7.31.2004

Open letter to the socially conservative:

I hear you. I hear you when you say that you don't want YOUR hard-earned money being given to the government to pay for social programs for those who need help from the government. Yeah, I know, I know that you work hard every day from 9 to 5 in your suffocating suit with a noose around your neck to make your money and you don't want it going to the lazy people who sit around watching TV all day and leeching off of the government. You don't want your money spent on them.

It doesn't affect you. The human plight on the wrong side of the tracks doesn't affect you because you were born to successful families headed by businessmen, doctors, lawyers, salesmen. You were enrolled in a school where you got individuial attention from the get-go, and I will bet that you had a mother who stayed home from work to help you grow in the right direction. Did you think about where your college tuition came from? Did you ever question that you would be ABLE to go to college? Or did you just have to decide which one you thought had the best parties?

Did you go into work with your parents? Inherit a business? Did you get the job that you have now because of connections that your family has? The unearned luxury of knowing the right people? Did you ever have to entertain the fact that you may have to work more than one job just to pay your bills? No, you probaby didn't. So it's no wonder you don't want your hard-earned money to go to help those people in those other neighborhoods. You could never understand them. You have never walked one second in their shoes.

You did not have to grow up in a single-parent family where your mother had to decide wether to "be lazy" and stay at home, accepting help from the government so that she would be there when you walked home from school so that you would have somewhere to go that is safe rather than seeking family outside of your home in your neighborhood streets, joining a gang because every child will seek family somewhere. Or she could have chosen to get a job, leaving you with a key to an empty house every day after school since we are dropping the after-school program funding in this counrty.

No, no one in your family ever had to make those decisions. You were born outside of the vicious cycle of poverty that,like an undertow, grabs hold and sucks constantly downward from the first breath that you take and allows virtually no one up for air and out of the lower class. Social programs do not affect you.

It doesn't affect you when we kick kids out of their after school programs. It doesn't affect you when a single mother has to leave her child to be raised by the streets until she comes home at night, exhausted from a hard job that doesn't pay enough. It doesn't affect you that the ban on the sale of assault rifles is about to be lifted. And it doesn't affect you that our public school system has become an abomination, breeding contempt and violence and continued ignorance, leaving poor children with no hope of ever getting ahead in this country.

It doesn't affect you.

Until you walk to your luxury car from a party one night, and you find yourself with the barrel of a gun rammed into your ribcage. A desperate, disenfranchised, uneducated, and hopeless son or daughter of "the lazy people"across the tracks with their finger on the trigger. And do you think that they have any reason for not pulling that trigger? They don't. They have no hope. They have no possibility to know anything different in their lives. And they hate you because you have never had to struggle. What reason do they have to not make one split decision the wrong way and spill your priviledged blood across the dirty sidewalk?

But, no. I hear you. You don't want your hard-earned money being given to people who are lazy and sit around watching tv. You don't need to help fund public schooling because your kid goes to Montessori school. You don't care that those other neighborhoods are becoming war zones with not enough police force to patrol them. You're right. It just doesn't affect you.


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Perhaps the guest of honor at the Republican National Convention will be Osama Bin Laden in shackles and in a cage, Bush standing triumphantly next to him, dressed in army fatigues. "I got him, Amurica. I have defeated Terrerr. What's John Kerry got on that?"

And'll people will fall for it and reelect him so that Diebold won't even have to rig the voting machines that leave no paper trace or throw out any votes to win the election.

The New Republic Online: July Surprise?:

An article about the current administration's ramping up of pressure and near-threats to the Pakistani government to rustle up some "High Value Targets" (Big-money terrorist captures) during this crucial pre-election time. So if they get him, if they get bin Laden, Bush can reinforce to the brainwashed masses that he is keeping them safe. If he were really keeping us safe he would not be putting this increased pressure on the Pakistani government to capture Big Al Quaeda now. He would have done it three years ago.

And he wouldn't be allowing the fact that one of their nuclear scientists sold nuclear secrets on the black market to NORTH KOREA (who may have the capability to hit American targets with a nuclear bomb) and other countries whose anti-US sentiment grow by the week just slide claiming that that is an inernal affair for Pakistan.

If they capture Osama bin Laden before the election it is NOT because Bush is keeping us safer. It is because his administration holds the strings on this giant puppet show with the world as a stage, and its time to cue Osama bin Laden. It's time to win the election.

"Pushing Musharraf to go after Al Qaeda in the tribal areas may be a good idea despite the risks. But, if that is the case, it was a good idea in 2002 and 2003. Why the switch now? Top Pakistanis think they know: This year, the president's reelection is at stake."

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7.30.2004

My best friend is back. Mat's been out of town, and I have been alone with my thoughts.

And work has been heartbreaking lately. Absolutely heartbreaking. It has been surreal in its horrors, but it has been so amazing to stand shoulder to shoulder around the bed of a struggling soul as we all work together to save it as a team. I would never be able to do the job that I do without each one of them. After a particularly harrowing day yesterday, my friend came up to me and put her arm on my arm. "What are we doing? Do we like our jobs?" She was smiling as she said it, and I could see in her eyes that she does love it. But after a day like the one that we had yesterday I can't help but ask myself the same questions. What am I doing? Aren't there things that are just too awful to subject yourself to?

Sometimes I feel haunted. Sometimes I feel like a hero. The team that I work with is amazing. They are calm in a code. They work together. I can look at the face of a doctor or nurse or the pharmacist that I am working with when I am tempted to get rattled or rushed or too anxious to make decisions correctly, and they bring me back down to the job that we are all trying to do. There is nothing like being a part of the team that helps to convince a little spirit to stay here on the planet with us for a while longer. There is nothing like handing a baby to a mother who hasn't been able to hold it for weeks because it was too sick. And there is no way to adequately describe in words what it is like to be standing there when a beautiful child's heart ceases to beat. Some of us cry when it doesn't end the way that we want it to.

But all of us have been through these things together. The faces of my friends and coworkers wear understanding for what it feels like to be a part of these things. We have all been through them together, and we do not have to explain them to each other. We just know. We know what we have seen and will, perhaps, be occasionally haunted by. We have done great things together, and we have had to come to points where we can do no more.

For the past few days, I have been dragging my feet at the end of the shift. Not really ready to leave the support of the people that I have been through hell with. Pedalling my bike like a demon possessed through the misty fog, I breathe hard and sweat and pump the adrenaline that has collected in my body out of it and into the night. At home, with Mat out of town, I am trapped with my thoughts, replays of some of the scenes that I have been a witness to.

But he is back today. As soon as I saw him at the airport, I felt the post-traumatic, weird, hallucinatory, surreal way that you feel after something horrible, the way that I felt for weeks after september 11, and the way that I felt when one of my best friends died when we were 18, like life is happening around you in a bit of a fog, and you can think only of what has happened... I felt this feeling start to break apart and dissipate off of me. He has walked beside me, sat beside me, eaten lunch with me, laid on the couch exhausted after his three hours of sleep last night and watched Return of the King beside me, and even though we haven't talked much about what has been happening at work, he cut the grief of it in half. By being beside me he has lightened my world. We talk about the Democratic National Convention, we laugh at everything, we are tired together, other things come into my head and I am able to let some things go.

My best friend is back, and my heart is clear.

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7.27.2004

****Barack Obama!!!****

what a speech. What a man.
what an inspiring person. He makes me excited to call myself a democrat.

This convention gives me so much hope that the next time I travel through Asia or Africa or New Zealand I won't have to be ashamed to say that I am from America. I love this country. I am not ashamed of IT>

I am ashamed of what it has become under the corrupt and dividing extremism of this administration.

Barack Obama. He is America's future. Someday he will be president.

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