Category Archives: politics

Confessions of an Angry Lefty with a Big Mouth

Posted on June 6, 2018 | 1 comment

This morning, upon exiting the B/D station at 53rd and Broadway, I almost ran right into a high school tour group wearing MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN shirts.

I almost walked away but then turned and asked the chaperones, “Hey, how’s that swamp draining going? You guys having fun with Manafort and Pruitt?”

They gave me what I assume were rehearsed careful blank looks, no doubt practiced in anticipation of their trip to NYC in what I’m sure they think are their “brave” T-shirts (Note: Trump supporters are not brave, they are bullies).

I shook my head, turned and left, impressed at their careful restraint or deliberate ignorance, I’m not sure which. Clearly they were not going to engage, and in that moment, I wondered why I had said anything at all.

Image result for corrupt cabinet

And this is the justification for electing Trump and his pay-to-play cabinet

After all, what can possibly be gained by reminding Trump supporters they were hoodwinked and are, well, wrong? If given the opportunity to heckle, I enjoy reminding Republican voters of Trump’s corrupt Cabinet picks and associates, since many claim the corrupt Democrat party was why they voted for Trump (instead of, y’know, xenophobia, racism and a desire to Put White People First). I am especially fond of harping on Pruitt since his environmental policy is horrifying and he is happily destroying America’s parks and environmental legacy for the same generation of teenagers that were wearing MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN shirts this morning.

The problem is that, although these people were putting their beliefs out there by wearing Trump T-shirts and hats IN THE MIDDLE OF NYC (#irresponsibleparenting) it doesn’t justify trying to pick a fight with them just because I’m furious that they voted this wannabe dictator into office.  Reminding them they were wrong in that they voted in a completely corrupt slate of Cabinet members that each make Hillary Clinton look like a corruption amateur also isn’t going to appropriately convey the consequences of their actions.

Perhaps I should just be reminding these sort of people that they’re responsible for bringing their own poison to rivers, as well as the financially motived shrinking of parks, or the downfall of the NPS or the plight of the Department of the Interior.  All people from “real” America need constant reminders of the corruption that threatens the most beautiful and precious aspects of the country they claim to hold so dear. In that moment, though, I had just come off the train, where I was reading the NYTimes and I was reflecting on the sheer audacity of this administration in the selection of an almost completely pay-to-play Cabinet, and that’s what I chose to heckle on.

Still, I ask myself, why say anything at all? It isn’t standing up for my beliefs to heckle people wearing Trump shirts in the street. It won’t change their minds or get them to see reason. It will only reinforce their worldview that all lefties are determined to project fault onto the Trump administration instead of on Hillary where it belongs (even though she lost, which is something I enjoy reminding every Trump supporter who does that childish whinging about Hillary being corrupt: she’s not in charge! your guy is! grow up and take responsibility!). Heckling isn’t about the person being heckled; it’s about the ego and issues of the heckler.  This was about me and my emotions and rage at the state of the country.  (Also about my raging period related hormones and four hours of sleep and constant leg pain but that’s still basically me and my emotions)

I also then asked myself, would I have said anything if I’d been in any sort of B-PSA or WAGGGS associated uniform? And the obvious answer is no. I would not have sought to try to shame people who are visiting NYC by reminding them they voted for a corrupt, power mad, dynasty seeking despot against their better judgement, probably because they are racist themselves at heart.  After all, how does that make me any different from any other public verbal attacker (like Aaron Schlossberg)? Other the the fact that transgression is only yelling at someone without provocation, and not being racist on top of it, it’s still not acceptable behavior.  It’s definitely not following the Guide/Scout laws of being kind or a friend to all, even if anyone wearing a Trump shirt in New York Freaking City is deliberately trolling 90% of the population (and the other 10% are the Aaron Schlossberg’s of the world)

My list of reasons for not wanting Trump in office extensive and go far beyond the corrupt Cabinet, too.  Trump has normalized and encouraged racism and hatred for his own voter base gain.  He is trying to gaslight an entire country into thinking CNN and the New York Times are “fake news”.  He uses the power of his own platform as POTUS to attack anyone who tries to mock him, which is trending dangerously towards suppression of free speech.  He has inadequate grasp of foreign policy that is leading to trade wars with my homeland; he refuses to admit to basic science which is causing a catastrophic environmental policy, and did I mention that he is willing to cave like a bitch to any bigot that brings a substantial enough voter base with them, resulting in executive branch endorsed hate and prejudice on the increase against anyone who is not a white cisgender person?  However, the corruption and the plights of the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture are, I think, the areas that would most resonate with people from a state where it’s acceptable to wear MAGA hats in public.  I don’t and wouldn’t know, because I’m a lefty, raised on union marches (Dad) and civil liberties (Mom), on workers rights and equal rights, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand how people who voted for Trump are still supporting him despite nothing he does being in their best interests.

So.  Today, I’m not proud of my behavior.  I was an overly angry lefty.  I reinforced the cliche of being a dogma driven left wing attacker.  The only consolation I have is that I’m sure someone is going to call those poor brainwashed high school kids “baby racists” today, and that’s much worse than me asking their chaperones if they drained the swamp yet.

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unfeminine

Posted on January 16, 2018 | 1 comment

The last few months of open conversation around sex and power have been both enraging and illuminating.  It has been like flipping on a light switch to see horrors that were only barely camouflaged by darkness, that we all knew were there.  It is the way we have now shone lights on the society we have built, the way we have encouraged male and female roles to the point where men are expected and encouraged to prey on women who feel trapped.

This is a many faceted discussion, and it will be a long one.  It will take years to identify all the points at which behavior is conditioned towards inequality, and begin to change it.  But for right now, I’d like to just look at three minutes of the conversation, in which Aidy Bryant sums up how she constrains her behavior in order to make her statements palatable to men:

“I, like most girls, have been taught to be accommodating and nice.”

“I’m trying to keep it cool and chill so I don’t come off like a shrew!”

“That’s a straight up sports reference for the boys!”

Yes.  That, right there.  That is the behavior that women are expected to adhere to.  We put, “I think,” or “I feel” in front of our statements to appear non-threatening.  We do not negotiate hard enough or push for what we want, because we don’t want to be seen as threatening.  We try to take up as little space as possible.

What angers me about this is that this is the behavior I learned and taught myself.  It doesn’t come naturally to me, to shrink back, to be quiet.  It comes naturally to me to be loud and vocal.  I don’t “feel” something is right, I usually know I’m right, and I’m ready to argue it.  And yet, over the years, I’ve considered it a positive to have learned how to polish my behavior to be nicer and more accommodating, less aggressive, more passive.  I have tried to be quieter.  I have tried to take up less mental and physical space in an attempt to be more likable, less threatening.

Perhaps I was better off unpolished after all.  Perhaps I placed too much value on the idea of what acceptable adult female behavior looked like, a series of gender constraints and tropes that are just incongruous with who I am.  Now, I’m just furious that women are expected to function within these lines and boundaries, and, worse, that so many of us still think we have to adhere to these unwritten guidelines of being nice, being accommodating, and never speaking up to make anyone else remotely uncomfortable.

I don’t like this.  I believe in making people uncomfortable when they deserve to face some sort of social consequence.  As an example, last week at a bar, my friends and I were discussing a play we had just seen.  A drunken boor kept coming over to hang over one of my friends at the table.  She was charmingly polite to him, hoping he would go away.  I ignored him entirely and continued talking because I didn’t think we needed to be polite to him – he was in our space, uninvited, and distracting from the conversation.  His response to this was to announce that I was “the Professor”, a lecturer, and yell that I was lecturing about something boring.  (I was comparing the play we had seen, Mankind, to LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness).  I wouldn’t participate in the female accommodation of a rude man, so I was labeled with something sexless.  Then he came back to the table and grabbed my friend’s ass because she was nice to him, and he thought he could get away with it, even though he was a drunk slob and she’s about a zillion levels above him on the social attractiveness scale.

This wouldn’t be a big deal (other than the entertainment factor when we had him kicked out) except as a metaphor for male response to female behavior: if you are nice, you are inviting sexual behavior.  If you are kind, you are open for grabbing.  If you are neither nice nor kind, you are neuter, devoid of the femininity that is the only coin of value in these social transactions.  I am certain that the “neuter” response a lot of men respond to me with has just as much to do with my size as my behavior – I’m literally the size of most guys at five-ten – but this has happened to me my entire life.  If I challenge someone, if I am not nice and accommodating, I am no longer feminine.  I can be dismissed, because femininity is of the utmost value in these kind of low-meaning, public interactions.

I spent ten minutes at my next workout getting this out of my system, beating a punching bag at the gym while muttering, “take THIS patriarchy!” All the years I’ve tried to behave in a more female manner so I would receive a positive response from the world.  All the times I’ve been dismissed for not being female enough.  All of it from men who have no right to assign or deny any woman her value, and yet who feel they have the right to judge us.  I thought about that and it gave my jabs and hooks even more power – enough that I think Paul looked slightly worried when I came out and headed over to the leg press.

This is a minor offshoot of the greater conversation we’re all having right now, about the way our society has formed to give men this ultimate social power over women, and how women are punished if they try to step outside subservient behavior.  We’re all engaged in this question of how we re-write our everyday social transactions to be on equal ground, because right now it feels like every encounter between the sexes is one where men have the advantage, and choose to take it.  My quibble with gender roles is minor in the scope of what many women have experienced, and what they are now brave enough to voice and share, one by one.

And yet, my quibble is part of the foundation that leads women to be taken advantage of, over and over, without recourse.  It’s the invisible barriers.  It’s the rules that say we must shrink back, or be punished with labels, insults, social consequence.  It is a small piece in the scaffolding that is holding up our society in this inequal structure.  Perhaps if we change the way women feel comfortable behaving, and reward those women who choose not to be nice, choose not to be accommodating, we will be one step closer to the balance we need.

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Posted in equality, politics, thoughts

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I have to stop reading the comments

Posted on December 26, 2016 | Leave a comment

I have to stop reading the comments

Do not ask me why I read the comments. It is always a mistake. Whatever the topic now, it manages to devolve into a set of crystallized black and white beliefs from the Left and the Right. This year’s crop of holiday messages has been the worst yet, as people have used those as jumping-off points to insult and express their dislike of the politicians posting those good wishes.

It’s impossible to see good in any comments anymore. The right jumps in to say that we Lefties are all “libtards” (officially my Most Hated Term Ever) and refuse to see The Truth about the Current POTUS, and/or His Associate Hillary Clinton and/or The Current Canadian Prime Minister. That “truth” is usually that that the “libtard” in question is wearing blinders/corrupt/biased in ways that are MUCH worse than their counterparts on the Right. If only us lefties were smarter/less fooled by MSM/more willing to admit it, we’d realize the leaders we chose are awful in their own right and that we are too stupid/selfish/elitist to choose REAL leaders like Current Right Wing Extremist. (Oh, and also, Obama is a Muslim/Trudeau hates Christmas)

The Left states that the incoming President is racist/going to get us all nukes/corrupt, and that the outgoing POTUS/his associate Clinton/current PM Trudeau is the best, classiest leader that ever was or could have been and NO MATTER WHAT they are definitely better than PEOTUS/past PM Harper. They would like to cite a lot of racism and prejudice that the Right is responsible for, and would like to also cite Russian hacking/Russian affiliation/Russian arms race as a factor.

What frustrates me the most is that neither group is playing on the same playing field. They are each shouting horrible insults at each other in knee jerk reactions of hatred that require the mental gymnastics of lumping each and every person into the same category. I do genuinely believe that there are many more incorrect facts and honestly just plain wrong beliefs by the Right, and that a lot of people with single-issue reactions (ie. this week’s “Obama is the WORST EVER for not using his veto to help Israel” crew) are lying to themselves and/or believing outright false news in order to make themselves feel better about the fact that A Possible Nuclear Winter Is Coming And It Was Fairly Elected In.

The Right continues, when sane, to announce that Obama was the Worst President Ever because of one or two things he did wrong; the Left continue to exaggerate Trump’s less concrete (and therefore more easily dismissed) problems to stand on a platform of Righteous Indignation and Moral Superiority.

How about this?

  1. The Left will focus on actual, well written statements. Not “Trump Will Get Us All Killed”, not “Trump Grabs Pussies”, not “Trump is Racist”, but “Trump has Business Conflicts Of Interest and had Bob Dole broker a call with Taiwan for his own hotel empire’s growth, thereby risking our relationship with China.” Or “Trump is pandering to a Christian population and is expressing vocal support of policies and laws that are in direct conflict with our Constitution”. Or “Trump isn’t attending security briefings but apparently has time to watch SNL.” Or even “Trump’s entire cabinet bought their positions and will never have the country’s best interests at heart over their own business kickbacks.” (This is my favorite because I really can’t handle having decisions over minimum wage made by a fast food CEO, or decisions on our foreign relationships made based on what’s best for Exxon)
  2. Perhaps we could also politely suggest that the Right put the same amount of fucking effort into digging up dirt, corruption and shadiness among Trump and his ridiculous excuse for a Cabinet that they did into finding all that circumstantial evidence against Hillary to believe she was corrupt. If they’re all so great at seeing through the screen of decency that Obama and Clinton throw up over their shady backdoor dealings, maybe they can apply that superpower to the new League of Supervillians that will be running the country? Insulting Hillary and telling us about her corruption is moot right now, maybe those watchdogs could look for corruption in the administration they somehow thought would be less corrupt.
  3. The Right will stop the absolute wall of hatred they throw up at every possible opportunity, like posting those stupid “crying laughter” emojis, saying that the Left is whiny, or calling us “libtards”. I hate “libtards” because it’s a generic insult calculated to be offensive, and I hate being called “whiny” because I don’t like the President Elect and insist on expressing my distrust of him and his coterie of 1%ers at every possible opportunity. You know what’s whiny? The government of North Carolina disenfranchising the state by taking all legislative power away from the democratically elected governor. Or, for that matter, continuing to complain about losing the Civil War for over a hundred and fifty years. Being “loyal opposition” to a PEOTUS you don’t trust isn’t even in that league.
  4. The Right will also stop citing proven false statements like Obama being a Muslim, Planned Parenthood selling fetus parts, LGBTQ being a “lifestyle choice” or climate change being a myth. Science exists, please stop denying it.

What we should do is just all talk about why we are so fucking emotional about this. I know why I’m so emotional. Every single member of Trump’s cabinet will make decisions that are bad and wrong for me, my family, my community, my city and my country. Most of all Trump’s policies on climate change will put my beloved hometown underwater within my goddamn lifetime. And to add insult to injury, my NYC income tax is now paying for security at Trump Tower because the PEOTUS won’t even live at the White House. Do you all realize how much that is taking away from my son’s school budget? DO YOU?!?

This is what I mean about emotional. I perceive these things as genuine threats to me & mine. Insulting me though, does not serve to help. And me insulting other people who believe in Trump because they are upset that Obama chose to stab Israel in the front today (JESUS BARRY REALLY?!?) or who genuinely believe that Trump is the choice for bringing back jobs to their small towns is not going to help in much the same way.

And that’s just America. I am deeply afraid for Canada, and afraid that the culture I grew up with and so strongly believe in — that of diversity and mutual respect and being just plain nice to people — is being eroded as people begin to take on American-style exaggerated blanket statements as mantras so they may justify adherence to a slate of politics they may or may not entirely agree with. For example: justifying the concept of “screening for anti-Canadian values” and saying that “67% of Canadians agree with it” [sample size or survey too small to make this accurate, btw] because you don’t like the Liberals fiscal policies are two totally separate things from the Conservative slate In Canada, we do not have to have absolute partisan politics with prejudice and insults the way we have in the USA. The fiscal conservatives in Canada should be perfectly capable of saying, “I don’t like Trudeau’s carbon tax but I do like how he is willing to work with pipeline companies,” without having to go into personal insults and undying loyalty to the Ghost of Stephen Harper and/or The Threat of Kellie Leitch and their racism — or, worst of all, saying things like “we need a Trump.”

Canada has been divided East vs. West before, and we do not need to follow America’s shitty example of being divided Rural vs. Urban now. It’s fine for those who do not like Trudeau to post that their Christmas is fiscally bleak because they don’t think his financial policies for the country make sense, but to constantly say he is a corrupt pretty boy out of touch with reality is making those statements far less part of a Loyal Opposition and far more part of a Knee Jerk Partisan Loyalty — or really, just Being A Jerk.

So that’s why I have to stop reading the comments. It literally sets my heart racing to be impersonally attacked, to have the leaders I support and believe in and the service they have done to their country reduced to insults so that those on the Right may continually believe in 100% of their political slate and their extremely poor choices. Claiming climate change doesn’t exist so you can be completely on the Conservative Train isn’t necessary. It’s OK to not agree with the entire slate of stupidity, and it’s OK to say that Obama did a good job of climate change legislation even if he wasn’t a friend to Israel.

It also makes my blood sugar spike to read the pandering and retroactive re-writing of history to eliminate things like Clinton or Trudeau’s pay-to-play fundraising. Right now I am also disappointed about the glossing over of Obama’s policies on Israel (REALLY BARRY YOU WANTED TO BE A DICK ABOUT THAT INSTEAD OF FORCING A SUPREME COURT APPOINTMENT?!?!?!). But I do think the selective perception and fake news is a more common phenomena on the Right as we see this increasing psychological phenomenon of justification and self-placating regarding an extremely bad decision to elect and support Trump. This is why we see the walls grow more absolute and the statements less truthy with time. This is why seeing the right wing trolls really upsets me because they are so illogically and unnecessarily mean, and they especially come out when the Left make emotional, sugarcoated and/or panicky statements.

Perhaps we could all agree to make more logical and polite statements on the Internet as a first step to healing the divide between the two Americas…and what will, if we don’t stop it, become two Canadas as well. That would make me more likely to engage in productive and intellectually challenging discourse, instead of being outraged and responding in a non-constructive way. It would also be nice to be able to make statements on the Internet without worrying about being attacked, as I am posting this on Medium, because I know ultimately, I will get comments from people who do not agree with me about one political point or another and will argue about it.

Just, if you must argue with me, please do not call me a libtard, or insinuate I am whiny, or that I am ignoring the fallacies of the Democrats/Liberals. I may not be as familiar with all those fallacies — but I’d be willing to hear logical statements about them. Saying Obama is the worst, most divisive president in history though and ignoring the legacy of economic and environmental good he did in his last eight years of service, however, is not going to make me listen. Calling the current PM “Trudope” or insulting his hair is not relevant to an argument against his tax policies or foreign aid distribution. Just stop. Please. And allow me to read the comments once again.

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Posted in canada, Current Events, politics