Showing posts with label Child Rearing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Child Rearing. Show all posts

Thursday, May 22, 2008

A Kinder, Gentler America

Exists in our imagination, not in reality. In reality, we treat people who need help as a disgusting drain on the system. No matter what the circumstances or how innocent they may be. And if they aren't from this country, we won't and don't give them the care and consideration that an American would expect to receive in a foreign country under the same circumstances. And we call ourselves civilized. More... There is going to come a time, most likely in the near future, when we will need the type of help that China or Burma currently need and the world will turn its back on us. And we will complain mightily, totally forgetting all of the cruel, insensitive and depraved actions we have taken against those who we have determined are less than human. White American humans that is.

And then there are the Israelis. The usual bullets against stones, with the normal result. I know my position isn't popular, Ireland has been one of the safest places in the world recently and who would have predicted that back in the 70s?

While I empathize with Damien Cave, imagine being an Iraqi veteran and trying to readjust to society in an America that doesn't care. Without the job, the money, or the contacts.

No, they didn't. The trauma and drama is something that will affect ALL those kids for many years to come. While there is something definitely wrong with the way the elders practice their lifestyle, the kids did not deserve to have their lives totally destroyed. 400 kids, forcibly separated from the only love they had ever known. You bet it was wrong. But then, this is the state that also contains Waco. And Crawford.

Do you like oral sex? How about some velvet handcuffs, feathers and a major tickle session before getting down to those three minutes that are supposed to satisfy? Do you like the lights on? Do you prefer to physically be with someone of your own sex? Do you like to do it in the shower? If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you might be a deviant. At least according to the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that is currently being worked on. By appointees of the current Bush administration. The definition of normal sex (according to the American Psychiatric Association, that bastion of people who determine what is normal and what isn't) is being worked on once again. I think they discovered that some people don't even do it under the covers. Oh, the horror.

Okay, enough funning around, back to the world we live in now. Only in America can one lose one's home for a $68 dental bill. My potted tomatoes (if the wind doesn't blow them away today) are worth more than that bill. In what world do you take someone's place of residence in lieu of smaller items? There are people who have larger outstanding phone or cable bills and they are still living in their homes, but with satellite and cell phones instead. Can indentured servitude for parking tickets be far behind?

3Bsand Debsweb

Thursday, March 20, 2008

What If The Earth Is Just One Big Science Experiment?

Biblically correct, now that's a mouthful. A book written by many men (Ruth and Esther were tokens used to prove a point but Mary, the mother of Jesus and a major part of a world religion, gets scant mention much less her own book, why is that?) to reflect their point of view and the parts that didn't fit in, were discarded. Now some of the "believers" are conducting museum tours and explaining to the young and impressionable that thousands of years of history never happened. Oh sweet Jeebus, how much dumber is our population going to get? Tyrannosaurus Rex was a vegetarian because Adam and Eve hadn't sinned yet, so there was no death? What planet do these people come from? They most certainly didn't evolve from intelligent humans. That Bible belt is cinched a little too tight and preventing oxygen from circulating through their very little brains. No wonder there are very few "American" doctors in practice, you have to have a science education in order to understand how the body works. Praying doesn't help cure disease.

This will really throw a spanner into the works. Not only is the moon not made of cheese, but it isn't even made of the same materials as the Earth and Mars is made of something completely different than the other two. Maybe since we are supposed to be made in God's image, he's just trying to find out whether intelligence waxes or wanes with each succeeding generation. I think we are in the wane phase.

Funny how when I was growing up on an Air Force Base, science was accepted as tradition and you were expected to do well in it. I got kicked out of Sunday School (Southern Baptist) for asking impertinent questions like "if you lived on an island and had never seen a white man, does this mean you go to hell because you never heard of the Bible or Jesus Christ?" When I was told yes, I answered "I don't think God does that, he wouldn't punish innocent people for an eternity just because they had never heard of him." And out the door I was pushed and told never to return. Forgiveness seems to be a sin, unless you're a Republican who has committed a sexual indiscretion.

Then I got involved with the Pentecostals. Now that was an adventure. Reality went on a long hike because only a chosen few will be saved. Once again I was shown the door. This time because I thought it didn't make sense that a person who had committed murder, rape, robbery and other trespasses of the Ten Commandments could repent on his deathbed at 75 and he would go to heaven, but a person who had followed the Commandments to the letter would go to hell because he hadn't accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. An exemplary life doesn't count but crying and begging for forgiveness of heinous crimes does. Didn't sound logical then and it doesn't sound logical now. Jehovah's Witnesses are sure I'm not going to heave either. That's okay, it doesn't sound like a very happy place.

Almost 7 billion people on the planet but just 144,000 are going to qualify to go to heaven. One would have to ask what kind God would do something like that. Maybe a scientist who was looking for deviant bacteria and a way to inoculate the space population from contamination would be my guess.

BBB and Debsweb

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Can't Resist These Sock Puppets

Incredible film of two sock puppets discussing work and working conditions in the modern, white collar, "neoliberal" market. Its really funny to watch these Sock Puppets discuss Marx, Foucault, and everything in between. ( h/t Crooked Timber who linked to the original posting over at a marvellous site called Wicked Anomie.)

Its really worth watching because some issues we've been talking around politically (about how much any politically active individual can recognize their own agency, or lack of it, in a political contest) come up in the context of the sock puppets discussion of labor and work in the modern world. What struck me most was the sock puppet's explanation of the necessity for the creation of internal controls like anxiety, fear, and guilt in the modern white collar worker to take the place of brute force oppression in the regular factory worker. In a democracy we can see this issue being played out in this election with people encouraged to imagine themselves "freely choosing" among a variety of competing candidates offering them a smorgasbrod of policy choices. But are they really "freely choosing?" when the candiates and the issues and the coverage have been constrained and limited by authorities and powers beyond the control, or even the ken, of the individual voter? As Incontinentia Buttocks pointed out over at LGM the battle between Obama and HRC is, in reality, largely a battle over minute and even trivial differences in the delivery of the same product (she calls it the "narcissism of small differences"). And even where there are actual policy differences for voters to choose among they are encouraged or deluded into regarding the political/policy battle as being one of taste. Even worse, they are misled entirely as to the nature of the choices before them--see e.g. Kristof's skin crawlingly meretricious but utterly standard paen to McCain's honesty in today's Times.

Where this hits me is actually somewhere different--in my role as a parent. Anyone out there raising young children to be part of the ideas creating and marketing middle and upper classes will slowly come to recognize, in the sock puppet's discussion of labor and capitol some very interesting similiarities between child rearing and worker castration. The "ownership society" relies heavily on creating an anxious, frightened, submissive, self repressive "owner" who willingly and even eagerly performs his function as a cog in a machine that offers him (or her) the mere right to compete with other owners for basic necessities. That training starts very, very, young and much to my chagrin I recognize that I play an important part in it. Too gloomy for you? Watch the vid and laugh...and then cry.