fill My Spoon, Lord
• Take My Life and Let Me Be
• It is My Secret What God Can Do
• There are Scattered Clouds in My Soul Today
• Just as I Pretend to Be
• My Hope is Built On Somewhat Less
• It Is Fairly Well With My Soul
• When the Saints Go Sneaking In
• Onward Christian Reserves
READING: Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping
SANG IN SHOWER: “Fill My Cup Lord” (sigh)
BEST OF SPAM: Be the "biggest" of all of your friends! (Oh, is that the one you want me to use tonight dear?)
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
166. CAUSE AND EFFECT
From the Archive
(October 2005) A writer in The Nation points out that, while we focus our attention on whether or not Supreme Court nominees will overturn Roe v. Wade, Bush is stacking the courts with pro-business judges.
I worry that, as a culture, we have such a short attention span that we have already forgotten the Hurricane Katrina debacle because, hey, Brittany Spears had a baby!
Yet this debacle made clear the folly of giving precedence to private financial gain over actual human lives.
And speaking of giving less than a shit about people who live in poverty (or are sliding into it as the middle class vanishes), Bush Inc. has allowed Florida to limit Medicaid benefits. Their approved plan says that “the state will set aside a specific amount of money for each person enrolled in Medicaid,” based on the citizen’s medical condition and historical use of health care.
And the state is now allowed to limit the “amount, duration and scope” of services.
Did you pick up on that historic use of health care? That’s cause and effect from a White House that makes value judgments on human lives.
You’re a poor black New Orleanian? Well, you probably live a sinful life in that den of iniquity and voted Democrat and ate southern/soul food that ain’t real healthy, so you are expendable now, baby.
And, since you inconvenienced us by not drowining at the get-go, we’ll make sure you know how valuable your life is to us now.
Hmm. Says right here that you have been treated for bronchitis twice now, yet you choose to continue to smoke.
No treatment for you.
And you eat the starchy food that poor people can afford instead of grilling out a nice healthy salmon filets?
We choose to not pay for sins.
GOP cause-and-effect never extends to exacting payment from the corporations that pollute our environment and make us all sick with their pollutants, however.
So my question is this: Now that Florida can legally set a ceiling on insurance spending per person per year and per lifetime, what will JEB and W do with the next Terry Schiavo when she meets her insurance cap?
Inquiring minds want to know.
(Actually, Bush Inc. is making it harder to declare bankruptcy too, so I suppose Schiavo’s spouse will be stuck with the bills and a vegetable he can’t put out of her misery.)
•
One of my former roommates—a public-health advocate—decided to go to medical school because she saw the writing on the wall about Roe v. Wade and wanted to be in a position to set up illegal abortion clinics à la the Redstockings when the time comes.
And sometimes I believe I’m going to wind up pursuing Constitutional law in an effort to battle these Christianists who want to rewrite our rights.
(Note to self: send more $ to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.)
Meanwhile, Steve Satterwhite of The Texas Observer interviewed some of fundies who want a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages and civil unions (i.e., who are working to codify discrimination against a portion of the citizenry) and what they said is just astounding. These people really do want to destroy our Constitution! And what they pass off as fact with such confidence just baffles the mind.
Satterwhite points out the echo-chamber phenomenon that I have discovered with my fundie students—a tendency to use the same phrases and inaccurate statistics to argue the same points (which some liberals do too, of course). Many (in the classroom and in this article) quote “widely discredited reports by Paul Cameron,” the man who started the urban legend about queers inserting hamsters into their rectums.
This doctor was dropped from membership in the American Psychological Association in 1983 because he did not meet professional codes of ethics and conduct, yet his lies continue to make the circuit as facts.
Example. Mary Ann Markarain from Sugar Land said
(October 2005) A writer in The Nation points out that, while we focus our attention on whether or not Supreme Court nominees will overturn Roe v. Wade, Bush is stacking the courts with pro-business judges.
I worry that, as a culture, we have such a short attention span that we have already forgotten the Hurricane Katrina debacle because, hey, Brittany Spears had a baby!
Yet this debacle made clear the folly of giving precedence to private financial gain over actual human lives.
And speaking of giving less than a shit about people who live in poverty (or are sliding into it as the middle class vanishes), Bush Inc. has allowed Florida to limit Medicaid benefits. Their approved plan says that “the state will set aside a specific amount of money for each person enrolled in Medicaid,” based on the citizen’s medical condition and historical use of health care.
And the state is now allowed to limit the “amount, duration and scope” of services.
Did you pick up on that historic use of health care? That’s cause and effect from a White House that makes value judgments on human lives.
You’re a poor black New Orleanian? Well, you probably live a sinful life in that den of iniquity and voted Democrat and ate southern/soul food that ain’t real healthy, so you are expendable now, baby.
And, since you inconvenienced us by not drowining at the get-go, we’ll make sure you know how valuable your life is to us now.
Hmm. Says right here that you have been treated for bronchitis twice now, yet you choose to continue to smoke.
No treatment for you.
And you eat the starchy food that poor people can afford instead of grilling out a nice healthy salmon filets?
We choose to not pay for sins.
GOP cause-and-effect never extends to exacting payment from the corporations that pollute our environment and make us all sick with their pollutants, however.
So my question is this: Now that Florida can legally set a ceiling on insurance spending per person per year and per lifetime, what will JEB and W do with the next Terry Schiavo when she meets her insurance cap?
Inquiring minds want to know.
(Actually, Bush Inc. is making it harder to declare bankruptcy too, so I suppose Schiavo’s spouse will be stuck with the bills and a vegetable he can’t put out of her misery.)
•
One of my former roommates—a public-health advocate—decided to go to medical school because she saw the writing on the wall about Roe v. Wade and wanted to be in a position to set up illegal abortion clinics à la the Redstockings when the time comes.
And sometimes I believe I’m going to wind up pursuing Constitutional law in an effort to battle these Christianists who want to rewrite our rights.
(Note to self: send more $ to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.)
Meanwhile, Steve Satterwhite of The Texas Observer interviewed some of fundies who want a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages and civil unions (i.e., who are working to codify discrimination against a portion of the citizenry) and what they said is just astounding. These people really do want to destroy our Constitution! And what they pass off as fact with such confidence just baffles the mind.
Satterwhite points out the echo-chamber phenomenon that I have discovered with my fundie students—a tendency to use the same phrases and inaccurate statistics to argue the same points (which some liberals do too, of course). Many (in the classroom and in this article) quote “widely discredited reports by Paul Cameron,” the man who started the urban legend about queers inserting hamsters into their rectums.
This doctor was dropped from membership in the American Psychological Association in 1983 because he did not meet professional codes of ethics and conduct, yet his lies continue to make the circuit as facts.
Example. Mary Ann Markarain from Sugar Land said
Sin is sin. We're not animals. [oh?] We're people, and I do not believe that you're born homosexual. They only have two signs over at the hospital: blue ones for the boys and pink ones for the girls. God knows when we're born what we're supposed to be.
The proof is in the pudding. Ninety-two percent of all gay males engage in rimming, the process of licking the rim of the anus and ingesting various amounts of fecal matter. Forty-seven percent of all males engage in fisting, the act of placing their fist in their partner's rectum for sexual pleasure. Twenty-nine percent of all homosexual males engage in golden showers—the practice of lying on the floor, typically nude, and allowing their partner to urinate on them. This is abnormal. These are things I've never read in the newspaper. This isn't something you hear about on CNN. But this is something that is taking place.
Now I know this is not real pleasant, but the truth needs to come out. When we say the word “gay,” we're really just hiding because we're really not understanding what that word really entails—what it means, what people are doing, and why this can hurt society as a whole. It's never been an accepted lifestyle. If we allow this to become accepted, then the numbers will grow astronomically. Now they want to take it into the classroom, to teach our children that this is okay. Our society is two to three percent gay, but if you teach children that homosexuality is okay, then we're going to have a lot of problems.
The median age of homosexual men dying with AIDS is 39 years old; that's wrong, not natural. The median age of all other homosexual men dying from other causes is 42. Do you consider 42 young? I consider it extremely young since I'm one year away from it. The median age of death for lesbians is 45 years old—of lesbians. That compares to 75 years old for heterosexual men and 79 for heterosexual women. Only one percent of homosexuals die of old age; only three percent ever live to age 55. Think about it, and then tell me that God doesn't have some problem with this whole thing—that God isn't speaking. It's unnecessary to put my name in the paper—you can just say that "God said," and here's the statistics.
Where did Mary Ann from Sugar Land learn these woefully inaccurate statistics and how many more people wrote them down and believe them after Cameron shared them on hate radio?
Monte Watkins from Houston said A few years ago, my husband and I were at one of the [Gay Pride Week parades]. After the parade broke up, some of them walked by us, talking to each other, but I heard them look around and say, “Mess with us, and we'll rape your kids."
Yeah. Sure you did.
Alan Ward of Stephenville said
There is a natural way that human beings are crafted to operate, and that is on a heterosexual basis.
We had a homosexual in my family, a young man. During high school, he learned to be gay; he wasn't before that. Was that different for my family? You bet it was, because we are a family of heterosexuals who really believe in being heterosexual.
About two years ago, that young man learned not to be homosexual, and he has a girlfriend now. Right in the midst of all this social controversy, he learned to be gay, and then he learned not to be. I've seen him changed, and I've seen two or three or four changed.
Logically, [policing sexual behavior] is out of the reach of the government, but I'm not saying that I believe it should be.
There is not enough manpower—not enough people working for the government—to go into every home of every professing homosexual to put eyes on them and watch to see that they do not commit homosexual acts. That's not possible. There is not enough manpower.
I’ll say there’s not (and ever heard of the Right to Privacy?).
Of course, many Christianists deny scientific evidence anyway, so reminding them that homosexuality exists in many species, that's it's a naturally occurring deviation from the norm, is ineffective. And it doesn’t seem to occur to them that their god could have made some people homosexual on purpose just as he made some of us, say, left-handed—that maybe this is a gift, as my friend Louisville and some Native-American tribes call it.
Nope it’s a choice, pure and simple.
But so is believing in myths, dude. And you don’t get to rewrite our nation’s constitution based on your myths and unsupportable lies and smear campaigns.
BEST-OF SPAM: Just a reminder; Our University Enrollment department has been trying to contact you. The date for enrolling in our 2-week degree program is ending on Friday, October 28, 2005. As of now we can only offer you a BA, BSc, or a MA. If you enroll by the due date then your degree of choice and transcripts can be sent to you within 2 weeks.
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