America, What Have You Done?

Last night, against all odds, against everything that's holy, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.  A vile, cruel man who flaunts his fame and fortune, who exacts revenge in the form of name-calling and slander, a man who has a history of lying, cheating, and ruthlessly attempting to destroy anyone who goes against him, will be, as of January 20, 2017, the most powerful man in the world.

He beat out Hillary Clinton, a woman who carries her own baggage--none of it nearly as heavy or as dirty as Trump's--yet who is inordinately qualified to be president, a woman who couldn't match him in bombast and showmanship but rose above him in matters of the heart, of commitment, and of intellect. 

It wasn't a glass ceiling that was shattered last night, it was our country.  The Republicans--those very same menaces who, through their obstruction and disdain for anyone other than the rich and powerful, caused most of the economic problems plaguing the voters--still came out smelling like roses. They won over the Democrats and held their majority in Congress. Those voters who felt so threatened by the government of their choosing have now willingly bought into an outrageously ludicrous line of demagogic fear-mongering and turned to someone outside of politics for solace and succor. Or revenge.

The postmortems will be coming fast and furious in the days ahead, but the die is cast, our bed is made, our new president is a nasty narcissistic loose cannon who will be in a position to fill his cabinet with his equally slimy agenda-driven cronies, to fill the Supreme Court with Scalia clones, to shut down needed social services, to rape our public lands, to deny climate change, to end the Affordable Care Act, to send packing anyone whose skin color, religion, or ethnic background, doesn't match his idea of a pure America.

He has threatened to send his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to jail.  He has threatened to take away the freedom of the press. He has threatened to "bomb the shit" out of Isis. He has aligned himself with the ugliest elements in our society, including the gun toting militias, the KKK, the NRA, and the religious right.

Vladimir Putin has already sent his congratulations.

And I'm stunned, angry, depressed, mortified, and embarrassed for my country.  I didn't create Trump, I didn't promote him, I didn't vote for him, but I'll have to live with what comes next and so will everyone I hold dear.  Some of them voted for this man, along with the millions of others who saw this inconceivable win as payback of some sort, a punch in the gut to wake us the hell up.

I'll leave it to them to figure out how they'll live in the America they've now created.  And I won't feel an ounce of pity for them when all of their wishes don't come true.

(Cross-posted at Dagblog and Crooks & Liars)

VDAY. Ending Violence Toward Women and Girls

Join us here.  We can get this done!

This Valentine's Day I'll be foregoing jewels and candies and pink teddy bears with red hearts on their tummies (Ha! As if!) and I'll be going, instead, for dancing. Some of you who have seen me dance might find that cause for concern but never fear--it's not me dancing, it's them:

Did you notice when you got here that my walls are now pink? You should know that normally I'm not a "Pink" person, but in this case I will wallow in pink if it means this message is getting out:  Unbelievable numbers of women and girls are being viciously abused minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, and we must be the catalyst that brings these horrors to an end.  No one else will do it.  It's up to us.

One in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, often more than once.  If we haven't been victims ourselves, we know someone who has been.  We can't have lived this long and not know that women and girls all over the world spend their days in fear because of what men have already done to them or will do to them.  They are not safe from men--either the men in their lives or complete strangers--who see them as sexual or domestic chattel, of no use except as a belonging or a conquest.

Please, please, go here (or click on the logos above) and join the crowds of men and women rising up to let their voices be heard. Watch the videos, grab the links and spread the word.  Let them know we're in this together.  Send a message to the abusers that we're out to protect women and girls from them and we won't stop until we've done our jobs.

And dance.  Let's all dance.  Because womanhood is meant to be a joy and not a burden.

We'll show them how it's done. On Valentine's Day.


NOTE:  The walls are back to brown.  Pink was yesterday and the day before.  Your eyes are okay.  Feel better?)

 

In 21st Century America: It's still okay to beat up on women.

TOPEKA | The Topeka City Council on Tuesday [10/11/11] voted to repeal the city’s law against misdemeanor domestic battery, the latest in a budget battle that has freed about 30 abuse suspects from charges.
One of the offenders was even arrested and released twice since the brouhaha broke out Sept. 8.
It started when Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor announced that a 10 percent budget cut would force him to end his office’s prosecution of misdemeanor cases, almost half of which last year were domestic battery cases.
With that, Taylor stopped prosecuting the cases and left them to the city. But city officials balked at the cost.
Tuesday’s 7-3 vote to eliminate the local domestic violence law was designed to force Taylor to prosecute the cases because they would remain a crime under state law.

Hey, all you totally misunderstood guys in Topeka who feel the need to smack around your women, good news!  As long as you don't get too heavy-handed -- blackening eyes, loosening teeth, leaving really ugly bruises -- your city officials are on your side.  

In a fledgling century of new lows this may not rank up there with the worst of them, but as an indicator of how low our new austerity drives have allowed us to fall, it's right up there.  Misdemeanor violence against women has now been approved by a city council for no other reason than to play chicken with a county prosecutor looking for creative ways to get around budget cuts.

Tack on top of that last week's action by the House to bully insurance companies into refusing to cover abortions.

From the Hill:
The House approved a bill that Republicans said would prevent last year's healthcare law from funding abortions, but which Democrats said would go far beyond that and make it much harder for women to exercise their constitutional right to have abortions.
The bill, H.R. 358, was passed in a 251-172 vote that saw more than a dozen Democrats join nearly all voting Republicans in support of the measure.
Republicans said throughout the day that the bill is needed because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was approved without any limitation on funding for abortion rights. They also dismissed President Obama's Executive Order that Democrats say reinforces this prohibition.
"Thus ObamaCare, when phased in fully in November 2014, will open up the floodgates of public funding for abortion in a myriad of programs, including and especially in exchanges, resulting in more dead babies and wounded mothers than would otherwise have been the case," Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) said.

 I expect that sort of thing from the Republicans, but 15 Democrats bought into it, too.  It would still have passed without them, but that doesn't make me any less ashamed of them. (Here is the list.)  Don't tell me they're only doing what their constituents expect of them.  Either they're Democrats or they're not.  A real Democrat wouldn't be caught dead voting for something like that.

"This bill is a radical departure from existing law," House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. "This legislation is bad public policy, it is the wrong priority for Congress, it is an assault on women's health, and women should know that it prevents them from using their own dollars to buy their own private insurance should they be part of an exchange."

 Never mind that this action by the House is as phony as the bill's moniker, the "Protect Life Act".   Where are the bills to protect jobs, to protect children already living, to protect the health and welfare of the citizens of this country?  Nowhere to be seen.  There are some battles we shouldn't still be fighting.  A woman's right to choose is sacrosanct. A woman's right to protect her own body is not now and never should have been up for debate. 

You protect life by respecting the living, by nurturing the living, by honoring the living.  You accept the job as representative of the people by promising to preserve and protect. This bill and the actions in Topeka turn those notions upside down, and do it in mean-spirited, draconian ways too many people are finding acceptable.  But change is in the air.  If we can keep it going, a great awakening is about to begin.  If we can keep it going, we'll be looking back on the last few decades of wicked wrongheadedness, wondering how we ever let it happen in our lifetime.

It can't come soon enough for me.

My mother Lived a Life

My mother was born on this day in 1918.  It was the year the influenza epidemic spread across the world and became a pandemic.  By rights, and in a more populous locale, my mother might have sickened and died before she ever had a chance at life.  She was a skinny, spindly little thing who always looked undernourished in early pictures.

She was born at home in Fulton Location, a company town in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula that existed because the copper mines were in full swing and thriving then.  At the time she was born, her father was a "mule" deep in the mines, a trammer, a dirty, lowly job relegated to the Finns and other Eastern Europeans by the Cornish bosses because the "foreigners" couldn't or wouldn't speak English and were barely understood.  In the human chain, in that place, they were considered the least.

My grandfather was a proud man--too proud for that time and that place.  He eventually worked himself up to foreman, a job almost unheard of for a Finn, but he never got over the slights.  He drank too much and could be cruel to his wife and four children, but if he had a favorite, it was my mother, who looked the most like him.  Still, it didn't save her when it came to her schooling.

 Fulton Location was a place where only Finnish people lived.  It was so remote from anything American, my mother didn't speak English until she went to school.  She learned, and loved school, and thrived there.

Irene - 8th grade graduation picture

In the summer, after her eighth grade graduation, her father told her she was done with schooling and she would have to go to work cleaning other people's houses.  Somehow, the principal heard about it and went to their house to try and talk my grandfather into letting her continue.  It didn't work, but my mother was always proud of that--that someone in education would try and fight for her. (That was all I ever knew of the story, but I used it as a chapter in my unfinished novel, "The Year of Lost Men")

I've written about her marriage to my father before, but here I want to talk about Irene as my mother and as a woman.  She was 19 years old when I was born, and they had no money, but somehow my father managed to ship her the 600 miles from Detroit to Fulton so that she could be with her mother and I could be born in a hospital that wouldn't charge more than they could afford. 

She nearly killed me when I was an infant because she insisted on breast feeding me when she had no milk.  There was a time when they had so little money we all subsisted on oatmeal, and it wasn't long before I began to suffer from malnutrition.  I survived, I thrived, but I was still hearing my mother apologize for not knowing enough to take better care of me when I myself was a grandmother.

She had no formal schooling beyond the eighth grade, but that didn't stop her from learning.  She and her sisters played a word game all of their lives, where one of them would choose a new word and they would have to use that word in a sentence as often as they could for an entire week.  I remember that one of the words was "regurgitate".  They laughed themselves silly over that one.

Maybe it was her impoverished background, but she loved beautiful clothes.  Her oldest sister worked for a rich Chicago family and would send my mother their cast-offs, which she wore with movie-star flare.  When I was in the fourth grade (still an only child, since my brothers weren't born until I was nine and 13, respectively), she went to work at a dress shop, where she could buy the on-sale clothes at an even greater employee discount. 

It only lasted for a while, but I had to come home by myself for lunch, and I would find the radio on, tuned to "The Kate Smith Hour".  My lunch would be set out on the table, always with some cute little thing that would make me smile.  She might peel an orange and segment it and make a stick man from it, holding a carrot walking stick or wearing a pickle hat.  When Kate Smith sang "When the Moon Comes over the Mountain" I knew it was time to get back to school.

Irene as Barbara Stanwyck

Later, when they bought a house with a basement, she set up her own beauty shop, having learned to cut and style hair almost by magic.  She had a thriving business going until a neighbor turned her in for operating without a license.  She fixed that.  She went to beauty school and got her license and worked legitimately at a profession she absolutely loved until she developed what seemed to be emphysema but turned out, in fact, to be lung cancer.

She never voted, but was a liberal in the best sense of the word.  She understood and could argue for the labor movement, for childrens' rights, and, in the 60s and 70s, for the Women's movement.  Ironically, the women she wanted to see liberated would have been disgusted by the lifestyle she chose for herself.  She never learned to drive, and my father did all of the bill-paying and grocery shopping.  Her house was as neat as a pin, and she kept Lestoil and Clorox in business, so fussy was she about laundry.  She was a housewife and a hairdresser by choice.

She had a lovely singing voice and was mad about Perry Como and Tennessee Ernie Ford and Yma Sumac.

Glamorous Irene

 She liked beer and cigarettes, and only gave them up when she was finally forced to by the cancer.  But here's the amazing thing:  I never liked beer, I never smoked a cigarette, I was the farthest thing from a fashion plate she might ever have imagined, my house would never pass a white glove inspection, I could take Perry Como or leave him, and I didn't do the one thing she always hoped I would do--get a college degree.  But she loved me anyway, always and forever.

She adored my children and her great-grandson, who had the privilege of knowing her before she died at a too-young 68 in 1986.  She loved my father and her sons, her nieces and nephews, and anyone else who entered her life and stayed there.

She lived a life.

Irene and Ralph at their 50th Anniversary celebration

six months before she died
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