I got last minute tickets to see Obama at Colorado State University. Which was an awesome stroke of luck. I saw a sitting president. Not only a sitting president, but Barack Obama, the first black president. Awesome. Great.

He was speaking to a college crowd, so he addressed all these awesome things like how he stopped a student loan interest increase, how he funded more grants, how health reform allows kids to stay on their parents’ insurance until they are 26, how all women now get preventative care with their insurance plans including birth control and mammograms, he talked about how his administration wasn’t going to deny civil rights to gay people. The biggest cheers from CSU students were about green initiatives, lack of dependance on foreign oil and green jobs.

He talked about the economy, though not as much as you might think, I mean college kids don’t really buy homes and pay mortgages or worry about having 401k plans. They aren’t yet concern with taking care of their parents or their kids. Certainly, they haven’t given much thought to their own retirement. Well, most college kids anyway. There are plenty of older students who do.

I was hoping this presidential sighting could cure my voter apathy. It hasn’t.

Not a Bad Job 

I don’t think that Barack Obama has done a bad job at all. Honestly, I think it’s a little ridiculous that anyone expects the economy to have recovered after the serious blows it took in less than four years.

Though I’m basically in favor of all the stuff the Obama administration has done, none of it has really improved my own personal life. Health insurance reform seemed to matter so much, except I am now uninsured due to divorce and still can’t afford insurance premiums. My uninsured middle-class neighbors and freelancer friends can’t either. Nor am I poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. I do, however, qualify for the Colorado Indigent Care Program, which existed prior to Obama and will exist after this election. I’m “indigent” but don’t qualify for Medicaid and can’t afford insurance. I thought we were going to do something about this gap in our system, but we didn’t.

The student loan relief . . . excludes me.

The mortgage relief . . . excludes me.

The bailouts, though I’m sure were helpful to many industries – like construction crews for roads, yada yada, – did not help me or my family.

So essentially I voted for all these awesome entitlements, just in case I find myself in a position to need them. I now find myself in a position to need them and I’m “indigent” but I don’t qualify. Uh. Ok.

What I need is for the economy to start kicking ass so I can either find a good solid job with benefits or quadruple my writing business so I can afford to live. I don’t want to just live, I want to thrive.

The source of my apathy is that I don’t feel like this election is going to have much of an impact on the economy at all. I think businesses will start hiring again when they feel like it. Just because a company pays fewer taxes doesn’t mean they will hire. That was the faulty thinking of the bailouts too, wasn’t it? Bail them out so they can hire back their employees and give the economy a kick start. Except they didn’t. They raked in profits on a skeleton crew and kept a skeleton crew. Just because a company pays fewer taxes doesn’t mean they’ll offer their employees more benefits, better health insurance or increase 401k matches. Why should they? We’re so desperate they really don’t have to, do they?

I hope I’m wrong.

I hope companies jump into high gear and hire bunches of people, pump up their benefits, and the economy surges into high gear. That would be massively awesome. This time, I intend to ride the wave. Last time I sat the high out being lamely financially responsible, going without, living within our means and being a SAHM. It fucking sucked. I hope to cash in on the next high.

No, I don’t think Obama has done a bad job. I didn’t expect a black Jesus.

Boogie Man or Money Magician?

I also don’t think Mitt Romney is either super scary or some kind of magic money man who can turn the economy around just because he’s a bazillionaire. He’s a bazillionaire in a vacuum. He’s the boss. He calls the shots. His employees do what he tells them to do.

That’s not how our democracy works. He has to move a couple hundred stubborn fools and do-gooders with special interests in the same direction. I don’t think Romney will have any more luck getting congress herded in the same direction than Obama has. Is one of his amazing skills herding snakes and cats? No, this is a man unaccustomed to being told to fuck off.

Crabby Marriage

We’re a split country. In half. Old and new. Progressive and regressive. One half of us naively idealizing a future that doesn’t exist (and assumes that everyone should have the same idealistic fantasy if they are moral and good, and if others disagree they are monsters). The other half is romanticizing a past, full of ingenuity and amazing leaps in progress and economic growth, (but a flawed past that includes a bunch of serious crimes against humanity like gender discrimination and slavery and which tends to nurse a bunch of archaic phobias, isms and prejudices and romanticizes how awesome it is to work ourselves to death just to scrape by.) We’re like a crotchety married couple, smashed up together and fighting over the bed sheets. We fight over how the money should be spent, like every married couple in America, cranky or otherwise. Our legitimate needs exceed our ability to meet them. Someone should give. The other side, of course.

Evidently four years is not enough time for the economy to rebound. Otherwise it would have. I don’t think it would be better if it had been McCain. Isn’t it equally naive to think that Romney would do better than Obama at it? Maybe he can pull a kajillion dollars out of his ass. I don’t know. If he wins I sure as hell hope he can.

Vagipolitics

And women, oh dear women. Let’s not be histrionic about our reproductive rights. Mitt Romney has no power over whether you get to terminate your pregnancy. He can nominate a Supreme Court Justice – if one of them dies or retires – and then that Justice will do whatever the hell he or she wants. Overturning Roe v. Wade would only give states the right to make their own abortion laws. Some will allow it, some won’t. Just like today’s differing abortion limits in various states. Essentially, the worst that can happen is that you’ll have to take a day trip to another state. And yeah, I do think that any woman in the world can figure out how to make her way there. Unemployed crackheads can still do $50,000 in blow every year – because they want it bad enough. If a woman or girl wants one bad enough she will get it, because women are resourceful.

I hate to simplify this issue because I know the hysterical screeching about the rape and the incest abortion clause is so much fun (and gets so many juicy clicks), but, for goodness sake, in the cases of rape or incest, take the motherloving Day After Pill or Plan B. You know instantly whether or not you’ve been raped, or even made a drunken mistake. So, take the damn pills. That’s what it’s there for. And if that is disallowed somehow, here’s a little secret for you – Plan B is an overdose of birth control pills. That’s it. That’s the whole secret.

Romney has no intention of outlawing birth control (he won’t have the power to either). Mormons use birth control. As do most Christians and most Republicans. The very small minority of people who don’t use birth control in this country are not a threat to me or you. So take a deep breath and focus on nurturing your womb. And your soul.

Feminist Man?

Has Obama really done a lot to improve women’s economic experience? Is his cabinet full of bright, intelligent women? (Obama, 6; Bush W., 6) Are there all these wonderful economic policies that pay women equally or is there still a 23 cent differential? Is there a wonderful safety net for SAHMs who end up divorced? Are there a bunch of women leaders in corporations or blah, blah, blah? Is there suddenly a major drop in teenaged pregnancies? Is there some awesome workplace policy that creates a positive work/family balance for “family values?” During his speech Obama made a comment that I thought was pretty choice, “Do you want a congress made up of a bunch of men?” Because you recently grew a vagina Barack? Because under your administration things have dramatically and wonderfully improved for women? Because you want us to believe that you somehow love and respect your wife more than Mitt Romney does, maybe because she had a job? Really?

Boomer Bust

I read only one article, last year, about Paul Ryan’s economic reform ideas and I thought his was about the only realistic plan I’d heard so far. Harsh maybe. But, realistic. Do you realize that 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 every day in this country? That’s 10,000 people qualifying for medicare and social security. Per day. Most of them are richer than me and you. And they will still be cashing a social security check. That my generation will have to pay for. And they are going to live another 30 years. Some of them will live for decades with chronic illnesses. Expensive chronic illnesses needing lots of care. So even our children and possibly their children will have to pay for this. Get reproducing folks, because there are millions and millions of baby boomers about to enter their senior years and they expect fantastic free health care and social security checks. Who has a realistic plan for that? Ryan? I don’t know. Maybe.

Naive Ideologies are Easy

We make arguments so loud and long that we stop questioning our own ideology. And we often do it when we’re way too young to have even formulated a real opinion about our own positions because we haven’t acquired the relevant life experience. Abortion is an entirely different issue when you’re the one who is pregnant, or yearning to be. The economy is a vastly different issue, when you’re the small business worried about how you’ll pay taxes by the end of the year and feed your kids.

So What?

I have not watched one debate. Not one hour of CNN. Certainly I have not polluted my brain with Fox News, the cause of 95% of high blood pressure in America. I have ignored news articles deliberately. I have clicked “hide” on every. single. person. on Facebook who pollutes my consciousness with rants about their political rightness and how the other side is a bunch of anti-American morons for having a differing opinion. Why?

Peace.

Every hour I have not watched CNN has been another hour that I get to maintain my internal peace. Every second I have not watched FOX News has been a second in which I have not been furious with assheads. Every issue I ignore, is another thing that I don’t have to be stressed out about. Every political conversation I have not had with a relative or friend is a relationship that has not been damaged by condescension, divisiveness or baffling irritation.

This is America, everyone has a right to be wrong. And I have a right not to hear about it.

The truth is that I can’t solve anyone’s problems right now. Maybe never. I can vote. Period. The end. I have no control whether or not women are allowed to get abortions, my opinion about whether they should is irrelevant, what is relevant is whether or not I should. I am powerless over whether or not insurance companies are money sucking turds who screw over their customers, hell I don’t even have any insurance. I have no idea how we’re going to pay for baby boomers to retire in the style they’ve become accustomed to and they are going to get old whether I like it or not (and I do like them, I do, well a lot of them anyway). I can’t control whether interest rates go up or down.

Powerless. 

Accepting my own powerlessness is paradoxically freeing. I don’t have to fix this. Or convince you that I know how to fix it. Or even convince you that Romney or Ryan or Obama know how to fix it. I don’t even have to believe that any one of them can fix it to roll the dice and vote. I don’t have to believe that Romney is a woman-hating douche bag. I don’t have to believe that Obama is a Muslim non-US-citizen. I don’t have to understand why other people need to believe this bullshit in order to justify their political positions.

My position right now concerns staying above water and improving my own family’s economic condition. Putting gas in my car, feeding my kids and keeping the mortgage current. And I want a really nice pair of black leather boots. I just do.

If Obama loses, I’ll have won anyway. Because this political season’s bullshit hasn’t made me crazy.

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The whole state just finished their Standardized Tests. If you’re a parent you know that the entire school year has been hijacked by making sure kids pass these tests. It’s legislation called No Child Left Behind and was the major education reformation of George II.

The test had a number of consequences — some good, some bad. The good part was that it created a national tracking system that allowed us to get some idea of who was learning what. Prior to No Child Left Behind schools and districts were using their own tracking system or no tracking system at all.

The bad part is that it took a lot of creativity out of the classroom, substituted rote memorization for actual learning and put a ton of pressure on school boards, principals, teachers, parents and students.

In other words, the Standardized Test became the central focus of education. Which robbed our kids of the experience of actual learning through creativity; substituted artificial learning for an organic, authentic education. It made kids conform to a “cookie cutter” education.

It also increased Title 1 participation, because if your kid diagnosed with autism, ADD, dyslexia or whatever their issue is, their test scores are counted, but they get special tutors, services and accommodations in order to ensure that their test scores improve. If you’re a parent, you want your kid to have the best education and performance possible, and if you’re on the faculty you NEED these kids to perform well. In other words, it is likely that the increased number of kids with a diagnosis is, in part, a result of Standardized Testing.

Another downside is that it really isn’t appropriate for schools and the public education system to bear the burden of making sure kids learn well when it is obvious that there are other factors at play. Time Magazine’s article Why It’s Time to Replace No Child Left Behind points out that there actually are children left behind and they are the same children that were being left behind before this supposed magical reform of America’s education. While middle-class and upper-class kids have improved their scores and do well, poor minority children still lag behind.

Part of this is the way we fund education in this country. If you live in a rich community there are dollars to spare for education through higher property taxes or at least property taxes on more expensive homes, which equates to more education money. Money buys better technology, safer classrooms and halls, better faculty, better and more extra-curricular activities, more educational resources — in other words, a far better education. If you live in a poor one — you’re screwed. Education isn’t equal in this country and it never will be unless we reform how we fund the education of our students. One solution is to distribute dollars equally through gambling or lotteries as Nevada and a few other states do. Another is to fund education entirely by the state, property taxes which fund education dollars go to the state school board, as opposed to the local one, and the state distribute funds equitably regardless of the income of certain neighborhoods and parts of town. For obvious reasons upper- to middle-class communities will likely oppose this, because hey, their kids’ get a great education.

But, money is not the major issue here, as New Jersey schools show quite clearly. New Jersey spends far more per student than average and they have far more than average failing schools and failing students.

Yes, yes, fire the sucky teachers, sucky administration, etc. You’ve heard it all before as the big solution to education’s problem. God bless the teachers who are willing to go into these failing schools, stick their feet into quick sand and fight the battle for these kids. Certainly, moving away from a failing school and students who don’t score well would be most prudent for their careers. Unless, of course you choose to believe that all teachers who enter these institutions couldn’t get a job elsewhere and don’t care at all about their students, only their retirement. I think that’s pretty far fetched.

What I don’t understand is why schools are being held accountable for the factors that have nothing to do with education at all: the culture of African Americans where the numbers of single mothers and absent fathers is staggering; the astronomical number of minority males who are in prison; the communities that are drug-infested nightmarish nests of violence; or the culture of certain communities whether from religious persuasion, cultural norms or just plain apathy that don’t value education at all. It seems absurd to me that we expect schools to overcome these obstacles, in fact, it’s absurd to assume that schools have any responsibility to change the consequences of these environments for these kids. It’s simply not their job.

For the most part, I haven’t had a serious problem with Standardized Testing. Probably because Ainsley performs well on them and I have no reason to believe that Zack won’t perform well too.

My problem this year was the way Standardized Testing is being delivered to students. Ainsley sobbed that she went over and over her writing essay and didn’t finish the last sentence. It was confounding to me.

I didn’t finish the last sentence, now I won’t get my candy bar and I won’t get a good score! 

You’re a better writer than most people in your class, how will they even know you planned to add one more sentence at the end? I’m sure your score will be above average. If not, it’s not a big deal. Everybody bombs a test now and then.

No, my teacher saw me not finish when she called time.

Your teacher isn’t grading the test. 

My grade is going to go down. 

This test doesn’t effect your grade at all! 

What? It’s practically my WHOLE grade. 

It’s NONE of your grade. They aren’t grading you with this test, they are grading your school, your teachers, your principal. If you don’t score high on the test then they take money away from your school. 

No it’s not. It’s a big part of our grade, the teachers said it was really, really important that we do our very best on the test. 

Yeah, because they need the money and they want to keep their jobs. Not because it effects your grade. 

Well, I don’t want my teacher to be fired either! 

People, my daughter didn’t believe me at all. My neighbor’s daughter didn’t believe her mother either. These are high-performing students who work hard and care about their grades and their performance on tests. The school bribed the children with candy bars of their choice and class parties if they showed up, finished the section and tried their mightiest to score as high as possible. They told, or at least implied, students that this test would be a major part of their grades. Good God, the emotional trauma this testing has inflicted on faculty, school boards, parents and children should be enough to motivate us to think of a better method.

As Americans we’re supposed to be innovative. This isn’t innovative at all, it reduces a real education to a factory line. We’re not going to be more effective in the global marketplace with this stunted thinking. Genius is born of creativity and the guts to make million mistakes before success. Intelligence is born of exploration. Things do not not get invented by the people who have excellent scores on Standardized Tests, things are invented and discovered by curious people who daydream a lot. The people who ask, “what if this is possible?”

Surely, we can think of something more . . . creative. Surely, we can dream a bigger dream for our kids, for our futures.

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The New York Times has an article, They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve, about how new studies have found that girls and women direct language for the rest of the population.

The article is slightly condescending in tone, in that, well just look at the title yourself. Then look at this little cartoon. They cite Valley Girls and the Kardashians as the evidence of girls’ influence on language. The rest of the article is about how girls are using language to create bonding relationships and to convey emotion. You know, girl stuff, acting cute and being cute. Even though it makes them appear stupid and not to be taken seriously.

I’d like to point at that just because researchers just started studying female influence on language does not make it a “new” phenomenon. Nor is it limited to trendy teenage girls with reality shows.  Have you read a Mommy Blog or Friended a woman or two on Facebook? Women are inventing new words, new syntax, new inflections and sounds, adding new meaning to existing words every second of the day.

Nor do women use language simply to create bonds and convey their feelings. They use language to get what they want. They use language to make political points. They use language to draw boundaries — in the home, in the workplace, in politics. In every arena in which they participate and women and girls participate in every arena.

You should meet my friend Jenny. She appears to have invented a new word or phrase that conveys complex meaning for things that, as yet, have no known definition every time I talk to her. Just yesterday I learned the word Suck-tastic when a woman described the month of February on my Facebook page. I intend to use it frequently now.

Women have superpowers when it comes to listening to language. From the moment their babies are born they can distinguish their cries for hunger, tired and overstimulated; they can tell their baby’s cry from another, they can hear complex levels of emotion in their children; they can hear a lie.

From the earliest of ages girls can distinguish between a truth and a lie. Young girls will tattle on other girls for saying something cruel and hurtful like “I love your hair” or “that dress is so pretty.”

In other words, this condescending theory is craptastic and straight from Crazytown.

Words are the most powerful thing in the entire Universe. In fact, we know from the Bible and many other faith and folklore traditions, that whole entire Universe was created with “The Word.” The pen IS more powerful than the sword. While men point out statistical evidence for this or that legislation, women bring the power to it by evoking emotion and personalizing the political by means of Story. I promise you that Story is one of the most powerful means of changing people’s understanding and changing their minds. Statistics evoke nothing in us, they don’t touch our humanity and they don’t invoke change. But if someone perceives the Story behind the statistics — that a child is going hungry, that people are left suffering for lack of healthcare, that women die from breast cancer leaving their beloved children without a mother, that gay teenagers are in such pain for lack of acceptance that they often consider suicide — only then do they consider changing their original beliefs and taking action. Story is feminine domain.

Women make language their Bitch, bitch is the new black (Tina Fey). We direct the entire culture with it. We add layers of meaning where there is none. When called for, we can reduce the strongest biggest man to a cowering wuss, using language as a vicious sword to emasculate him. We seduce with language. We reframe perceptions with language. We expose truths with language. We create definitions and invent new concepts with language. Words are our playground. Language is feminine domain. We conquer entire nations with it. There’s no stopping a girl or woman with something to say.

Women invented language.

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Last year I wrote a post about Jess Weiner’s body issues. I feel bad about it. I want to apologize and make amends. Jess Weiner’s body issues are Jess Weiner’s body issues. They are her issues whether she chooses to talk about them in public or private. My point could have been made without calling her out directly. Or I could have let the point go.

I don’t normally call people out personally, even if they are famous. I think it’s an international cop-out “they’re famous so they signed up for the entire world to say whatever they want about them.” No they didn’t. They’re famous and they are people and the entire world just uses this justification to allow their mean flag to fly.

This is one of the most effective ways we silence girls and women, especially politically and in important social activism roles. I’ve often thought that I’d make a good politician with effective with out-of-the-box thinking and lots of new ideas. But, I love myself and my children too much to go through the insane nonsense that we put politicians, especially female politicians, through in this country.

Oh, you made gang-bang porn with a Sarah Palin look-a-like? Hilarious! You forwarded a Photoshopped photo of Sarah Palin in a bikini carrying a semi-automatic weapon at a pool party to a billion people? So funny! Well, she did disagree with your politics and your sense of social right. She deserved it. (Yeah, not so hilarious. Really. Disgusting and disrespectful to all women is more like it.)

You’re a horrible mother!

You’re too fat!

You’re too skinny!

I can’t believe someone would marry you!

She’s a practicing Witch!

She’s a whore!

A woman would have to grow emotional armor the thickness of a T-Rex in order to withstand, to willingly subject themselves and their families, to this kind of treatment for being willing to serve . . . from other women who are supposedly on their own side (in their own political party or of their own social activist realm or religious denomination or whatever group or category a woman tries to make headway in).

So, to Jess Weiner, I’m making a public apology because I made public my criticism.

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Reagan: Not A Viable Candidate for 2012

I find it so irritating when pundits declare a candidate “a waffler,” claiming that they lack a moral compass or they stand for nothing if they have had the good sense to change their mind about something in the last 30 years.

I call this growth and maturity. For me this is a primary criteria for relationships of any kind. If you have lived for over 30 years and you haven’t changed your mind about anything, then I don’t trust you enough to have a vote in congress or to be President of the United States.

Changing your mind signifies a couple of vital things:

• Admitting you could have been wrong about something in the first place. Changing your mind shows humility and a willingness to admit when you’re wrong. It shows you’ve got your ego in check.
• Acknowledging that something in the world has changed. Changing your mind shows that you agree that new research not supporting your original opinion or hypothesis might have been presented between the time you made your original opinion and your current one. Changing your mind only shows that you have been paying attention.
• Illustrating there has been some personal growth. If you don’t grow from personal experiences and that growth doesn’t inform your opinions and positions, then I don’t I trust you as my political representatives. Humans are meant to grow.
• A willingness to be educated or enlightened. Changing your mind is sometimes about being educated about something you really didn’t know anything about before, or about letting go of an unfair judgement about a group of people you really didn’t know before or even just saying, “I don’t get this, but I see that it’s important to you and it really doesn’t impact me, so I’m willing to concede the point and give you what you want.” It’s about allowing light and compassion in.
• An ability to compromise and listen to your constituents. A senate and house of representatives full of stubborn people, on the extreme right or left, who believe compromise is a moral flaw is a broken system going nowhere. Nothing happens. The deficit grows. Laws don’t get passed. No one gets anything they want. Because our lawmakers are being pigheaded. I think I can speak for the majority of Americans when I say, we’re sick of your childish pissing contests. We want balanced budgets. We want to pay off the deficit and we are willing to make sacrifices, though bitching and moaning on the Internet might be our hobby. Conceding a point or a position and allowing the other side to get something that’s important to them doesn’t make you a pussy and it doesn’t make you wrong. It moves things along. Stop thinking about your next election and do the next right thing. If the next right thing is raising taxes, raise them, equitably. We’ll suck it up. If it is outlawing second-trimester abortions, trade that for more funding of more forms of birth control like Plan B. If it’s letting gay people get married, just let them already; If you want to protect marriage, work on your marriage because it’s the only one that’s any of your business. Stop being dicks about everything. Pick your battles. Decide what’s really, really important to you and the people who voted for you and draw the line there. Don’t draw the line everywhere because at this point all of the people are sick of all of you.

Voters, consider the political, technological, medical, pharmaceutical and information advancements of the last 30 years and ask yourself why many candidates are using the same canned responses about teen pregnancy, drug addiction, crime, health care, abortion, education, immigration, world politics, global economics, the domestic economy, social security, entitlement programs and taxation as Ronald Reagan did. If it was such a great plan would we be having the same problems magnified now? If a candidate doesn’t understand that everything has changed since 1980 then we don’t want them in office in 2012.

If a candidate believes they knew everything they needed to know while cheering for Reagan at the Republican Caucus in 1979 or even if they solidified their political ideology while campaigning for Barack Obama in 2007 and they haven’t experienced a shift in perception about anything since, then they won’t serve us well in the present or the future.

We need candidates that are ready to respond to the issues that concern today’s rapidly changing global economic structures; who have new and reasonable ideas about our vastly changed and changing medical and pharmaceutical landscape and can achieve an affordable and equitable system; who understand today’s shifting global political climate and can be wisely diplomatic; who can look at new education research and can consider the possibility that all kids don’t think and learn the same; who can look at a correction system that fails us all; who can look at both parties and see one people.

We want people who understand they don’t know what’s coming next in the waves of advancement, but who have histories of responding to the flow of ingenuity, change and rapid upheaval with optimism and out-of-the-box thinking rather than digging their heals in the sand and screeching that the end of the world is near.

I want candidates who will say, “I didn’t foresee the impact of the Internet when I was in college,” “I didn’t have a full understanding of this issue when I ran in 1994,” “I was overwhelmed with anger and passion when I voted for Iraq and didn’t foresee a decade-long, extraordinarily costly war if I had I would have insisted we finance it differently, but I also feel there was a legitimate threat to world peace in Iraq,” “I wish I wouldn’t have spoken so adamantly about not raising taxes, I think that might be a good idea now to help balance the budget,” “I didn’t understand the impact of sex education or how Plan B really worked when I said that,” “I was an ardent supporter of the 2nd amendment and I still believe in the right to bear arms, I just don’t think you need a rocket launcher or an uzi to kill a dear or to defend your home, and also think gang members and teenagers probably should have less access to them.”

Whatever the position or opinion that has changed, I hope voters can spot signs of maturity and growth and signs of immature pigheadedness and realize that the latter serves only their own ego.

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