Concerning Mrs. Nix

Fat People, Genetics, and Arbonne

2011-05-19T18:35:00.000+09:00

Speaking of fat people - which is what I've been discussing most of the morning on my Facebook page, I have spent my entire life fighting the chub. Most of the women in my biological family tree have also fought the battle of 20 extra pounds over large portions of their lives. People who like to say it's not genetic to be overweight are just blind and stubborn. My daughter, for example, takes after her father's side of the family (thank God for that mercy to her life), and has never shown any sign of tending toward chubbiness. She is as slender and healthy as I could hope. She eats candy from time to time. She is allowed a soda periodically. When we have a family dessert, which isn't every night by any stretch, she is given a portion. Like most children in our culture and tax bracket, she is very familiar with Happy Meals, but she doesn't get one every day - or even every week. These statements are all true for her and they were all equally true for me at her age. I was a chubby kid by the time I was 7. My daughter is not.

Both of my parents, both of my grandmothers, two of my four great-grandmothers, and all but one of my biologically-related aunts led periods of life struggling with weight...and a few of these relatives were just plain fat (photos of one of my great-grandmothers show a woman of at least 300 pounds). For my daughter, only one of her parents (me) has any family history of becoming overweight. Every single relative I've found information about on her paternal side has been slender. In old photographs from the early 20th century, there are family groups from my husband's side at weddings that show an entire family group of 15 or more people and none of them were overweight. Today, almost all of his relatives are living at healthy weights. My daughter takes physically after her father. She is shaped like him and resembles him and physically carries herself like him. Like I said, praise God for that mercy in her life.

Sure, this is anecdote, but it's my anecdote, and it's not anywhere near unique. Don't try to convince me that the reason I've never been a size four has nothing to do with my genes and everything to do with my fork. It's simply obtuse and inaccurate to hold that view.

Genetics is HUGE in issues of body shape and size. Not everyone will be slim when they are eating optimally and living a healthy life. It's true. The fact that our society cannot accept that is befuddling to me. It's been true throughout the history of the world and, yet, modern man cannot grasp it.

All that being said, one does not have to accept being fat, either. A healthy body weight is attainable for everyone, no matter the genetic handicap score. For some of us, that healthy body weight will be harder to achieve and harder to maintain, but it's not a fantasy proposition for anyone. I know this because I have enjoyed several years of my life at a healthy size...and I felt very healthy during those periods.

About 8 years ago, I was in the shape of my life. I was relatively slender, had great muscle tone and strength, and I was active. Since then, I've put on about 30 pounds. I am not obese, but I am pretty chubby and clearly need to lose a stone or two. This gain happened over time, and I can't point to one event or period when it all happened because it was very gradual. It would be easy to blame the weight on my pregnancy and the birth of my daughter, but it would be horribly disingenuous, too. I lost all of my pregnancy weight less than 8 weeks after she was born. No, becoming a mother didn't make me fat. Chronic back pain, a short bout of depression in which I stopped exercising altogether, and constant anxiety between 2003 and 2006 during Ashley's Iraqi war deployments did the trick. I became sedentary, I didn't eat less to compensate for that, and I occasionally ate more. I ate more convenience food and did less cooking. My body chemistry changed because of constant anxiety, pain, and mental lethargy. SO here I am. As an example for contrast, a friend of mine who has always been slim through her genetic predisposition lived through this time with me. We ate almost all of our meals together, suffered the same anxieties and stressors, and had similar exercise-to-calories eaten ratios. She gained about half of the weight that I did. This didn't shock either of us because we know what all women know: genes matter in body shape and size.

I am no longer suffering any of those things that led to my weight gain, but I still have this 8 year-old weight sitting on my body, and I want to get rid of it, now. I am veggie. I am reviving my regular exercise habits of old. My back pain is neither so frequent nor so unmanageable as it once was. My knees are starting to suffer, which is more motivation to get crackin' on this. I also have an old, lovely, and darling friend who sells Arbonne products. I loved the skincare stuff because it's vegan and it makes my face really soft, but then I found out they have diet supplements and shakes, too. I used to like the whole SlimFast type of deal for kick-starting a habit of eating less, but all of those things tend to use dairy protein. Not Arbonne! So I bought it, and I'm in business. If it's great stuff, I will let you know. Even when I sit at a healthy weight, I do not look like a Barbie. I look nice, and I have my own kind of prettiness. I like the way I look when I'm healthy just fine, but no matter how hard I work, I will never look as good as someone with a great genetic profile can without even trying. Them's the breaks.

For now...just remember to be grateful rather than smug if you don't have to work at being slim. Many people with rockin' bodies work their butts off to get that way, and they have my ultimate respect. If you're not working daily to maintain that healthy body weight, though, then you are the grand contest winner in the game of genetics. Trust me, if you don't actively work at being slender and fit, then you didn't get that way because you just naturally eat the right amounts and types of foods unlike "those fat people." No, you should be more thankful on a daily basis....and you should also have your cholesterol checked. I'm just putting that out there. My friend who gained alongside me 8 years ago has also been working to take off her extra weight. She looks great, and I'm confident she will manage it. She's now a mother of six, so she's got plenty to keep busy with! Maybe I should get her the Arbonne weight loss stuff, too, and we could compare notes. :)

The point I suppose I want to make is this: Be nice to fat people. They're not all fat because of what you think. Degrading them or reviling them is beneath you and totally unhelpful in turning the obesity problem around. Every fat person in possession of his mental faculties KNOWS that he is fat. You don't have to point it out or smugly assume that you know how to "save" him. The issue is far more complex than the fork...but the fork is always the best and first place to start.

What I Remember of 9/11 and Sara Low

2010-09-12T11:54:00.002+09:00

I think it's important to remember exactly how it happened.

I lived in Denver. I was 26 years old. Ashley and I were still dating, and I was working for a contractor downtown.

I was 15 minutes late for work that morning. Because I was running behind, I skipped the news while getting ready. Ashley drove me to work that day. I don't remember why. Because we were together in the car, we talked with one another and didn't listen to the radio.

We stopped at McDonald's to get breakfast. I remember ordering a Diet Coke and a McGriddle sandwich. It had bacon and egg and cheese on it. When I got to work, the building was oddly quiet. I got up to my office and set down my things. A group of people were huddled around each other at the office next to mine. I said my usual good mornings in the hallway. They stared at me. I thought they were staring because I was late. "You haven't heard, have you?" It was a male co-worker who said this to me. I don't remember his name. No. No, I hadn't heard.

It was Ms. Hitchcock, another project coordinator there, who pulled me aside and told me that a plane hit the World Trade Center that morning. She told me that for a while they thought it was an accident but that a 2nd plane had hit the other tower about 5 minutes ago, and now the news people were calling it terrorism. It took me a long time before what she said actually registered. My first thought was, "so there was a plane crash in New York. Why is everyone this upset?" I hadn't processed the hit the World Trade Center...building on fire...terrorism part. All I really heard was "planes crashed more than a thousand miles from here and everyone is walking around like a zombie." I went about my morning routine. I got a cup of coffee and went through my inbox. I took a bite of my sandwich. I was chewing when I had the strangest thought. I thought, "I wonder how many people in the World Trade Center were eating McDonald's for breakfast when they died." That was it. It finally landed on me what was happening. I threw the rest of my breakfast away and I never ordered another one of those sandwiches. For a long time afterward, I got physically sick whenever I saw a billboard or print ad for McDonald's breakfast.

I watched the reports of the following two crashes on streaming video. Most of my co-workers did, as well. No one talked anymore after a while. We all sat at our desks or mechanically went about tasks. Even those of us who smoked took the breaks without saying much. Everyone was in shock. Jessica Lopez saw me downstairs at around lunch time. She hugged me. We didn't cry. We went back to our respective desks and kept working. I don't remember if I ate lunch. I called Ashley. He worked at Radio Shack then. They were watching several of the news channels on the TV display models there.

On the way home, no one had on loud radio music. No one honked at anyone. No one was speeding. Even the rush hour commute, it seemed, was silent.

For the next week or so, I woke up every morning thinking, "I must have imagined that. It wasn't real." That was my very first thought upon waking every single day during those first several weeks. I don't remember how long it was before I stopped trying to believe it hadn't happened. I had to listen to music a lot to stop the thoughts. Sadness for the families who lost someone...guilt for being relieved that no one close to me had died...anxiety about the possibility of having it happen again in another city...calculating the odds of Denver being that city...more guilt for "making it about me" with that sort of thinking. Round and round it went. Anger was not one of my reactions. I have not been angry or enraged. I don't know why. That use to bother me because I thought it meant there was something wrong with me if I wasn't angry. I think I was too sad to be angry. I wanted justice. That was all I felt.

I don't understand people who say we shouldn't dwell on it...that we shouldn't watch the video again or read the timeline. I can't imagine brushing that morning to the back of my mind. We watched radical ideologues murder 3,000 Americans live on television. What benefit would anyone receive from forgetting that? I don't cry about it except on the anniversaries when I read the detailed timelines. I don't get all het up and angry about it. I don't dwell on it or fixate or obsess. I just remember it. I don't want to forget it, and that's not some corny greeting card or serial email line. I don't want to forget about it, and I don't want anyone else to, either.

------------

I read the timelines and remember the events of that morning on purpose every September 11th. After I do that, I try to remember everything I ever knew about Sara Low. She was two years older than me. My stepbrother had a crush on her his freshman year of high school. She was beautiful. She was so, SO kind. She had striking eyes that were sharp and almond shaped. She smiled a lot. I'm pretty sure she was in the band because I remember her in the marching band uniform. I think she played the flute. I'm not sure...it was a long time ago. She ran track (so did my brother) and she was a cheerleader and she was an honor student. That's all I can remember because we were children the last time I saw her...but I feel like the least I can do for her is remember her.

The reports online say that she was not originally scheduled to work on flight 11. After the hijacking began, she tried to call her parents, but she dialed the phone number they had when she was growing up instead of the current number. She didn't reach them that morning, but she gave one of the other flight attendants her calling card. The card was used to place five calls out with warnings before it was over. The report said Sara's father speculates that maybe because of the stress and fear...her childhood phone number was the only one she could remember. Every time I think about that, it makes my stomach knot. She was too good--in every way too good--to suffer that kind of fear. I hope she wasn't scared for a long time, and I hope someone was holding her hand.

Nothing Works

2010-08-26T16:15:00.003+09:00

I want to live in a world where I will be able to make a list of things that I need to do and then go out and actually check off all of the items on that list. I can't do that anymore. It cannot be done. No matter what I do, who I speak to, or how kindly I treat the workers I encounter in my errands, Hell will freeze over and my tush will fit into size 2 jeans before America will return to an era when good customer service is the standard rather than a rare exception.

Rude (or downright hostile) customer service, apathy, and a thorny labyrinth of red tape characterize most of my experiences in public life. I could try to comfort myself by saying that all these things are a military issue and that those living outside our "DoD family" don't have to deal with this stuff...but that would not be true. It's not just the military system. The country is broken all over.

No one can make a list of tasks or errands and just go out and get it done, anymore. Well...no one except the most wealthy among us. Great wealth and power inspire fear, so those folks get the crap on their lists accomplished, but even that is misleading. I'd bet that very few people tell Donald Trump, "no." I'd also bet that he has an army of assistants who run his errands for him and that they get told, "no," just as often as you or I would. The wealth and power doesn't get the list done better, per say. It just insulates the wealthy and powerful from having to deal with the problems personally. The system doesn't work any better for the influential folks. They just have more help.

So what am I talking about with this babble about an impossible task list? Using my own list from yesterday as an example, I will attempt to explain. My to-do list was as follows:

· Doctor's Appointment at 10:30a.m. Sign in by 10:15.

· Vet's Office for 6 months of heartworm tablets and make appointment

· Get the A/C in the van fixed or get an appointment for it

· Go to the Commissary (grocer)

· Go to the PX (like a military Wal-Mart)

The Doctor's Office

I have a semi-serious health issue going on right now, and so I put on my big girl pants three days ago and began calling for an appointment. The first call, I got forwarded by a clueless admin at the front desk to a nurse's line. The nurse's line didn't answer, so I left a message. The next day, the nurse's line called me back and referred me back to the front desk. The kid at the front desk was the same one who talked to me the day before. He tried to transfer me back to the nurse's line, but I threatened to remove one of his testicles if he so much as put me on hold, so he gave me an appointment. Now you're caught up on the history of this thing.

At 10:15 on the button, I arrived at my doctor's office and signed in (had I signed in any later, they would've cancelled my appointment and made me reschedule, even though my appointment was not until 10:30. I made that mistake once before). Though morning is always a busy time of day for this office, they have never taken time or care to order sufficient seating for the number of patients waiting to be seen. There is an abundance of open floor space, up to 30 people waiting on any given morning, and only about 15 seats. My daughter and I stood against the wall with the other chair-less patients. After about 15 minutes, and very near the time of my actual appointment, I was taken back for vitals. Once done, I was returned to the waiting room to wait for my name to be called. Twenty minutes past my appointment time, I was walked back to an exam room. The doctor came in 10 minutes later (half hour past appointment time...and this was impressive given my past record with them). I like this guy. He is professional, seems sincere, and always tries to give his patients attention and appropriate diagnoses. He examined me, referred me for an ultrasound (I watched him type the referral into the system), and sent me on my way.

Once in the car, I called to schedule my ultrasound appointment. No one was available at the office. Per the automated voice system's instructions, I punched a series of buttons to find the correct voice mail, left a detailed message, and asked for a call back. This was approximately 11:30a.m.

The Vet's Office

Very near noon, I pulled up to the vet clinic. Since I did not have an appointment and had never been asked to do so on similar errands in the past, I did not sign the patient book. I walked straight to the counter to make my appointment and purchase the heartworm meds. After watching 5 women with no apparent task to do saunter around talking to one another for several minutes without acknowledging my presence or speaking to any of the other customers waiting, I was asked if I had signed in. I smiled politely and said, "No, I'm just here to buy some heartworm preventative and make an appointment." The lady stared at me for a long, awkward, and silent moment as if I had just slapped her in the face and she hadn't yet recovered from the blow to retaliate. "Ma'am," she said in that tone, "You need to sign in and wait until your name is called. We're very busy today, as you can see." Um. Okay. I signed the book.

Fully twenty minutes later, my name was called. A different woman (her name tag said Amber) was at the counter now, and she asked what I needed. I told her, gave her my ID and my beagle's name (it's Kioko). She clicked some keys and then her eyes scrunched up in thought. "Ma'am," Amber said, "We can't give you 6 months of heartworm because your dog is due for her annual heartworm test. We can only give you one at a time until she gets a test done." Frustration welled up, but I understand the reasons behind this rule. Heartworm preventative given to a dog with an advanced heartworm infestation can kill the dog. Since I knew there was a good reason for this rule, I submitted without comment or shooting anyone a dirty look (note that Amber didn't tell me why the rule existed. I just happened to know already).

"Okay," I said, "that's actually the other reason I'm here today. I need to make an appointment for Kioko to get her annual vaccines and tests." Amber's eyes brightened. She knew the answer for this one, and she poured it out so fast that the words jumbled in my ears, and I didn't understand most of it. I had to ask her to repeat herself...which, to her credit, she did very politely. "Okay, Ma'am, you can come in next Monday morning any time from 8-9am when we open up appointments for the week of September 20^th." I stopped her. "So, I can't get an appointment until 4 weeks from now, but I can't buy heartworm for this month and September?" Amber sighed and assembled her "patience face" before saying, "No, Ma'am, until she gets her heartworm test, you can only buy one per month." I continued, "You said I can't get the test until September 20^th , and Kioko will need another dose of preventative before then. I had to wait over half an hour just to buy one tab of HeartGuard from you, so you're saying I have to do that again?" Amber was losing her patience with me, now. "Yes, Ma'am, that's our policy." I think she shocked herself with her own curt tone, so she softened up a bit and added, "or you can come in for an open house on any Wednesday to try and see if you win a slot for an appointment someone cancelled on." I physically shook my head a little to clear it and this distressed poor Amber. I could tell. She thought she was giving me good news with that last bit. "I'm sorry, let me see if I understand. I can't get heartworm preventative for my beagle because she hasn't gotten her annual heartworm test, but I can't make an appointment to get her heartworm test today because you're booked solid for the next four weeks, and you won't open dates after that until Monday?" Amber nodded. "So in order to get an appointment, I have to drive up and see you—I can't call?" Amber shook her head and I went on, "...during the very same time I will be dropping my daughter off at school—which means I can't make it here in that timeslot—or I can drop in on a Wednesday and see if I get lucky with a cancellation?" "That's correct, Ma'am." She could hear that I wasn't appreciative of how kind she'd been, and she'd just about had it with me. "Your heartworm pill today will be $7.00, Ma'am." "Thanks for your help," I said.

I paid and walked out.

The Rest of the Day

I was hungry. My daughter was hungry. We were both hot and grumpy, now, and I was on the verge of homicide. We grabbed some nori rolls for lunch. I tried to improve my mood for the sake of my daughter's, and with a somewhat renewed temper, we headed off to complete the rest of the list.

We live on a tropical island. It is August. It's as hot as the Devil's hatred here right now, and the A/C in my van stopped blowing cold air last month. My first trip was to the auto shop we always use. The woman there apologized and said they had a broken gauge or something and could not help me. I asked for a recommendation to another shop, she gave me one, and I drove there. At the second place, I was told they didn't do that kind of work, but they knew who did. They gave me directions, and I went to the third vendor. "No, Ma'am, we don't fix air conditioners," was the response at place number three, and he didn't have any other advice or commentary to offer. I drove to the gas station on base and bought some cans of Freon.

The commissary and PX were a total success, which would've made me ecstatic on any other day. Generally, there are a few things on my list they don't carry (we eat a lot of produce, and produce variety is not our commissary's strong suit), and I have to hit several stores to find what I need. We're not talking about exotic plants here. I'm talking about celery or tomatoes. The PX is generally even worse for selection, but I only had two items to get: toilet paper and paper towels. Had it been something racier (like Scotch tape or socks in my daughter's size...we might have had a bit more trouble).

By 4:30pm, I had done all I could do. I was waiting for a return call on the ultrasound appointment, completely stumped about how to handle vet care for my dog, in possession of compressed gas for my A/C with no idea how to use it, and fully-stocked on toilet paper. Happy day.

We got home and I started dinner. At about five minutes before closing time, I received a call back from the ultrasound people. They could not see me for three weeks. "I'm in pain here, and it could be serious. Is there no way to fit me in sooner?" "Well, Ma'am, if you start bleeding really bad or the pain gets too bad, you can go to the ER and they'll send you up here before that." I was just done. I practically hissed, "So, if we let it go until it becomes life-threatening, you can see me, but until then, I'm out of luck?" I'm not even kidding you. The lady said, "Yep," and hung up on me.

After all that work and running around, I was only able to cross off 3 out of 5 errands, and only two of those were actually completed. I still hadn't received a diagnosis, my dog still didn't have an appointment for her annuals, my car was no closer to fixed, and an entire day of my life which I will never get back was over. I took some aspirin, ate dinner with my daughter, and went to bed. Do you really need someone to research why so many Americans are depressed? Life is like this for everyone. It's soul-sucking. This day was neither extraordinary in my life nor typical only to me. Most people I know deal with this every single day just to get their bills paid, their stuff maintained, and their lives managed. It's this hard, all the time, to get anything done...for everyone.

Nothing works, anymore.

America is no longer a nation able to support a well-oiled society. We've become too litigious, too isolated from one another, and too selfish to deal with our neighbors like civilized humans should. This is just as present in business relationships as it is in personal ones. Businesses in just about every industry have grown so large and so wealthy, that the way in which any individual customer gets handled is of no consequence and, therefore, of no concern. Losing that customer's business is not important. Satisfying that customer is not important. Monopolizing an industry is all that matters because once you've made your company the only choice out there, you won't need the customers, anymore. They will need you.

Megabanks swallowed up all the smaller banks, so they no longer treat the average American account holder with any respect. Very, very few individuals have enough wealth to threaten a bank into submission, and if an accountholder pulls all his money out of one megabank, his only alternatives are other megabanks with the same level of service. The entire medical profession is beholden to insurance companies, and the insurance providers are just like the banks. No individual patient is important. No individual doctor can effectively fight against regulations that impede his ability to provide appropriate care for his patients. Retailers may have retained their brand names on the storefront, but most of them have been swallowed up by mega-corporations. Clothing, groceries, electronics, department stores...it's all the same. Cable companies, phone companies, internet companies, cellular companies, and even basic utility companies have all been merged and acquired into the same mire of customer-crushing...hugeness.

What the customer wants, needs, or deserves is no longer important. He is just a number, and that number moves further and further right of the decimal point with each passing year.

Racism vs. Prejudice

2010-06-09T12:20:00.010+09:00

I haven't blogged here in a very long time, and I apologize. The reasons are multiple, and what it all boils down to is that I've been too busy with school and too angry about politics and the degradation of my national culture to sit down and analyze anything for the purposes of writing.

Today, however, I was compelled.

Those of you with a daily knowledge of me are all familiar with my regular indulgence in celebrity gossip. I love looking at the clothes and I really enjoy the schaudenfruede-esque satisfaction I get from watching the ever sought after combination of fame and wealth bring misery more often than happiness. So there you have it.

Anyhoodle, I frequent a particular celeb gossip website, and today they had up an article about a photoshoot with the lovely Jessica Alba. In it, she is wearing all sorts of edgy fashion pieces, and the comments on the website were varied in reaction. One commenter, we'll call her "X," chose to post a comment which made my right eyebrow twitch. The relevant portion is as follows:

"Indeed, Jessica Alba is very and absolutely beautiful. Excellent curves that many white ladies lack..."

The rabid gang-rape tendency of internet communities is no different on that website than anywhere else, and so a long list of other posters came in to annihilate this poster's character and drain her soul of any remaining will to live. A few were actually rational enough to point out the racist quality of her statement before jumping all over her, and still others attempted to make excuses for the poster. The excusers were the most interesting. Some of them examined possible childhood influences on X's racial attitudes while others simply claimed that the comment was true and/or no big deal. Then...the post which prompted me to respond went up. Another poster, who has claimed in past discussions on this site that she is a black American wrote the following:

"Oh good grief. Racism = prejudice + power. It’s pretty prejudiced (and misinformed) to say that white women don’t have curves, that’s patently ridiculous. But please, white women are the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, and are hardly talked poorly about (unlike darker skinned women). So, whatever on the claim of racism."

"Whatever," indeed.

I couldn't help myself after that and a flurry of keyboard clicking ensued. My response was as follows (although, I did go through it this morning and edit because it was full of the kind of content, grammar, and punctuation errors that I forgive in social forum posts...but not blogs):

Oh please. That is so tired.

Racism does NOT equal prejudice + power. That’s political psycho babble that activist groups have been spouting to stir up anger in voting pools and keep dissenting opinions out of the national discussion since the 60’s. Let’s be real about it. Stating with any seriousness that "only those in power can be racist" is just crazy ridiculous on several levels. It's denial, and it is a sad, tired crutch used by people who refuse to face their own biases or give up the scapegoats they have taken refuge in holding onto.

In fairness, a lot of people believe this drivel because they’ve been slammed with it over and over and over again in universities. The whole concept is a load of garbage, and any honest study of sociology with historical context proves me out. The reasons that otherwise good and honest people keep using this excuse are all very psych 101 and easy to understand, but it doesn't change the fact that it's decidedly untrue. It also makes the people using it look an awful lot like a big, fat pot pointing frantically across the kitchen at a kettle.

Racism is a persistent belief that one race is superior to another and/or a hatred of persons of a particular race based on race alone.

Prejudice is not racism, and it is not the same emotion from which racism springs. Prejudice is a preconceived expectation, fear, or opinion. Sometimes, prejudice is based on experience. Other times, a person might have no evidence at all for a prejudice and be totally unable to explain why s(he) holds it. Prejudice can apply to any area of life…certainly not just race or even people in general. Most prejudices can be changed or worked totally away through experiences or demonstrated evidence which offer an alternative to the prejudicial concept. Most people make these adjustments on a daily basis without even thinking about it.

Prejudice is something that every human being on earth has in some form or other. It is not evil. It is not hateful. It is normal and natural and unavoidable. Anyone who honestly believes he has no prejudice is seriously good at deluding himself...because he does.

Hatred and prejudice are not the same thing, and hatred of a race of people, with or without the power to oppress that race, is still hatred…and it’s still racism.

There is no neat absolution for those groups who don’t have or believe they don’t have power for indulging in racism. I don’t care which philosophy or PoliSci teacher told you there was. Hatred is ugly no matter who the poor bastard on the business end of it is, and powerlessness is no excuse for perpetuating the ugliest side of humanity.

X's comment was racist because the tenor of it suggests that X not only believes that white women's bodies don't have curves, but also that this lack of curves makes white women inferior in beauty to women of other races.

That’s why it’s a racist rather than a prejudiced comment…and it is racist whether white girls have great salaries and a full complement of civil rights or not.

2010-01-05T13:58:00.000+09:00

Why I Married a Military Man

2009-07-30T03:57:00.002+09:00

I have rarely been so angry on my husband's behalf as I was when John Kerry made a gaffe-ish slip during his presidential campaign, insinuating that the average education and understanding of most military personnel was so low that they didn't really comprehend why or how they got out there in the deserts of Iraq.

The jokes that are so popular about how stupid Marines are; the Hollywood portrayals of soldiers being violent, thoughtless walls of meat; the media's refusal to tell the truth about the varied and vital work that our military members do every single day on nearly every continent on earth to protect America and better the world...well, I just lost my tolerance for all of it after Kerry's little "misstatement."

The fact is...men and women who volunteer for military service like that young man in the video (and like my husband) tend to be some of the most socially and politically aware people I have ever met. They know their history. They know what they're doing and why. They join up for all kinds of reasons. They have all different levels of formal education. They come from all over the country. They come from every racial, religious, and socio-economic background in our diverse population, and so generalizations are hard to make. In my experience, however, there are several common threads. Among them are patriotism, interest in government policy, a general knowledge of history, and a desire to protect the United States, its people, and its Constitution.

Military men are appealing for many reasons. They're strong. They're fit. They ooze masculinity and authority. The uniforms...c'mon, enough said. In addition to all that stereotypical stuff (which became stereotypical because it's true), military men have the added charm of being passionately driven in their need to defend and represent something larger than themselves. There is nothing sexier than a man with righteous principles who would literally die to protect you.

Just LOOK at this young man.

Does he seem irrational, unhinged, lost, out of touch, or uneducated to you? He sure as hell doesn't to me.

The next time you see the media run yet another story about the latest bag of ass soldier who did something illegal, stupid, or violent...just look at this video and remember that this man is what our military really looks like, and this man is the one the media doesn't think you'll tune in to see.

A Naive Notion

2009-07-30T02:24:00.007+09:00

Representative John Conyers, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said last Friday:

“I love these members who get up and say, ‘read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s 1000 pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

Earlier in the month, Congressman Steny Hoyer actually indulged himself with a smug chuckle before expressing a similar sentiment in response to a pledge that was circulating through Congress urging legislators to commit to reading what they vote for:

“If every member pledged to not vote for [a bill] if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes.’’

Gentlemen…We aren‘t laughing.

As I stated in the letter I wrote to Congress on July 4th of this year, the American People have an expectation that people writing and voting for legislation in this country will be familiar with that legislation before they pass it. The reigning sentiment among our government leaders seems to be that “the folks” simply don’t understand how things “are done” up in Washington. Oh, but they have that backward. We are not naïve. The problem isn’t naiveté on the part of the American People. The problem is obtuse, arrogant elected leaders who’ve gotten too big for their britches. Ladies and Gentlemen of Congress, it is you who don’t understand how things get done out here.

We know that you can’t read a 1,500 page monstrosity filled with legalese that would make Einstein himself go cross-eyed if you are only given two days.

We know that you can’t read hundreds of pages of addenda that get added to these tomes on the day before a vote.

We also know that if these bills are too complex, lengthy, and esoteric for the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Majority Leader to understand, then something has got to change. It’s time to take a look at how you’re writing laws up there in D.C. instead of laughing at the people who elected you to do your jobs. It’s time for that transparency Speaker Pelosi promised us back in November.

Our expectations are simple:

1.) We want you to demand concise, honest, and effective bills.

2.) We want you to vote “no” on anything unreadable that comes to the floor.

3.) We want you to vote “no” on anything with hidden pork.

4.) We want you to vote “no” on anything with addenda attached so late that you did not have time to read them before the vote.

We want the dishonesty to stop. We want the usurpation of Congress’ authority that these monstrous bills represent to stop. How do you stop it? How do you change it? Easy. Vote “NO.”

Congressman Hoyer was wrong when he said there would be very few votes if legislators refused to pass bills without reading them. There would be more votes…more no votes. If you make it clear that you will not tolerate this corrupt form of legislation, you will begin--and quickly--to see better bills being written.

Legislation too complicated for the army of lawyers in Congress to comprehend is too complicated to be passed. Embrace that perspective or lose your seat. That’s the offer on the table.

If you cannot understand the bill, then either you are incompetent or the bill is a piece of garbage. If the first is true, then you need to get out of my capital building. If, as I suspect, the second is the truth, then you need to stand up do the right thing.

It is that simple.

The way you are doing things right now doesn’t work. Down here in the real world, we stop doing things when they stop working for us. We adapt and overcome. If you’re not up to the challenge of changing the broken system, then get the hell out our way.

The level of disdain--nay--the level of loathing that we, the American People hold for our Congress right now would be hard to overstate. Do you not understand that? Don’t you know what you look like to us? We loathe you. We’re not “irritated.” We’re not “confused.” We’re not just a mass of peasants stirring over issues we don’t understand. No. We hired you to do a job. Do it. Do it or get out.

It is not a lack of understanding that prompts the People to demand that you read the bills, Congress. If you want to dig in your heels, lift your noses, and refuse to accept the justice of what we’re asking you to do, then you better start padding your backsides because we’re gonna start tossing you out on them in 2010.

Twilight at Midday

2009-07-22T11:55:00.002+09:00

Today, I got to experience a total solar eclipse (well...90%). At 11:00am, I walked out into my backyard with my camera. It was dark as twilight outside, but the light was wrong. Because it happened in late morning, we had an extended dawn, so to speak. It just never got light out this morning until the eclipse passed us by a few minutes past eleven. I took this picture, careful not to look directly at the white sun. The halo you see was outlined by a very defined 360-degree rainbow prism. You can't really make out the color bands in the photo, which is a shame. It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen in the sky.

Friends Who Hunt

2009-07-18T01:31:00.002+09:00

During the 2nd day of Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings for the United States Supreme Court, America’s favorite Wise Latina made a telling comment. When discussing her disposition towards the Second Amendment, she defended her left-leaning stance by saying that America should know that she is not biased in her views of gun control saying, “…and I have friends who hunt.” You have got to be kidding me.

She’s got friends who hunt.

What on earth has that fact got to do with her disposition towards adjudicating gun control or with the spirit and intentions behind We the People having a Constitutional right to keep and bear arms? Well, I suppose if you want to argue that the founders stuck that whole gun thing into the Constitution with a primary goal of making sure we’d all be able to obtain venison or game birds to eat whenever we like, then it’s a salient point. Otherwise…well, let’s take a gander at otherwise, shall we? Let’s just start with the source material and look at the actual text of the 2nd Amendment in our Bill of Rights:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

What does that even mean? What exactly is a militia? What did the term “militia” mean back in the eighteenth when all the lads got together and put the Bill of Rights down on paper? What does the term militia mean for Americans today?

Starting with the simplest definition, we find that a militia is a group of citizen soldiers (civilians) from within the population as opposed to professional soldiers (military) who are trained and paid by the government to exercise its will. The purpose of militia groups, both in 1789 and today, is to take up arms to defend life, property, or country in the absence of a government military/police force to do it for them. If the government-sponsored military and police forces are too weak to defend the republic, militias can organize from within the populace to do that work for themselves. If the government-sponsored military and police forces become enemies of the populace through tyranny, then the people can form a militia to revolt and overthrow the tyrants. This second, revolutionary purpose is arguably the one our founders had foremost in their minds when creating the Bill of Rights. They had just begun a new country after fighting their own revolution against the tyranny of England. The precious value of a patriotic militia was fresh in their minds, and they wanted to make sure that this new government would never be allowed to prevent the people from having an ability to rise up again if necessary. Second only to the freedoms of speech, assembly, and the free expression of religion, our founders placed the right of private citizens to arm themselves at the top of their priority list.

Fast forward almost exactly 220 years to the present day. Today’s America has very little notion of revolution. Many of us don’t have an understanding of why the 2nd Amendment is even needed anymore. We don’t see any relevance of a right to own firearms in today’s society. Guns are dangerous. Gun crime is scary. It’s not like it’s the Wild West, anymore, when people needed to hunt for food and defend themselves from predators. This isn’t 1789. Back then…we get it. Obviously, people needed guns back then. Today? Well, today, we have a bunch of people, including children, dying in accidental shootings. Young men and innocent bystanders die all the time in gang-related gun violence. A lot of homicides are committed with guns. Many suicides are carried out with guns. A lot of violent things happen in this country at gunpoint. With all these horrible truths in front of us, how can so many people insist that we need to keep a legal right for private ownership of firearms? Don’t they see it? We can use tasers, pepper spray, kick-boxing classes, and home security systems for self-defense. We have 911, meat as far as the eye can see in sterile plastic packaging, and the most powerful military in the world. Police will protect your home, the grocer will supply you with meat at affordable prices, and the Marines don’t need militia support, thank you very much. Why in the hell would any sane American citizen want to own a gun?

We are, indeed, a cosseted bunch of folks. The idea of gathering your neighbors together and taking up arms against a tyrannical government is just not anywhere near the top of our consciousness as a society today.

…but it should be.

In 1929, Stalin implemented confiscatory gun control despite a constitutionally-granted right to bear arms in Soviet Russia. From that time until 1953 (when Stalin left this world and went straight to Hell), approximately 22 million civilians were executed in an extension of Lenin’s “Red Terror” campaign or died in the gulags. In addition to the millions of murders committed against this starving and impotent population, Stalin used their defenseless state to take their property, steal crops from the farmers, and instill a bone-grinding fear of the government.

The Nazis exercised gun control, as well, but they limited their scope. Though many groups were deemed “undesirable,” and suffered persecution under the Nazis, only the Jews were kept disarmed by Hitler’s regime. In fact, Germany was disarmed as a whole before Hitler’s ascendancy. It was done in a misguided attempt to prevent revolutionary overthrow of the lawful government. The result, as we know, was a bit contrary to the intent.

Turn on your television or Google “violence in Iran.” Go to YouTube and watch videos from Tiananmen Square in 1989. What do you see? Look hard. These are not tales of fiction. These things happened. Millions upon millions of human beings died violent, horrifying deaths in these events. What did they have in common?

What you see, Boys and Girls, is what it looks like when a populace is disarmed and then tyranny takes over. It is violent. It is terrifying. It is evil…and in every single example, you will find that the guys on the side of evil were the only ones with any guns. The people cannot effectively fight back. They cannot get out; they cannot change their government; and they are impotent to fight against it. Throwing rocks or standing in front of a tank may get your point across, but it cannot stop that soldier with a rifle or the gunner on that tank. There have been genocides and horrific human rights violations perpetrated against people by their own governments throughout history. You will almost universally find, among a host other similarities, that these tyrannical regimes disarm the populace before the violence begins in earnest. In contrast, during WWII, Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor. Top military brass in Japan originally played with the idea of attacking the mainland, but Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto knew any such plan would end in failure. According to legend, Yamamoto told his officers:

“You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

Yamamoto san probably never actually uttered those words, but it’s an excellent illustration of the point, and it’s something to think about. Americans have historically been armed to the hilt. There have been guns in American homes since the first boat came ashore, and the English met with a bit more resistance when rounding up American rebels than tyrants suppressing a disarmed populace have generally encountered throughout history. It’s true that farmers are easy targets…unless they have guns and neighbors. In America, our farmers have always had guns…and so have their neighbors.

The concept of a well-regulated militia being necessary is neither alarmist nor outdated. A militia is not a group of twitchy conspiracy theorists making bombs in a cabin off the grid in Montana. The ability to raise a militia is one of the many methods provided for We the People in our Bill of Rights to keep our government in its place. America is a republic. In a republic, the government must remain subservient to the will of the people. Our ability to wave a gun around when the government gets lippy is essential to the survival of that basic principle.

You cannot say that you love the Constitution out of one side of your mouth while advocating for confiscatory gun control out of the other. There is a reason our founders made sure that the government would never be allowed to disarm us, and there is a reason they put it at the top of the list. I’ll give you a hint:

It had nothing to do with hunting.

John Kerry is an Asshole

2009-07-12T04:53:00.004+09:00

The Boston Herald had this story today. I'm tellin' ya...this guy just keeps makin' America proud, doesn't he? Edit 07/30/09: The Boston Herald link went to paid archive access only, so I'm providing new links to the same story from other outlets.

L.A. Times Blogs

Newsmax

The Huffington Post

The basic gist is that during a conversation with peers (that's code for "very wealthy elitist snobs"), John Kerry was regaling them all with the "bizarre" tale of Governor Sanford's four-day disappearance early in the month. As we all now know, the governor was schtupping his extra-curricular activity down in Argentina while his wife and the kids got to wonder where he had run off to. Anyway, Kerry finished the conversation by saying, no doubt with that sneering attempt at a satirical smile on his face:

"Too bad if a governor had to go missing, it couldn't have been the governor of Alaska. You know...Sarah Palin."

I guess the frat boys didn't tell him that making Palin jokes is so last year.

I suppose we should be grateful he didn't make sex or retard jokes about her children or accuse her of felony fraud.

Words Matter

2009-07-11T21:11:00.007+09:00

The summer before I began 10th grade, my family moved to the St. Louis area from Batesville, Arkansas. I was fifteen and from a small town. I was moving from a graduating class of 80-something students at Batesville Junior High School to a graduating class of more than 400 at Parkway South High School in Manchester, Missouri. I was scared out of my mind in the way that all teen girls tend to be at the prospect of sweeping change and fresh judgment from new peers. It was during this nerve-riddled year of my life that I studied English under Mr. Mike Hopkins. Mr. Hopkins taught us that words mean things. Like all great teachers, Mr. Hopkins loved his subject, and he taught us a new vocabulary word every day in addition to his larger lesson plan. My English class swiftly became the only place I felt comfortable in that first year, and I babbled and vented and over-participated in the class as a result. I don’t think Mr. Hopkins liked me very much, but I adored both him and being in his class. Now, at the advanced age of 34, I still remember his kind voice guiding us through poetry analysis, American novels, and the beauty of knowing “just the right word.” I sincerely hope that Mike Hopkins is still teaching because I credit him with being the first adult in my life to talk about the evil that can result from using the wrong words.

Today, America is using a lot of the wrong words. We label things incorrectly to make people feel better, to make ourselves look better, or--worst of all--to deceive others into going along with something they would object to if we labeled it truthfully. This column will serve to focus on one such false label: The Debate over Immigration. I contend that the current national dialogue being referred to as a debate about immigration is nothing of the sort. America is a nation of immigrants, and the overwhelming majority of Americans will tell you how much they love the diverse cultural, racial, and ethnic population of our country. We all either descended from immigrants or are immigrants ourselves, and we welcome all new immigrants with open arms. Very few Americans from any part of the political spectrum would disagree with me in this assertion or argue over any part of it. Immigrants are what we are. Immigrants are our history. America loves immigrants.

The current debate we’re having in this country is not about immigrants and it’s not about immigration. The debate we’re having in this country is about the 7-20 million aliens currently living in America illegally. The debate began as an honest discussion of what in the world we should do about all these criminals in our midst after the terrorist attacks in September of 2001. Sure, we’d talked about this problem before, but it became a front-and-center issue for many Americans for the first time after 9/11. What did illegal aliens mean for national security? What kind of strain were they really causing to our economy? What kind of human rights violations were some of these people participating in to get here? What was the real level of burden these people were placing on our police force and the criminal justice system? Who was hiring all these people? Who was hiding them? Why couldn’t anyone find them and make them go home? Why weren’t they availing themselves of the naturalization process to become American citizens? As a nation we asked all these questions, but we got very few answers. We called it a debate over border control and illegal aliens. As time went by, objections to the word alien arose, and we were told by the media to call it a debate over border security and illegal immigrants or undocumented workers. “Fair enough,” we said, and we changed these words in our discourse. The next step in this softening of the truth had us drop border security altogether from the title of our debate…and, in the end, we allowed the language to shift us so far off course that we don’t even call it illegal immigration anymore. What started as a debate about what we should do to combat the troublesome pattern of foreign individuals living illegally in our country and how we should secure the southern border…became a debate between those who are “pro-immigrant” and those who are “anti-immigrant.”

…and that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is where I have to draw the line.

This switch in terminology is not limited to any one party, faction, or segment of society. The mainstream media, bloggers, and even conservative talk radio hosts have adopted the whitewashed term of “immigration” as a substitute for anything that would accurately describe the substance of our national argument over these issues. It’s dishonest. We’re not talking about immigrants. We’re talking about illegal aliens. We’re not talking about race. We’re talking about national security and border control. We’re not talking about immigration reform. We’re talking about law enforcement.

Five years ago, the media would’ve referred to me as a person who wanted stronger border security and considered the encroachment of illegal aliens as an important domestic policy issue. Today, the media calls me anti-immigrant. My stance hasn’t changed. The issue hasn’t changed. Only the words have changed. The definitions of words are important. Language is communication and words are language. If we are to talk to each other about anything with any level of honesty, then we have to use the right words.

So why have the words changed? “Why” is the most important question anyone could ask in this discussion. Who wanted the words changed? Why did they want the words changed? Who is being shut down by the changing of the words? Who looks better when the lie replaces the truth? Most importantly, why hasn't anyone been asking these questions in public...and out loud?

Americans need to take this argument back. We need to sit and discuss these issues honestly. We need to refuse the false words and start using the truthful ones. I am the descendent of English, French, and German immigrants. Each of them became an American and participated in the generations that brought our country into greatness. I am not opposed to immigration or immigrants. I never have been, I never will be, and I refuse to allow myself to be labeled as anti-immigrant.

I am anti-amnesty. I am anti-criminal. I am pro-law enforcement, and I am pro-border security.

What words describe you?

Regarding Sarah

2009-07-09T02:18:00.003+09:00

I’ll start by disclosing that I am a season ticket holder for Team Sarah. I drank the Kool-aid and then I ordered seconds. I’ve held off from talking about Sarah Palin on this blog in the past because I didn’t see any point in it. There is another reason for my silence, too, and that is my general resolution to refrain from blogging when I’m angry. I try not to analyze things when I’m overly emotional. Whenever I talk about Sarah Palin, I get angry, so I’ve abstained totally from discussing her in public. Be that as it may, I do not see anyone else out there in the world of politics or government representing my opinions about Mrs. Palin today. No one in the media, apparently, sees this quite the way I do.

So yeah. It’s time. I’m gonna talk about Sarah.

Last week, Sarah Palin announced that she will step down from her position as the governor of Alaska. It is the overwhelmingly negative media response to this fact that prompted me to write about this today. Even on talk radio, all I hear is, “I cannot understand why she did this,” and “it’s a mystery to me,” or “I have no idea what she’s doing here.” I have three things to say in reply to all this hand-wringing and finger-pointing.

First, shame on the right-wing commentators who are dumping insult upon injury from behind a microphone. Today, I heard a chorus of obtuse arrogance like, “I get threats every day, and I didn’t quit,” or “You should see the horrible things people say to me, and you don’t hear me complaining.” If you really think your situation is analogous with Sarah’s, let me disillusion you. You don’t have your children being used as the butt of sexual jokes on national television, and you don’t have a list of frivolous ethical and criminal charges the length of your arm on your desk that keep you away from your microphone 3 days out of 5. In addition to these facts, most of you are multi-millionaires. The Palins are not. I don’t expect you to relate to the financial ruination this could bring to the Palin family, but it certainly should have occurred to you before you opened your mouths to call her a dirty quitter. There is no comparison that you can possibly make between the hate mail you receive and the untenable situation in which Sarah Palin now finds herself. She is not quitting because of the name-calling, the insults, and the hate mail. It is arrogance and deliberate blindness for you to behave as though she’s taking some sort of coward’s way out in all this. I expected that brand of filth from the left. It’s inexcusable coming from conservative talk radio, however, and I’m ashamed of all of you.

Second, Sarah Palin was very specific about why she stepped down. She stepped down because she was not able to do her job for Alaska in the current political climate, and she stepped down because her family was suffering terribly under the weight of the hatred they’ve been daily receiving since August 29th of last year. Her family has been excoriated in the press in a way that no politician’s family has ever been asked to endure before. Her husband Todd, her son Trigg, and her daughter Bristol have all been under a microscope filled with hatred and malignant cruelty the likes of which America has never allowed before toward the family of a candidate. It was beyond uncivilized. It has been barbaric. Yes, her family signed up for a campaign. They did not sign up for what they got. As to the accusation that Sarah is betraying the people of Alaska, I will remind everyone that spending the vast majority of her time with lawyers to combat frivolous lawsuits is not what the people of Alaska hired her to do. She’s not abandoning them. She’s doing the right thing by getting out of the way so that her distractions will not drag Alaska down with her. Her lieutenant governor is a competent and involved man who will ably carry on the administration’s goals. His name was on the ticket, too, you know. They didn’t just vote for Sarah. They voted for Palin/Parnell.

Third and finally, I’m hearing a lot of panic from the right about how this will damage Sarah forever and she’ll never get an opportunity to run for president with such a blemish on her career. That’s ridiculous. I read an article on the Laura Ingraham message boards today that was posted by another commenter there. The article, called “The Palin Potential,” was written by Dr. Jack Wheeler on Monday, and it discussed Nixon’s rise in the 60’s. Nixon’s career was over by 1963. He lost a presidential election to Kennedy in 1960 and then he turned around to lose the gubernatorial race for California in 1962. He was finished…totally irrelevant and irretrievably ruined in national politics. Then, he used his fame and ability to draw an audience to help scores of Republican candidates for Congress all over the country win or keep their seats in the next election. He went state-to-state delivering speeches, shaking hands, energizing the base, and gaining loyalty, respect, and favors from everyone in the party. The next time he put his name in the hat, you all know what happened. This game is not over. If Sarah wants to play the game, there is still more than enough room for her on the field. She has 15 months to get out there, draw in the crowds, help Republicans win back Congress, and learn the things she needs to know in national politics. She is neither down nor out in my book.

The sad thing is that in today’s cynical political world, no one knows how to recognize the truth when someone says it straight out. Sometimes, there’s not anything between the lines to read. Sometimes, there’s no grand conspiracy to sniff out. For most of us living out here in the unwashed mass, when we say something out loud…well, we mean it. Sarah Palin isn’t like one of you. She’s like one of us. It really can be that simple, Y’all.

For those, like me, who look kindly upon Sarah Palin, we see in her that “something different” we’ve been begging for since Ronald Reagan moved out of the big house. Palin is a true, capital-C Conservative. Her first allegiance has always been to her causes…never to her party. She is an American first, a Conservative second, and a Republican somewhere much, much further down the list. She is a poster child for average America. She is not wealthy. She is not an elitist fresh from the ivy-choked halls of a patrician university. She is committed to small government and willing to suffer the career consequences of remaining stalwart in that commitment (such as being called a “slut” on Letterman and being forced by conscience to give up her gubernatorial title amid accusations of having ulterior and mercenary motives). She is incorruptible in many ways because she can be held over the flame by neither money nor a desire to maintain her standing with the elite social class in Washington. She has never had either and consequently cannot be threatened by their loss. She doesn’t belong to the Beltway. She belongs to us. We love her strength. We love her principles. We love her background. And…we love that she is still green. We don’t care that she has a lot to learn because we know that she will learn it by the time we need her to know it. We see in her a woman untainted by the poisonous amorality and avarice of Washington. It’s honesty. It’s charisma. Together! When was the last time we had anyone trustworthy in D.C.? When was the last time someone who made the moldy machine nervous on both sides of the aisle stepped into the fore? She doesn’t fit. She doesn’t match. She doesn’t belong. And, yet, there she stands. This is what we see when we look at her, and her stepping down reinforces that for us plain, unwashed folks in the American trenches.

So for Rich Lowry, Juan Williams, Joe Pagliarulo, and even Laura Ingraham…stop being shocked and remember who we’re dealing with here. No one called Obama, Hillary, or McCain quitters for leaving-without-leaving during the presidential campaign. Politicians check out from their jobs without leaving anyone there to fill in for them all the time without being called on it. There are lame ducks all over Congress, and no one calls them names. Sarah Palin stepped up…and when the situation required it of her…she stepped down. It’s a fair ball, Ladies and Gentlemen. I’m just sorry that so many of you refuse to see it that way.

My Act of Sedition

2009-07-02T21:33:00.003+09:00

The following is a letter I will be distributing to each member of The House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate on July 4, 2009.

------------

Distinguished ladies and gentlemen of Congress,

I am a 34 year-old American woman. I was born in the Great State of Arkansas and I have also been privileged to live in Missouri, Colorado, Indiana, and California. Though I currently reside on MCB Camp McTureous in Uruma City on Okinawa, Japan, I am represented in the House by Congressman Darrel Issa of the 49th District of California and in the Senate by Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. I am fiscally conservative, socially moderate, morally Judeo-Christian, and socio-economically ensconced in the Middle Class. That being the case, my views are, according to most polls, representative of a very, very large portion of the voting population. Given that, it would be in your best interest to listen to what I have to say.

The following is a list of ten conditions that a candidate for any government office must meet in order to earn my future votes. In the absence of such a candidate, I will refuse the exercise of my right to suffrage and, instead, exercise my First Amendment right to assemble with my countrymen and demand that better men step forward so that we may no longer have to endure a choice between evils. It is my fervent hope that you will hear my voice and work to restore my faith in the American system of governance. That hope is the reason that I write this letter to you all. Our republic is in peril, Ladies and Gentlemen, and it does not matter whether any among you agree with me in that statement. My countrymen agree with me; that I know, and you work for us.

My conditions are these:

1.) Stand up for the Americans who elected you.

When was the last time any of you woke up in the morning and said to yourselves, “Today, I am going to be an instrument of The People?” Don’t answer that out loud because, if I have to listen to one more of you “um” and “ah” your way through thirty seconds of stuttering, meaningless blather in response to a question that matters to me--well, I might just lose it. When you sputter on incoherently after being asked to make a statement, what is it that you‘re trying to accomplish? What has happened to you? I mean, I assume that at some point in your lives, each of you had to display some strength, some passion, or some conviction. Otherwise, you would not occupy the offices you hold. So how have you become so weak? Who do you think you’re fooling with this non-committal nonsense? I’m here to tell you that you’re not being sensitive or politically correct. You’re not being circumspect and you’re certainly not being dignified. No. You’re being cowards. To paraphrase Robert Frost, we need you to be strong enough to “take your own side” in an argument. We are weary of being subjected to supposedly well-educated and competent members of government who are utterly incapable of forming coherent sentences when asked to stand for something. We’re not interested in what you think, anymore, and we’re for damned sure not interested in the deals you’re brokering all over Washington for personal gain. We’re not interested in how many lobbyists call you every day, and we don’t care about how much money you could lose if you vote the wrong way in these double and triple-play tit-for-tats you engage in behind the scenes. No. NO. We are only interested in how well you represent what we think. We need you to get reacquainted with your spine, your patriotic convictions, and your spirit of service. If you cannot stand up and declare definitively for the beliefs and wishes of your constituents then you need to get out of my capital city and pursue a life elsewhere.

2.) Show some humility and respect for your constituents.

A great many of you routinely put your personal interests and agendas above those of your constituents. You do not answer letters. Do you even read them? Most of you have lackeys answering your phones without even the pretense of respect or professionalism. The rest of you just let it go to voice mail. People calling to speak with one of you are laughed at, cursed at, dismissed, condescended to, or unceremoniously disconnected if they have the presumption to ask you an uncomfortable question. You shake hands with one another and wink over voting arrangements that go expressly against the wishes of the American People. Your approval ratings are lower than they have ever been in history. Americans are seething with righteous anger at your antics, and You. Do. Not. Care. To you, We the People are nothing more than an unwashed mass you have to lower yourselves to tip a hat toward now and then. I believe that many of you have gotten so far removed from anything that even resembles the life of an average American that you have either dehumanized us in your minds or else you honestly believe we are too unintelligent to know our own interests. Despite this advanced evolutionary state you dwell in, you are still answerable to the American voters. We don’t like being spoken down to. We don’t like being ignored. We don’t like being lied to. Congress has forgotten that its role is to fear the people. It is only through fear of the people that the wishes of the people can be sure of accurate representation in government. America does not brook royalty. America does not suffer kings. When you elevate yourself to a class above the people, you invite revolution. You must fear the American people or you will be overthrown. Some of the more reactionary and least-versed in history among you may be squirming in your seats right now thinking, “Did she seriously just threaten me?” Calm yourselves, but don’t lose your unease. As Thomas Jefferson said,

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

So, you see, I am not threatening you with anything but the loss of my vote. Make no mistake, however, you should fear the loss of my vote. You are supposed to fear the wrath of the people. Embrace that fear and use it. It will make you better at your job.

3.) Stop Gerrymandering.

Most Americans still don’t know what this word, “gerrymandering,” means, and so you have enjoyed that ignorance in an era of unchecked kingdom building that needs to stop today. Those of us who are familiar with the word’s meaning and its practice have looked on, annoyed, as we watched you slice and dice neighborhoods according to partisan whims. Annoyance has given way to indignation as we watch this practice grow more brazen and extreme. Through constant micro-redistricting, you have set up your own little fiefdoms where political competition is almost nonexistent and the complacence of an assured reelection has allowed more than a few of you to stagnate in political sloth. The people in these gerrymandered districts have been robbed of their Constitutional right to representative government. That, dear members of Congress, smacks of treason against the people, and our response the last time we were being led by a government this hostile and corrupt was revolution. Your people are stirring, Ladies and Gentlemen. Seditious anger is growing throughout the country because we see what you are doing. If you want to keep your seat, earn it…don’t steal it. Stop the gerrymandering. Stop it today…and give us our votes back.

4.) Don’t sign a bill if you haven’t read it yourself.

First, I cannot believe that I have to say this to you. There is literally a bitter taste on my tongue as I write this. You should, each of you, hang your head in shame. These things need to be said out loud, and the level of disdain I hold for each and every one of you because of that necessity would be hard to overstate. Do your own work, Congress! We didn’t elect your administrative assistant, a gaggle of adoring college interns, or a speed reading team from Temps R Us for any post that I’m aware of in any part of the United States government. We elected you. Your votes can spend billions of our dollars, change the structure of our government, and affect the daily lives of more than 350 million people. Given that, what in God’s Great Name is wrong with you that you think there could ever be a situation that would justify voting for legislation you have not read? Maybe--just maybe--you should write shorter bills. There is no problem complex enough to require 1,500 pages to encapsulate coherent legislation on the topic. If I’m wrong about that, then perhaps you should prepare the bills presented for law more than a few days prior to the vote. Do you really imagine that we are that stupid? We know that these huge bills you’re signing are huge by design. We know that you are using these ridiculous tomes to hide things from us so that you can spend our money, trample our liberty, and change our government without our knowledge or consent. For the love of all that’s good, do any of you even recall what appropriate shame feels like? The arrogance! The dishonor! It’s disgraceful, and I demand you put an end to it.

5.) Don’t sign a bill with amendments which do not pertain directly to the main purport of the bill.

Pork…it’s a breakfast meat, not a political strategy. We understand that it’s tasty, but we also understand that when eaten to excess or consumed while undercooked, the consequences can be fatal. Got that? I sincerely hope you do…because We do. We understand it perfectly, and we are watching.

6.) Stop spending money you don’t have.

I’ll give you another metaphorical anecdote for this one. Here in the Nix house, we have a budget. There was a quilt on sale in the Kadena Exchange recently. It was a good deal, and it was beautiful. The problem with buying it was that purchasing the quilt would have necessitated the purchase of matching curtains, sheets, and - perhaps - some new throw pillows or decorative rugs to finish the picture properly. I sadly brushed my fingers over the quilt and left it on the shelf. Why would I have done that? Don’t I want my bedroom to be lovely? Don’t I want to give both myself and my family the best of everything? Yes, of course I do, but my mother gave me great advice when I was younger. She said, “Amy, a good bargain is no bargain at all if you can’t afford it.” I could easily afford to buy the quilt, but I couldn’t afford the other things that would make the quilt worth having in the first place. My old quilt, by comparison, is functional and attractive. Everything in my bedroom matches the old quilt. I don’t have enough money to scrap everything and start over. If I were to buy all the new things in spite of the fact that I don’t have enough money to pay for them, it would throw my family’s budget into chaos for months. We would have to sacrifice on things we really need. We would have to pay fines to the bank when the deficit came to light. So I left the quilt where it was and went home to mend a hole in the seam of my old quilt and dust off the window dressings I already own. You cannot spend money you do not have. It’s common sense. Apparently, many of you didn’t have good mothers like mine to teach you that lesson. Either that, or you chose to ignore your upbringing and spend money like a celebrity with a coke habit in spite of your excellent mothers.

Whichever your error may have been, you need to put yourselves on a budget, get some therapy, go to rehab, pay your overdraft fees, and come back to the table with an eye on fiscal responsibility. If you don’t, you will damage the dollar to such a degree that it will never recover. Indeed, you may already have done irreparable damage. It will only get worse from here. You need to start repealing, retrenching, and reevaluating, and you need to start today. You want me to sacrifice? You want the Americans out of work to sacrifice? All I can say is, “You first.”

7.) Give us border security and stop threatening to pass amnesty for illegal immigrants.

We have spoken loudly and clearly as a nation on this subject. We, the actual current voters…like right now, the legally registered taxpayer citizens--today. Yet despite the fact that a great majority of actual Americans want a wall, no amnesty, and tougher reinforcement of existing immigration law, you persist in grand plans for grooming these criminals into a fresh pool of voters who will be friendly to your side and, someday, be legally able to vote for you. In spite of the national security risk our bleeding borders present; in spite of the disproportionate levels of violent crime in the illegal immigrant population; in spite of the overwhelming burden these criminals place on our social services and medical systems; and in spite of the fact that these criminals are…criminals, all you can see is future voters. You get on television and say over and over again that people who don’t want amnesty are anti-immigrant. These people aren’t immigrants! They’re illegal aliens. I don’t know a single person on either side of the political spectrum who doesn’t want new immigrants in this country. I also do not know a single person on either side of the political spectrum who does want amnesty for illegal aliens.

I’ve met several couples in my tenure as a Marine Corps spouse in which one of the partners is a naturalized citizen. They followed the rules and followed the law. We rejoice with them and openly embrace them as our countrymen. These are immigrants, and Americans love immigrants. People who cross a border illegally, take illegal jobs, pay no taxes, report no earnings, send their kids to our schools using free lunch programs, give birth to babies using free medical care in our hospitals, send most of their money back to their home country, feel entitled to remain here while daily breaking the law, and have no intention of becoming naturalized citizens? Those people are not immigrants. Never have been. Never will be.

Do as you’re told…for once! Stop salivating over what you perceive as a deep fount of possible political leverage and do the right thing. Stop being scared of the word “racist.” Stop calling illegal aliens by the same name as the immigrants who followed the law and became Americans. Stop calling those of us who are enraged at the lack of response from our government on this massive breach of both national security and law enforcement at every level “anti-immigrant.” Fix the system so that immigration is more sensible and timely. Punish the law breakers. Get control of the borders. Deal with this issue, and deal with it according to the wishes of those who elected you…not according to the wishes of the criminals who might one day re-elect you if they receive pardons and subsequently maybe decide to become citizens of our country.

8.) Give us transparency.

The honorable Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, promised us transparency under her leadership. Though I have no doubt that she sincerely meant what she said at the time, Congress has not delivered on her promise. In fact, you’ve made those waters muddier than they have ever before been in my adult life. You have passed two astoundingly massive stimulus bills. Each bill rivals War & Peace in length, and each bill was passed with astonishing speed. The money changing hands behind doors and under tables has become so brazen and outrageous that if it weren’t so infuriating it would be funny. We are facing a depression that will rival what our grandparents lived through, and you people are throwing our money around as though you were living in a surplus. The American people have no idea what you’re spending our money on, and that’s the way you planned it. The House passed a bill that would make sweeping changes to industry and environmental law with very little media coverage on a Friday night before a holiday. This bill, clocking in at over 1,000 pages, had a 300-page amendment added to it right before the vote. Many of you openly admit that you did not read it. Several of you were set up to be the beneficiaries of large sums of money if this legislation passes, and allegations of purchased votes and arm-twisting are rampant. If this is your idea of transparency, then I might just have to get all of you a new dictionary for Christmas. Stop lying. Stop hiding. Stop sneaking in the shadows like criminals and common thieves. We know what you’re doing. We see it….and we are going to punish you for it on election day. You’re supposed to be leading a nation. Have some dignity and show some respect. America really needs some restored faith right now, so make good on Speaker Pelosi’s promise.

9.) Cut the partisan crap.

I taught my daughter to use words rather than calling names. I send her to the corner to think about her thoughtlessness when she resorts to name-calling or inappropriate anger instead of rational discussion. She’s five. Do we need to send you guys to the corner, too, or do you think that maybe you can dig down and control yourselves without parental intervention?

We don’t want to hear one more syllable of bellyaching from any of you about how horrible the other side of the aisle is. We are so sick of this agitated partisan hatred. It is so beyond ridiculous at this point that I just laugh at it. It’s bitter laughter, however, because I find nothing humorous in the idea that the people running my country in a time of great peril cannot be prevailed upon to work and play well with the other kids at the office. Seriously, you sound like little girls fighting over who gets to play with the good Barbie. Oh my God! Where is your dignity? Yes, yes, I know that those jerks on the other side who disagree with you about the environment or reproductive rights or taxes or the war are just hideous, awful, evil people who probably torture puppies when they go home after work. They ought to be drug into the street and ritualistically burned at the stake. Do you feel validated now?

Good. Now get back to your offices and do your jobs. If you ran a campaign, won an election, and actually hold federal office in Washington, D.C., I expect you to be mature and evolved enough to use your words. If you cannot handle the existence of people who disagree with you, get out of my capital building so we can replace you with an adult. These are serious times, and we need focused, honorable, responsible grownups at the helm. Patriotism and progress exist on both sides of the aisle. We need diversity in Congress to keep you all honest and balanced. Stop fighting. Start legislating. Maybe if you spent less time ripping one another to shreds you’d have more time to read the bills before you vote on them. It’s just a thought.

10.) Uphold the Constitution of the United States of America

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

This is the oath each member of Congress makes at his swearing in. It’s strikingly similar to an oath I am more familiar with in my own life. My husband is a United States Marine. I’ve heard him repeat his oath of enlistment each time he was promoted over the last 9 years, and I have been present for the promotion ceremonies of many other Marines during that time, as well. Their oath is nearly identical to the one that each of you swore. Marines take their oath very seriously, and I have always assumed that you did likewise. Given the changing attitude of Congress toward the Constitution over the course of my life, however, I have begun to wonder.

I’ve read the Constitution many times. My 9th grade civics teacher, Mr. Burns, made us take a test on it. I wonder if any of you have read the Constitution, lately, because it says right here in Article I that you work for We the People as a representative of our will in the American government. It doesn’t feel like any of you are much concerned with the will of the people, lately. I know very well that every human being sees the world through a unique lens. I also understand that rigorous debate over issues is a healthy and necessary part of liberty. The Constitution is present in the middle of all these lenses and debates for a reason. It stands watch over everything you do in Washington to keep you focused, to keep you accountable, to give you boundaries, to remind you of our origins, and to unite you in mutual purpose. Stop fighting the Constitution and start defending it. Abraham Lincoln said, “The sin of silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” When government officials went house-to-house in New Orleans confiscating legally-owned weapons, far too many of you were silent. When The Patriot Act was passed, far too many of you were silent. When the President of the United States presents you with a nominee for our Supreme Court, all you talk about is partisanship. All We care about is getting a justice who will devote himself to the preservation and defense of the Constitution. When people get in front of cameras and refer to the Constitution as a document “from another time” that needs to be “updated,” you should squash them like a bug. You swore you would--or did your oath to defend the Constitution mean as little to you as the promises you made to represent the people of your states and districts?

It should take more than the President screaming ruination ala Chicken Little or reporters threatening you with names like “racist” and “unpatriotic” to crush your resolve in defending Constitutional rights. Scare tactics like those are nothing more than partisan leveraging. We know that's all they are, and we don’t punish people on election day for standing up for the things we elected them to stand up for! Where is your loyalty? Where is your fortitude? Where is your patriotism? This document--this old piece of paper--is the foundation that united the states of America. Do not indulge presumption to believe that we will suffer you to trifle with it, and do not imagine that you will ever be forgiven for allowing others to do so. Only arrogance, greed, or hunger for power could create resentment for the limits our Constitution places on government…hence, its existence. It does not need improvement. It needs adherence. In the last administration, we watched a president, with congressional approval, suspend habeas corpus under very vague terms. The current administration gave us a president who refers to the Constitution’s limits on his power with frustration. I implore you to do your job and honor your oath. Do not tread on our Constitution, for in so doing you would tread on me. Such encroachment will not be tolerated by the free people of this nation.

------------

I love my country, but my country is in peril. I can no longer deny that fact, but I don’t know what to do. I want to help, but I don’t know how. I am no one. I am nothing. But I am no longer satisfied to hide behind the truth of my insignificance as an excuse for my inaction. I am nothing and I am nobody, but I love my country. That love is enough to make me stand up in defiance of the somebodies and the everythings who have led us all astray.

I come to you, first. I come to you with this letter and I beg you to listen. I beg my government for representation. I beg my government to regulate itself and realign with the founding principles upon which this greatest of all nations was founded.

You have roused me to anger and that anger has become activism. As I send this letter to you, I will send it to everyone within the reach of my resources. I will tell everyone what you have done. I will show everyone what you are doing. I will encourage them to write to you. I will encourage them to rise up and demand reform. I will encourage their discontent. I don’t care which parenthetical letter follows your name on the news ticker, and neither will they. This is beyond faction, party, or politics. I hold you all accountable for the wreck you have made of my country. I am totally bipartisan in both my anger and my contempt. Both, Ladies and Gentlemen, you have earned. In both, I am joined by a multitude of my countrymen. I called this letter my act of sedition. It is that most truly. Sedition, when ignored long enough, becomes revolution. So stand up. Stand up and behave like the leaders you were elected to be. For the love of God and Country…stand up! If you ignore us, you will rue it.

We are The People, we are angry, we are legion…and we are watching.

Misandry and the Subversion of Stay-Home Mothers

2009-06-24T14:33:00.006+09:00

So, I'm a stay-home wife and mother. I stay at home because it's the best thing for my daughter. The decision to leave my career and stay home was made jointly with my husband when we discovered my pregnancy (a surprise). On that day and on each day of my life since, the act of placing my financial and physical support entirely in the hands of the man who vowed to God to comfort and keep me for all his days has felt like a perfectly natural thing to do. I have to confess that I have not spent any time worrying about whether or not I'll be safe if he leaves...because I don't spend time worrying about the possibility of his ever leaving us.

That is not naivete. I was married to a man who didn't rate this level of trust the first go-around, but it was my choice in husband--not the choice to let a husband care for me as his wife--that was the mistake. No, the level of trust I live in with my current husband is not silly, blind, or naive. It is a personal security that comes with knowing one has married a decent man, knowing that one is doing the work required of her to stay present and loving in that marriage, and making the daily choice to treat one's husband as an equal partner in life rather than spending one's days circling "the bastard"-- just waiting for him to drop a shoe.

Today, I found this article: Are stay-at-home moms risking everything? on MSNBC.com by Leslie Bennetts, and it got my hackles up. She is the author of a book called, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? On the cover of her book is the image of a tumbling house of cards, and the main thesis of the book (which I am now reading but have not finished), is purported to be that women staying home shouldn't trust their husbands to stick around and care for them because it is almost inevitable that he will someday leave for a younger, hotter mistress and leave the wife penniless while refusing to pay his child support. Sigh.

I contend that, though there are surely a few sociopathic jerks in the world, very few women suffer abandonment, divorce, and hostile behavior from their husbands in an entirely isolated, out-of-the blue scenario like the ones Ms. Bennetts, an obvious misandrist who bases a lot of her opinions on a male family member's betrayal and on one-sided tales of woe that were hand-picked to make a point, paints for us in her article. Paraphrase from the article: "I was married for 40 years. I cooked for him and raised his kids and loved him and then--poof--one day he left me for no reason and now I'm on welfare." Seriously? Yeah...No, the story is usually much different in reality than the fairy tale princess vs. villain theory so many "feminists" use to impugne life choices like mine. There is more to the story...almost every time.

Women become focused on the idea of marriage and all things bridal from a very early age. By 18, most women are in love with the idea of being in love and "getting married." Being married is not what we fantasize about. It's getting married we want in that stage of life...and that's exactly what most of us go out and do. In our early twenties, we find a man, fall in love, give him some nookie, and then tell him that if he wants the lovin' to keep coming, he'll have to marry us. Men want the women they love to be happy. Marriage is generally a financially advantageous thing in the short term for young people because combining incomes makes everything smoother. For these reasons, and because they like getting laid on a regular basis, many young men find this an acceptable proposal and jump in feet-first. The major motivators in these choices are "love" and sex...and the allure of a wedding dress with the ubiquitous gaggle of jealous bridesmaids in tow.

The destruction of the family unit, the trivialization of religious morality, and the feminist movement have all combined to create this all-too-common scenario. Men are not required to grow up, work hard, and acquire the means to support a family before women will be willing to roll over and spread their legs. Women no longer see anything wrong with giving their bodies to a man unworthy of such intimacy. As a result, you have millions of woman who settled because they wanted the dress and the stationery more than they wanted a good husband.

Women between the ages of 18 and 25 vary in maturity level, but almost no one is the same woman at 25 that she was at 18. Getting married prior to 25 leaves a woman open to all sorts of mischief. The man you choose at 20, because he is attractive, good in bed, and kind enough to reciprocate with simalar opinions of you, might just not be the best choice for marriage in the employment or personal arenas. Women get sexually involved which gets them emotionally entangled which confuses their judgment and causes blind spots to things like substance abuse, lack of financial solvency, lack of ambition, lack of education, lack of discipline, the woes of a hostile set of in-laws, the real consequences of partnering with a mama's boy, differences in world view, religion, or beliefs about parenting....and on and on.

If you marry a man with some of the above-listed deficiencies, give birth to children shortly thereafter, and expect all that to end well? You're nuts. Sadly, that's what most women do to some degree or other. Women react to "bad" or mis-matched marriages in many ways, but typically one of two scenarios is extant in these "tragic" tales of feminine woe. The first is one of poor choice; the second is one of poor behavior.

In the first scanario, the young mother marries a man who is genuinely not a good husband. He could be a drinker, an abuser, a lazy non-provider, a mama's boy who cannot put his wife above his birth family, a disinterested father who doesn't co-parent, a womanizer who cannot be faithful, a criminal of some kind, etcetera. Obviously, this kind of marriage is going to end in disaster, and we're all going to blame it on the husband. When parenting comes into play, however, I hold women responsible for the sperm they used to reproduce. In 100% of these cases, the wife chose this ridiculously horrible man to be the father of her children. She loved him. She was going to change him. No one in the world could've drug her away. Then, when it all goes to hell, she takes no responsibility whatsoever for picking a bum, marrying him, and allowing him to impregnate her. Her family and feminist friends will rally around her and reinforce that viewpoint. Men, the entire lot of them, are just bastards...and that's all there is to it.

In the second scenario, which is frighteningly more common, a woman marries a basically decent man. Like the wives from scenario #1, there are probably a lot of mis-matched qualities that cause friction after a few years, but both parties, being good people who genuinely want the family to work, stick with it and keep working. The man stays and keeps his mouth shut while the wife follows him around criticizing him, withholding sex, and focusing on her children to keep the growing hostility toward the husband at bay. The wife, thinking it only natural that her husband would be perfectly happy in a sexless, affectionless, respectless marriage, is shocked and surprised when her husband unceremoniously serves her with divorce papers upon the last child's exodus from the home (if he waits that long). She will spend the next several decades ripping her ex to shreds and bemoaning her vile mistreatment at his hands. Again, all men are just bastards because you can't even trust them after decades of marriage!

Better to just to swear off men, buy a vibrator, and adopt a child from war-torn Krazjikistan, no?

In my marriage, we chose each other after getting to know one another through a year of non-sexual dating and another 18 months of engagement. We knew what we were getting into, and we got into it as a team. My husband is a good man who shares my religious, political, moral, educational, and familial views. We have shared tastes, interests, hobbies, and goals. We also find one another attractive after nearly 9 years together. That requires effort, too.

So.

If you're the kind of woman who's going to pick a bad man and then marry him...you should read Ms. Bennetts' book and several others like it until you're convinced to stay away from the marital state altogether. If you're going to marry a decent man and hand him his balls in a jar every day until he divorces you...same advice.

If, however, you're going to choose a good man, give him as much as you take from him, and live in respectful appreciation of the family you create with him? You won't need Ms. Bennetts' book...or her jaded and misandrist advice.

Lewis Carroll would be Smiling

2009-06-23T12:29:00.007+09:00

I have to admit that I haven’t loved any of Tim Burton’s work since Corpse Bride. Everything he’s put out since I was in high school seemed to me to be running to catch up with The Nightmare Before Christmas. I haven’t been able to really fall into raptures over the work he’s done since then. But that's the magic of Tim Burton. Even though I couldn't? I really, really, REALLY wanted to.

I love the way his films look. His “vision” is flawless, and we got early glimpses of that with Batman and Beetlejuice. The execution of his films' plots and the scripts they get inexplicably stuck with? Well, sometimes…not so much.

I liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was beautiful and new, and Johnny Depp was mesmerizing. But it wasn’t as good as the first one, and I don't know anyone who disagrees with me on that point. Burton's version looks the part, but it has no soul at all. You neither sympathize with Charlie nor rejoice in the story's happy conclusion. I liked Sweeney Todd, too. Helena surprised me with her singing abilitiy, and I can't point to any particular scene that I didn't approve of...but there was something missing. You end up with no sorrow or shock at the irony of the story's moral, and it's not really scary, either. If Sweeney Todd isn't either successfully moralistic or triumphantly horrifying...then what is it? Edward Scissorhands was a good movie, but the basic moral of the story (the whole "suburbia is sad" theme back before it had already been done to death) was lost in a story so proud of itself for being “out there” that it forgot to be coherent. I saw Sleepy Hollow, but I don’t remember much about it (which is all the review it needs, I guess). Not even my beloved Wednesday Addams could redeem that movie.

It sounds like I'm trashing Tim Burton. I guess I am, in a way. That feels very wrong to me, though--blasphemous even. I’ve been disappointed by Burton over and over again…but I still long to see his films. Every time he takes on a new project, I end up being swept away on celestial expectations from the very first announcement. That's because no one else sees things the way Tim Burton does. You can tell without ever reading his name in the opening credits that you’re watching one of his films because the style is so unique (well...and your other clue will be the union of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in the starring roles).

So. I will go see Alice in Wonderland, and I will go in with high expectations. I will wait impatiently; fully believing–again–that THIS one will be the masterpiece I’ve been waiting for.

Whether or not this movie turns out to be “The One,” I am sure that it will be gorgeous, immersive, and entertaining at the very least. In all seriousness, you know, Tim Burton IS going to make that one film that we’ve been hoping all the others would be. Someday it will happen and I don’t want to miss that…because it will really be something else.

You can’t get more twisted than Alice, and no one does twisted better than Burton. I’m positively giddy.

God Wants Us to Be Vegetarians

2009-06-22T13:52:00.025+09:00

24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after their kind: and it was so.25 And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the ground after its kind: and God saw that it was good.26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.27 And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.28 And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food:30 and to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food: and it was so.31 And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

The Holy Bible, Genesis 1:24-30

-----------------

How many of you ever noticed that God created pigs, cows, and men on the same day? I was a grown adult before I noticed that. How many of you have always assumed that The Bible told us that animals were created specifically for us to eat? I honestly thought it did. How many of you realized that the only foods prescribed by God for Adam and Eve to consume were plant life? It's true. Nowhere in The Holy Bible does God tell us specifically to eat meat. Only after the original sin was committed was man expressly given permission to eat meat. Permission...not an order. God gave Noah that permission in Genesis 9:3 saying to him, "Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant." You could assume that this was tacit approval for the slaughter of animals as food in perpetuity, but I look at what God actually said was "good" in His eyes. He never said that he told man to eat meat and saw that it was good. No. The only diet God ever reflected on with satisfaction was the original diet he created for us in the seeds, fruits, and green plants of Creation. The violence of animal slaughter was never in God's plan for Eden. Why should we assume, with that smug smile I've seen so many of my Christian brethren don when discussing this topic, that God expects less of us than he expected of Adam and Eve?

In God's perfect plan of Creation, man was never intended to kill animals for food. When the earth was swallowed by floods, God made an exception for Noah in Genesis. Christ encouraged the eating of fish when he performed the miracle of feeding 4,000 starving people with the loaves and fishes. In one place, Christ is said to have shared the Passover with the apostles, but His consumption of the lamb was not mentioned, and in no other place in scripture that I am aware of did Jesus ever consume animal flesh.

In a book as big and written by as many as The Bible, I'm sure that some scholar or other could nitpick me to death with some verse or other from somewhere. That doesn't interest me. If you want to scour the Bible for a verse that will defend your consumption of a juicy steak wrapped in cellophane from your local grocer's counter, you go right ahead. I just can't join you in that effort anymore.

What I'm interested in doing is following God's will and His edicts concerning my stewardship of the earth, the animals on it, and the temple of my own body. The Scripture is pretty clear on what His original intent for mankind was. It is also clear that He intended our "dominion" to be a benevolent caretaking...not an apathetic proprietary sort of relationship. Finally, it is abundantly clear in many, many places that man will be held responsible for cruelty to even the least of God's creations. I'm fairly certain that dairy cows are meant to be included in that charge.

So.

The following is a list of links that I have found helpful over the years. Vegetarianism and its relationship to my faith has been a very long internal debate for me. There are MANY things I have to say on the subject of industrial farming, but...for now...I'll just let you sit with the Biblical argument.

-----------------------------

Links

The following are books I own, sites I visit, magazines I read, or some other source of information that helped me enforce my beliefs about vegetarianism and the evils of industrial farming. I think, somewhere deep down, we all know it's wrong to eat meat from a slaughterhouse. That's why we don't think about it. The apathy of good men toward evil is worse than committing evil, I reached a place where it felt sickening to continue pretending that there was nothing wrong with what I was eating. I can no longer ignore the fact that my health, my responsibilities as God's steward on earth, and the very condition of my soul are at stake over these issues. Yes. I really believe that.

The Christian Vegetarian Association

The Food Revolution by John Robbins

Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman & Kim Barnouin

Organic Valley a reputable organic farming coop. I strongly support organic coops and encourage every American to do the same. Only the consumer can change industrial farming by seeking out and buying from the small farmers who do the right thing.

The Vegan Sourcebook by Joanne Stepniak

VegNews the Magazine

Food, Inc. a film by River Road Entertainment, Participant Media, & Magnolia Pictures

An American in Uruma

2009-06-22T02:31:00.002+09:00

So I live in Okinawa, Japan for the moment. Most of you already know that, but what I haven’t really gone out of my way to share with most of you--at least not since we first got here--is how I feel about that fact. If I had to use just one word to describe Okinawa, it would be “hot.” If I could use two words, they would be “hot” and “wet.” I mean, it’s a tropical island, right? It’s a small tropical island, too. We seriously have water everywhere around here. We’ve got the ocean all around us, and it rains more days than not. I’m pretty sure we could give Seattle a serious run for their money in the rain department. The ground, in the scanty spaces not covered by concrete or asphalt, squishes with every step. During a good portion of the year, each squish is also accompanied by an unsettling crunch which informs the walker that he has just unceremoniously murdered a number of snails, which carpet the ground throughout the spring and summer.

Oh. Did I never mention the snails? Allow me to enlighten you.

Okinawa is literally blanketed with snails. The snails that people most often complain about are the humongous venomous ones that we’re instructed to keep our dogs away from during “briefings day” in our first week on island. I have seen a couple of these bad boys oozing across my path from time to time, but The Beagle has been pretty good about staying away from those. Honestly, these large snails don’t bug me much. They’re usually quite pretty and they have, so far, had the decency to stay out of my house. The snails I take issue with are smaller…and much, much more numerous. Every year at the start of spring, the migration of the snails begins. There are literally millions of them. Ranging in size from “baby French pea” to about the diameter of an American dime, these slimy little bastards hide in the shade of vegetation during the day and emerge to eat and get all over my stuff at night. Around 8pm, I can walk out onto my patio and survey the invasion on any given night. They dot the walls, cover the chairs, and traverse the patio tile by the truckload. I sweep them away with a broom, but they come back again…much faster than you’d think…you know, with them being snails and all. For fun, I once placed a piece of paper in the yard at night to see how much the little bastards would eat. In the morning, I found a little nub left under the rock I used to anchor it that looked more like lacework than a paper remnant. They seriously devoured the entire sheet of paper. I have a habit of printing things out and then reading them on the patio. Occasionally, I will forget to take the sheets back inside, and the snails will have a regular Thanksgiving feast on my patio table. I think of it as throwing out birdseed.

Speaking of birds…we also have bats. Bats the size of eagles…I am not exaggerating in the slightest. We have a puny tree in our back yard, and the bats like to hang out there on account of the shrews that tunnel under the yard and drive The Beagle out of her mind. The bats are harmless, of course, but their sheer size and total lack of fear around humans can bring you uncomfortably close to these creatures. One flew so close to me as I sat on the porch one night that my hair was blown by the air disturbance of his flight. After dive-bombing me, the friendly bat landed on our tree. Though I couldn’t see him, what with it being dark and his body being somewhat hidden by the greenery on the branch, he was plainly of no mean size because the branch bobbed up and down from the impact of his landing so hard that I felt the most prudent course of action was to immediately get up and go inside.

Perpetual wetness, unrelenting rain, snails, bats, shrews, flying termites (I’ll spare you), swarming mosquitoes that put Southern Arkansas’ skeeters to shame, Habu snakes(the only pest on this list that I have not personally encountered in or around my home), huge centipedes, roaches as big as your palm, and spiders the size of Volkswagens. Sounds like a dream vacation spot, eh? On top of the rain and the wetness and the vermin, we also deal with mold on the walls, black mildew on the ceilings and door frames, condensation inside the house, and unceasing humidity levels that warp wood furniture and threaten books. We suffer a lengthy typhoon season each year that can be quite frightening at times--oh! And I almost forgot--frequent earthquakes. We’ve had three that shook the house since I’ve lived here. That is the most unnerving sensation for someone who has never experienced it before. I lived in Southern California for three years, and I had to come to Okinawa, Japan to feel the earth move.

Anyway…so there’s all that.

After two years on Okinawa, I’ve actually grown pretty acclimatized to the humidity and desensitized to the majority of the local vermin (though the spiders still cause me a great deal of angst). I enjoy the people, and I’ve enjoyed learning a new language. I am far from being conversant, but I have a pretty large vocabulary, now, and I can generally manage to communicate what I need to. I can actually walk into a hair salon and specify that I want an auburn base with platinum and raspberry highlights, so I think I’m doin’ alright in the Nihongo department.

I don’t know, though. We’ve been here for two years, and I‘m really ready to leave. I feel guilty about that sometimes. So many people want to travel and would love to be in this part of Asia…to experience it. Vacationing, however, is quite a different proposition than living in military housing on an island that doesn’t look considerably different than it did when my grandfather’s generation lived here. It’s very run-down, cluttered, and dirty on the island. I’m tired of enduring the protesters that come over from the mainland to stand with signs in front of the bases. I wonder if they know that they’re protesting in the wrong place…because no one entering the gates had a choice about coming here, and no one entering the gates has a say in whether or not America maintains a presence here. Their own prefecture would be a better place to stage a demonstration, but I digress. I’m weary of the language barrier and frustrated that I haven‘t been able to learn to speak the native tongue faster. I’m sick of living in a concrete box the size of my first apartment. I just…want to go home.

I will miss Cocoichi curry. I will miss Cocok’s spa. I will miss being able to scuba dive any time I want to. I will miss the safety and freedom of living in a violent crime free area. I will miss being in a place where the generality shows respect and good manners to everyone around them. I will miss words like shokkidana and itashimashite. I will miss Japanese apples. I will miss Georgia coffee, Aquarius, and Suntory teas. I will miss Sheena and Jordan Small. I will miss Mayumi san.

In the long run, I am very glad that I came to live in Okinawa. For now, however, as I move into another wretched summer filled with limp hair, the scent of mildew, and a constant sheen of sweat…I miss The United States so much that it makes my stomach hurt.

Someone Finally Said It Out Loud

2009-06-10T08:39:00.003+09:00

Obama is God...with a capital G. Well, sort of.

I don't usually do two political things right in a row like this, but as I sipped my morning Diet Coke today and looked over the news, I was guided to a video of Evan Thomas giving an interview on Hardball with Chris Matthews. In the background, they have a video of President and Mrs. Reagan visiting Arlington National Cemetary grave markers under the eloquent title "Remembering D-Day." The now ubiquitous headline ticker scrolls underneath, and in the main window of the screen, Mr. Thomas is waxing eloquent about President Obama. As a conservative, I've gotten pretty good at filtering out the Obama boot licking in the background and coming back in when a key word that indicates substance is about to be introduced again...when I heard these words spill very casually from Mr. Thomas' mouth,

"I mean...in a way, Obama's standing above the country...above, above the world! He's sort of God."

I smiled to myself and said, "FINALLY." One of them had the balls to say it out loud.

Chris I-Felt-Tingling-Up-My-Leg Matthews responded with a fervent, "mmHmm," of agreement, and they finished their little discourse with Mr. Thomas about how Obama is going to be The One and bring the entire world together in peace.

I mean, seriously, if you didn't know beyond doubt that these people are college-educated, you would assume they were straight up illiterate after the emotional and totally irrational way they discuss our President nowadays. It's disgraceful.

So, my conservative friends, the next time you try to point out how ridiculous the media fawning over Obama is...and you get a leftie in your face panting in apoplectic rage about how Rush Limbaugh is the only one who ever called Obama "messiah," you can direct them to this nugget, remind them that it's one of many examples, and ask them to please refrain from spraying spittle all over your nose.

The Bleeding Horse and Sonia Sotomayor

2009-06-08T14:21:00.013+09:00

Today, I am going to give you my twist on the “issue” of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination for the Supreme Court. First, before I address my thoughts on the ubiquitous cries of racism going on in the media and general public discourse about this nominee, I think it would be wise to revisit what exactly it is that Supreme Court justices do. I find it necessary to cover that topic first because it seems that so many of my countrymen, most of the media, and just about everyone in Washington has forgotten what the Supreme Court’s function actually is. We have the President, himself, describing empathy and life experience as qualities to look for. Excuse me, what? I could not possibly have heard him correctly, right? Alas, I did hear him correctly, and I also observed the mindless head-nodding of the worshipping masses in America after he said it. It betrays a shocking lack of understanding of the basic role of our judiciary.

The U.S. Supreme Court is one of the three branches of our government, and it was designed as a check to the Legislative Branch which makes our laws. The Court’s purpose is, first and foremost to interpret the Constitution. The Court does not advise. It does not moralize. It does not legislate. It does not recommend legislation. It does not amend the Constitution. It interprets specific cases to determine if the outcome is in conflict with the Constitution as it stands. From its inception, it was made very clear that the Supreme Court is in no way advisory. The first Supreme Court justice, John Jay, refused to give George Washington advice on any matters of state because he felt it would chip away at the integrity of the Court and cloud its purpose. Empathy, life experience, and personal world view have NOTHING to do with being a Supreme Court Justice. Knowledge of constitutional law, an ability to judge to the law without prejudice, and the ability to subordinate empathy, life experience, and personal world view in favor of the law are all required of a judge on the Supreme Court. Given what we know of Sonia Sotomayor’s qualifications, I can posit that she possesses the first quality in abundance, the second to an admirable degree, but lacks the third almost entirely. Judge Sotomayor seems to share with our President the notion that the role of the Court is to mete out morality and social order to right wrongs rather than to interpret the Constitution. This concerns me a great deal. Leaving all issues of race or concern at Sotomayor’s speeches out of the argument, doesn’t it strike anyone else as utterly absurd for a President of the United States to cite empathy as his first requirement for a good nominee and for his nominee to cite her racial identity as a primary qualification for the job? The absurdity of it, and the general public’s inability or lack of desire to acknowledge that absurdity are both nauseous and frightening in my opinion.

Now, let’s gird our loins and talk about racism, shall we?

There are idiots and bigots in every apple barrel, but the good apples so far outnumber the bad ones in this case of race in America that it's seriously laughable that THIS is what we focus on day after day. I do not deny American racism, nor do I minimize the horrific pieces of our history that provided its roots. That said, I am not blind, either, to the undeniable fact that white people are not the singular wielder of racism in our nation. In fact, I defy you to gather 1,000 white Republicans off the street in any part of America and find more than one or two in that number who could honestly tell you that Justice Sotomayor’s race or the race of our president even register in their negative assessments of either.

When President Obama was running for office in 2008, I did not think of him as a black man. I thought of him as a liberal man with socialist leanings who attended a racist church for 20 years, who supped with a known anti-Semite who has ties to the PLO, and who served on community boards and received funding from an unrepentant domestic terrorist who bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol in the sixties. My concerns, when voiced, were dismissed as a simple reflection of my innate racism. Any protests on my part were further dismissed as evidence that I would never “understand” because of my skin color. Very well.

When Justice Sotomayor’s nomination for the Supreme Court was announced, I did not see her as a Latina. I saw her as an American woman who had risen up in our country with an impressive education, an astounding life of professional success, and some questionable ideas about race and her role in the racial discussion we continue to engage in as Americans. When I read the text of her speeches, I was angered by her intense and negative focus on race.

The fact is, not every objection to a minority appointment is based on race. In fact...very, very few are. Very few people voted for John McCain because they didn’t want a black man in the White House. Very few people object to the appointment of Justice Sotomayor because they don’t want a Latina on the Supreme Court. Very few people allow race to play into their political persuasions and outlook on the world on a daily basis. The idea that all we do is governed by racially-motivated prejudice is hogwash. In the 50’s, I’d entertain that argument, but nearly 60 years on, most of us have evolved.

Justice Sotomayor, despite having been presented with precisely zero racially-based obstacles in her education, professional life, or socio-economic rise in America, clings to the idea that every non-Latino is “other,” and is incapable of looking upon her or any other Latino with kinship or equality. She believes that a white man would thwart justice in cases where she would champion it. How, I ask you, is that not racist? How, I ask you, is that a quality to be entertained in a nominee to our Supreme Court? Why, I ask you, is the discussion of this bent in Sotomayor’s outlook a mark of her detractors’ racism rather than her own? If you honestly don’t see why there are objections being raised, then I don’t know what else to say. You may dismiss these objections in favor of her education, experience, and competence, but don’t be so ignorant and obtuse as to wave a hand toward conservatives and say, “They just don’t like her because they’re racist.” That’s not only so unoriginal as to be comic; it’s also untrue.

This racial horse has been on the ground bleeding for more than 40 years, but many of my countrymen insist upon polishing the saddle every morning and riding it again, anyway. You could, of course, get a lot farther a lot faster on a horse with a pulse, but leaving the familiar and fortified standby to defend one’s ideas in the open air is hard for people who have always taken comfort in the fallback of racism to dismiss and condemn all dissent. By this means, even those of us who would leave the poor creature in the barn and ride fresh mounts are forced to walk alongside this bedraggled nag of racism as long as its riders maintain their bull-headed refusal to stable it. It’s ridiculous, really, and it totally closes off the possibility of rational idea exchange, but there it is…and there it lies. I am just one chubby white girl. I cannot change this. All I can do is stand here with my field full of living horses and hope, one day, to be given a chance to saddle up.

I wish Sonia Sotomayor happiness, health, success, and every fulfillment of the American dream. I just don’t have confidence, at this time, that she should sit on the United States Supreme Court. God and Congress will decide whether or not she is appointed, and white racism will have little or nothing to do with any of it.

Observations on the Ordinary

2009-05-28T00:45:00.004+09:00

I am an ordinary woman. I am neither beautiful enough to turn heads nor ugly enough to garner notice. I am neither intelligent enough to inspire and innovate nor stupid enough for that fact to escape my understanding. I am neither fat nor slender, wealthy nor impoverished, genius nor dullard, scholarly nor ignorant, angelic nor cruel, gleeful nor despondent. I am wholly unremarkable in practically every way. I live my life in the quiet and rhythmic daily pursuit of pleasure and personal meaning. Everyone is special, they say, but I cannot agree with that. Every man is individual, to be sure, but special? To our mothers, maybe.

As humans, we all love and wish and dream. These are some of the grandest components of the human experience, but they are universal. My love lifts me, my wishes occupy my mind, and my dreams motivate me…and everyone else who has ever drawn breath on our small blue planet could claim the same. I am unique, yes, as is every human being, but my singular qualities are only singular in their combination. I possess nothing innate to my person or mind that has not been possessed by millions before me. My particular shade of hazel has adorned many an eye. The exact brown of my hair has grown from the heads of millions. My insecurities, my struggles, my quickness of mind, my love for books, my desire to be of use, my fear of being a bad mother, my passion for history, my distaste for spinach, and my contempt for liars…each of these things is commonplace in its own way--ordinary, first to last.

Since girlhood, I have feared being ordinary above any other eventuality in life. Even in this I am joined by a multitude. No one desires his life to be meaningless. No one enjoys the realization that he will never be anything to Leonardo. As Thoreau’s quietly desperate masses did before me, I wasted a lot of time wanting to be famous or important or immortal through some noteworthy accomplishment. In my innocent and childish ambition, I believed without a doubt that I would be different. I would be exceptional. I would be one of the names everyone always remembered. My life would be something beyond the ordinary. Ordinary is an unpleasant word, don‘t you think? Ordinary is an epithet. I have always believed it to be so and used it as such. And, yet, here I sit. Here I sit as plainly illustrating that word as any portrait of a person drawn specifically to perform that purpose could ever be.

So what shall my remedy be? How am I to reconcile myself to being less than more when I am also more than less? What grand comfort could I possibly find to ameliorate 34 years spent without one moment of experience in orchestrating the extraordinary or authoring the incredible?

Well, now, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?

The answer is to continue in the hope that I will one day find my greatness. We, all of us, must struggle to find our contribution to this world. For most of us, this effort will end without general fanfare, but if we do our best, we all touch at least the lives of our own circle in a way that, if not glorious, can at least claim the merit of general praise. The painful truth of life is that living with virtue closes many paths to us that those without a moral compass may run along with enthusiasm. Opportunity hangs like swollen fruit from the trees that line these questionable highways, and the bitterness of watching lesser men snatch it up can be the hardest pill a good man must swallow. But swallow it, he must. If one lives well by God and by his fellow creatures, the swath he leaves behind him will follow much the same road as the ruts of all good men who went before him. There is honor in that, and, in this, we must find our complacence.

Now, I find myself in need of something by way of a platitude. What great proverb can I use here to close my thoughts, for no statement about mediocrity would be complete without the use of some hackneyed phrase or other. Life is about the journey, not the destination? That one might suffice, but I am not satisfied. An ordinary life, lived well, is an extraordinary accomplishment?

There. That will do.

Eat Your Humble Pie

2008-12-01T12:52:00.011+09:00

Since we've just had another Thanksgiving go by, during which I was both breathing and in the presence of people who love me, I feel morally obligated to devote some time to counting my blessings and thanking my God for the privileges that I have been given in this life. I have so many things that make life joyful, and a great number of them are things that I did not earn or bring about on my own. So much of the bounty of my life has been purely given. God has blessed me with talents and traits that enhance my living for the better. My loved ones have given me gifts, both material and spiritual that I did not deserve or do anything to merit. Too often, people embrace inappropriate pride over gifts such as these. I spent a lot of my juvenile years doing precisely that, and it is a nearly epidemic situation in our contemporary American culture.

I'll give you an excellent example of what I mean:

I am very smart. I don't mean by the British definition, which is to say that I always look together and tailored. Nothing could be farther from the truth. No, I mean that I am well above average in the quick-minded department. I'm not prodigious. My brain is nothing especially noteworthy, and I have not exercised it to the point of prestige or accomplishment. It's simply better at processing, absorbing, and learning than more than half of the other brains on this earth. In fact, according to most of the tests I've taken, my brain is quicker than 90 percent of the other human brains out there. If you want to specialize that and talk about specific aptitudes, the numbers occasionally get even more impressive. Yes, I am a very intelligent woman, and--odds being what they are--I'm probably smarter than you.

That sounds snotty to say doesn't it? "Math being considered, I'm probably smarter than you." It's a simple fact, but it sounds like the very definition of arrogance. Why do you suppose that is?

The simple answer is that most smart people are proud of themselves for being so. They spend their entire lives being told that they are special because of their intelligence. They feel superior to those other mortals walking about in their periphery who are less intelligent than themselves. They enjoy displaying their intelligence by inappropriate means or in settings that allow them to demean or humble other people. They feel that their intelligence is a merit unto themselves, and as the famous movie quote says, they "congratulate themselves on being masters of the universe."

That's where the mistake is made.

I am not intelligent because I worked really hard in school and earned it. One cannot earn intelligence. One can only earn knowledge. With hard work and intensive study, even the simplest of human minds can attain knowledge. One can be rightfully proud of accomplishing knowledge and/or education. Intelligence, however, is not earned. It is not a reward for merit. It is a gift. It is a gene or two. It is divine providence. It is through no goodness or credit of my own that I am smart. I just am. Some people are born with natural beauty or really fantastic eyesight. Some people are born into families with great financial wealth that is passed to them so that they never spend a day of their lives in material want. Some people are really tall and can reach things on the top shelf without aid of a stepstool. Some people have really thick hair and can grow it long and wear all kinds of intricate hairstyles that are impervious to humidity. Some people can eat Twinkies and Cheetos on a regular basis without ever suffering from pimples, heart disease, or high blood pressure. Some people are born with feet and toes that are the perfect shape for ballet. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Pride in these things would be both a folly and a sin. The appropriate response in recognizing these marvelous talents is neither a sense of superiority and entitlement nor a sense of personal pride. The appropriate response to a gift...is humble gratitude.

So.

As you ruminate during this festive and fervent season over the things in your life for which you are grateful to God, try taking the appropriate humility you feel during those prayers of thanks with you as you live your days. Keep it. Remember it. Demonstrate it for others. Foster it in daily meditation. Doing this has worked miracles in my daily ability to experience mental peace and outright joy.

Eat your humble pie. It's not only good for you; It can change everything.

My Misogynistic Musings

2008-11-24T09:09:00.011+09:00

I don't like women.

There are a lot of reasons that I don't like women. I think that, had I been born in a different age, I might have found more to praise about my sex in general, but that's all purely speculative. I was not born into another age; I was born into this one. The only perspectives I can actually draw from, then, are the ones I've gathered in my relatively short life thus far. So far, I am unimpressed by the female creature, and I am more disappointed and depressed about that than I fully understood until recently.

I am a 33 year-old middle-class American woman, and I generally do all I can to avoid contact with others of "my kind." I volunteer for things in my daughter's classroom, but I am not a member of the PTO. I am a military wife, but I wouldn't touch the Key Volunteer Network with a 10-foot pole. I don't belong to any book clubs or church groups, and though I tried in the past to be a member of a professional women's organization, the experiment was unpleasant...and I will not repeat it.

So why the misogynistic angst? Well, I tell you that it's taken me a very long time to get to this point. Adult maturity is setting in, I think. I've reached an age where I am putting away childish things--at least, that's what it feels like. In this process, my "ways" are getting "set." My opinions and outlooks are cementing themselves in ways that feel very permanent. My hopes and aspirations are becoming much more realistic and clearly-defined. My ideas about the world, my place in it, and my ideal companions for a life spent on it...well, they have all been forefront in the last couple of years. I am becoming me. I am enjoying this process in general, but unpleasant realizations and revelations are a necessary part of examining one's life and purpose. Along with gaining personal direction and definition, a person going through this sort of 1/3-life introspective is inevitably going to have to confront the evil as well as the glorious. For me, one of the unpleasant things I've had to ask myself during all this is, "Why do I not seek the company of other women?" More than any of the other large life questions I've been mulling over in the past couple of years, this one has given me the most active trouble. I know! You'd think my largest stumbling blocks would be God or politics or large and looming questions about "what am I going to do with my life," but no. I have my ideas about all those things pretty well in hand. It's women I don't get. I have spent more time crying and working through childhood pain about girls and women than I have spent on any other major topic of life.

I've spent a lot of time in thought over it, and I'm reaching a place of peace with those thoughts. I'm this close to understanding and defining my thoughts on women, womanhood, and female relationships...so like anything else that plagues the tranquility of my mind...I'm going to write it all down.

--------------------------

A lot of women prefer the company of children and males to the company of other women. I am by no means unique or original in this preference. There are probably many self-help books about woman-to-woman relationships that discuss this animosity we generally hold for one another. Most people who examine the phenomenon of female misogyny come to the conclusion that women are "this way" because we compete with each other for men. They say that it is biology dooming us to this state of unrest with one another because "in the beginning," women would find the perfect mate and then hold onto him...defending her status as his woman against any other females that might try to come take him away.

I'm sure that's part of it...but it's not the whole story. We have a frontal lobe and opposable thumbs, for God's sake. I don't dislike women because I fear they're going to try and bed my husband. I can accept the merit of such an argument for a base, animal reason that women are wary of one another because it does apply, but the issue is not that simple for me...and I don't think it is for anyone else, either. I am a civilized human being. My animal instincts do not drive every motivation I have, and I have mastered control of my emotions after receiving good parenting and some basic maturity. My dislike of women is founded in more personal reasons than biology.

I suppose my disenchantment with my own sex began in second grade. At least, that is the first time from my life that I have any clear recollections of being harmed by the unkind words and actions of other little girls. "You're not my friend anymore," and "That's mine and you can't play with it," or "She is my best friend now, and you can't play with us" were the weapons of choice. Oh, believe me, I was by no means a blameless victim. I remember the sort of child I was quite clearly. I was loud and very vocal. I had not yet lost the egocentric self-importance that is the birthright of all children, and I had not yet learned to restrain it by any experience with either humility or fear of rejection. I also had at my command the use of a much larger vocabulary at that time than many of my peers possessed, and I used it to set them down as often as I felt inclined to do so. In short, I gave as good as I got. Nonetheless, it was in these early years of forced social interaction with groups of other girls my age that I first began to learn what female people were capable of. We are a cruel race, we women.

As a grownup, my feelings toward other females could best be described as a prejudice. You'll note that I said I dislike women. I did not say that I hate women. I don’t hate other women, and that is a very important distinction. I don’t have a hidden self-loathing of my femininity, and I don’t immediately feel hostility or anger toward every woman I meet. I like being a girl very much, and there are undeniably wonderful things about females. I simply have a general prejudice where women are concerned that has developed over my lifetime. Women who I do not know generally have to prove to me that they are not threatening or negative people before I can accept them in any sort of meaningful way. Everyone has prejudices and fears. This is one of mine. We cannot control how we feel, but we can control how we behave, and I have never made a habit of being unkind…to women or anyone else. I do not treat new women poorly or unkindly. I simply do not trust or feel comfortable with women I don’t know, and I rarely seek out new female acquaintance.

As is true of most people, I have standing relationships with members of both sexes, and there are women in my life who are more than just important to me. I love my mother. I loved both of my grandmothers fiercely and I miss them both every single day. I have four women friends in my own age group with whom I share loving and established friendships. I have an aunt to whom I am particularly attached, and my stepmother is an angel who has always taken care of me and played a third parent role. These women are vital to my life. This column is not meant to diminish my affection for these ladies. On the contrary, my ability to love them in spite of my fear and distaste for women in general is a testament to how very important women are and should be to each other. My love for these women was also the reason that I had so much trouble understanding myself. Clearly, I am capable and desirous of loving relationships with my own gender. I need them and want them, and I am grateful for the ones that I have. So why all the insecurity and fear about being open and vulnerable with other girls?

After careful consideration, I boiled down my problems and fears about relating to other women into four different central objections. These objections are as follows:

1.) Women are often cruel and vengeful out of all reasonable proportion when they get angry. I have found myself, many times, on the receiving end of spite and serious hurt when a woman in my social sphere takes offense to something I have said or done...or that she has heard that I said or did...or that she believes I might be thinking about saying or doing. It is a common trait of women--one that I am both proud and grateful to say that I do not share, myself--to go for the jugular when even the smallest perception of a slight arises from another person. Not only do they strike with intent to cause real harm over the tiniest things, women who behave this way will never go about punishing the person who offended them one-on-one. Women will gather two or three cohorts to gang up on the person who offended because nothing less than total annihilation will do. This strike team, once assembled, will say cruel, unrelated, and very personal things about the other woman. They will talk about her on the phone, in emails, on internet social boards, and--in the worst cases--right in front of her.

I have seen grown women glow with adolescent glee while they rip a coworker they barely even know to shreds while the unsuspecting woman is going about her business just feet away from them. I've seen groups of women on the internet vilify and excoriate strangers with some of the most vile and hate-filled language you can imagine. The offended will whip herself into a froth of hatred and pounce on the offender with ferocious and inappropriate hostility or, and this is often the most painful, she will use her circle of allies to shun the woman who offended.

It doesn't take much for a woman to pull down this kind of wrath. The "crimes" can be small or nonexistant. Sometimes, this kind of vitriol will befall a woman because she is of a different political persuasion or expressed the wrong viewpoint in some conversation or other. Sometimes, the situation can be that a woman makes an offhand comment that is taken the wrong way or misunderstood. With women, unlike men, situations like these can arise over literally nothing. A woman can develop an immediate dislike based on appearance or expression in another woman. On the occasions when these hostile relationships develop based on actual offenses--like someone not performing at work, failing to deliver as promised on something at an event, or an overstep of boundaries around another woman's children/family etc.--the resulting anger is still horrifyingly unjust in proportion to the misdeed.

When these types of explosive hostility occur between women, the woman who instigated all the vitriol will often come and expect forgiveness once she is no longer angry. She has calmed down, after all, and since the other person did make her angry in the first place, things should ostensibly go back to normal now, right? I cannot begin to tell you how distasteful this is to me. On several occasions throughout my adulthood, I have had women say horrible things to and about me over things small or unintentional that I have done/not done/been late in doing, etc. Several times, this happened and I never got to know what it was that I did to upset the other woman in the first place. They would insult me so deeply and personally and so unbelievably out of proportion or in ways that were totally unrelated to the incident that started it all…that I would have no desire to forgive them and go on as though nothing ever happened. People always urge us to “forgive and forget.” I contend that’s bad advice. Some things are horrible to the point that they have lasting consequence. Forgiving things that ought not be overlooked is folly, in my opinion, and bad people feel empowered to continue in their bad behavior when good people let them off without consequence for it.

Women treat one another with unmitigated cruelty. Not all women. Not all situations. Not every time. It's common enough, however, that any woman reading this column will be nodding with me by this point. For me, that makes the prospect of a new relationship with a new woman frightening and onerous. I just don’t want to have anything to do with any of that.

2.) A lot of women are needy in relationships with other women to the point that they express jealousy and inappropriate ownership behavior when their friends socialize with anyone else--including family. My girlfriends do not have the same rights to my time and energy that my husband or my child can claim. They do not have the same rights of authority over me as a parent. Yet, in my lifetime, I’ve befriended people who pushed these personal boundaries to a breaking point.

I don’t know where this tendency comes from. I’ve felt friendship jealousy, myself, but that was when I was a child. As children, we are all possessive and self-centric little creatures. It’s natural for young kids to go through a learning process about how to relate with others. It takes time on this earth and a little maturity to realize that we don’t have rights to people and that we can’t make other people do what we want them to do. The assumption is that when we’re mature enough to realize all that, we will also realize that other people have more in their lives than just us. All of my friends have other friends. I am not the only loved one in any of my loved ones’ lives. Nonetheless, these simple facts of life are foreign to many women, and they jealously cling to possession--singular possession--of those they forge relationships with.

I’ve had women friends who would literally be angry with me if I didn’t call them every day. They would feign “worry” about me or express fear that I was dead in a ditch somewhere if I hadn’t checked in with them. In reality, we all know that reasonable people don’t feel dread of this kind when adult friends and family go about life with their home responsibilities and jobs without making social calls for a few weeks. It was never dread for my safety that motivated this kind of possessive behavior. It was annoyance and insecurity because I had not placed them first on my list of priorities. They were made to feel unstable in our friendship if I placed my daily responsibilities and concerns higher than my dependence on their society for some length of time. It’s all very selfish and disordered, but it’s very, very common. Men are also guilty of this from time to time, but it is mainly a female trait, and females exhibit this behavior much more frequently in my experience than men do. The anger and guilt-tripping that goes on in this cycle of behavior is generally a means of control over the other friend. It is used by people who cannot feel certain of love or affection unless it is given in a bottomless and constant stream of active attention.

Oddly enough, the friends who behaved this way toward me as a pattern were the ones who actually phoned me and sought my company the least. They expected me to prove over and over that I wanted their friendship by soliciting their affection and seeking their company. Because they needed me to prove my affection for them by seeking them out in order to feel secure and wanted, they rarely felt cause to reciprocate and seek me out. This one-sided dependent behavior is unattractive, suffocating, and uncomfortable. It’s also unhealthy and I refuse to indulge it.

The other form of inappropriate possessive behavior I’ve come across is less common, but also far more damaging. I’m speaking of the women who express jealousy or hostility towards the spouses and children of their girlfriends. Women who are so needy that they resent my husband or my time spent at home with my daughter…just have no place in my life. I’ve come across several of these and had to drop the friendships entirely. Sometimes, the women who feel this brand of possessive jealousy employ more insidious manipulations than coming right out with anger at their friends. Instead, they try to drive a wedge into their friends’ marriages and families by constantly telling their friend that the husband doesn’t treat them right or constantly taking offense to the way, “your husband and kids don’t appreciate you.” I’ve seen this several times, and I know it’s a common dynamic in female relationships. This is so dangerous. This kind of crap can destroy families, and I see women dancing around some form of this kind of stuff all the time. The husband doesn’t appreciate her…but I do, and I’m going to be there for her when he’s gone. That is the attitude. In today’s culture of feminism, which I will discuss in the next section, women who are already disenchanted with marriage and domestic life are big neon targets for this kind of manipulation. The idea that a marriage and home could be destroyed because the wife has an insecure and possessive girlfriend repulses me.

3.) Many women today tend to be cruel and selfish with their husbands and family. I have trouble reconciling a friendship with such a woman given my values regarding marriage and motherhood. The world we live in is not the one I was raised in some 25 years ago. When I was a little girl growing up in rural Arkansas, people were very family-focused. No one was ashamed to be religious. No one feared public reprisal or accusations of abuse for reasonable family discipline when kids acted out. Mothers nurtured. Fathers led. It was a very traditional part of the country in an era of conservative Reagan leadership.

Today, most kids are raised by hired help. Daycares, nannies, babysitters, and aftercare have taken the place of parental guidance. Women work as many or more hours than their husbands. We all have nice clothes and bigger houses and the kids all look like Land’s End ads, but people just aren’t as happy as I remember being when I was a dependant child. There are a host of reasons for this, but I always speak as I see…and women have a lot to answer for in this state of affairs.

Women are tired. They don’t sleep well. They work too many hours to be effective mothers. They are exhausted emotionally and physically…all in the pursuit of career status and material gain. Their husbands often encourage or demand this, but men are not nearly as guilty of the mindset as women. I’m speaking of the mindset that puts money and property and the social status gained by such acquisition ahead of the security of families and child-rearing. Women today consider it a birthright to be both a CEO making 6-figure salaries and a mother with adoring children and a handsome husband to worship and foster her domestic side. Life, it seems, doesn’t work that way.

Women become angry and disillusioned and feel let down by the world when they hit my age group. They realize that it is nigh on to impossible to have all of these things at once and still manage to enjoy any of it…or do any of it well. They reject their husbands’ physical needs and herd the noisy children with their constant demands for attention and affirmation onto people who are paid to keep them out of mommy’s face with “child care,” classes, lessons, and an endless parade of organized activity. They spend all their time taking classes and meditating and searching for spiritual edification in self-help books and receiving professional therapy…when what they really need is to work part-time, take care of their kids, and slip into a nice bubble bath to melt off their cares. They also need to give their husbands some nookie…because next to a bubble bath, a nice half hour of nookie-ing it up after dinner with the man who actually cares about you is the best therapy I’ve ever received.

God first. Husband and kids second. Self? Well self comes roughly ¾ of the way down the list. It’s my job to care for my family. It’s their job to care for me. I trust them to do that, and they trust me in return. It’s amazing how well the traditional family unit operates when you back off and allow it to happen. You cannot be a good person when you are so totally involved in yourself. You just can’t. You certainly can’t be a good friend to another woman when you don’t even have time to play with your kids or make dinner for your husband. There aren’t enough hours in the day and there isn’t enough energy in a human body to do all of it. Something eventually falls by the wayside. Unfortunately, most women jettison their responsibility to husband and family long before they give up the clothing, the cars, and the status of a successful career.

There aren’t many women who agree with me on this nowadays…and I find that so much more than sad. It’s tragic.

4.) It has become extremely difficult to find women who live by the same value system that my family and I live by. I have grown weary to exhaustion with women who live immoral lives without any shame or intention of reforming, but retain the right to bitch incessantly about how unhappy they are as a result of their bad choices.

I don’t need to go into all of this. Everyone knows what I’m talking about. Picking bad man after bad man and then complaining that all men are awful. Sleeping with bad man after bad man, and then complaining about how hurt and afraid of abandonment they are. Using drugs or alcohol to excess or behaving like a common prostitute and then complaining that no one respects them. Giving body, soul, address, and paycheck to man after man without a ring or a promise or any demand for commitment beyond communal mailboxes…and then complaining that his family doesn’t give them the respect of a wife….that he’s never going to offer marriage…or any of the other crap that goes along with such a scenario.

Sigh.

------------------------

So that’s the substance of my distaste for women. I’m not perfect and I’ve made some of the very mistakes I’ve mentioned in this long, LONG column of insults to my gender. I succumbed to social pressure as a young woman and made a terrible list of mistakes and bad choices. Those choice left me depressed, empty, and very displeased with my life for a long number of years. I’ve grown away from them, though. I’ve remedied the problems I found and am working very hard to live a life I can be proud of.

The result of all of this has been that I am less of a friend to the women who do deserve my attention and affection than I should be. I am tentative and wary. I tend to feel oppressed by my friendships at times and the obligations I have to keep in touch and take care of the feelings of women I love. This damage has nothing to do with my current friends and everything to do with the poisonous relationships I’ve had with other women in my life. To be blunt, my loved ones are suffering because of the pain that I allowed other people to inflict on me. My anxiety and resentment from disordered friendships has materially affected my ability to operate well in my healthy ones. That’s what I have to work on because there are women in my life who loved me for years despite my faults. They deserve my best self…and I want desperately to give it to them.

The women who love me truly have been very accepting and forgiving when I open up and explain all this to them. I am “endeavoring to deserve them,” and part of that work is making sure that I do not indulge in any more damaging relationships that might further corrode my ability to relate in a healthy way to the people who have earned my affection, time, and energy.

So.

If you see yourself in any of what I’ve said here, I implore you to do something to change it. Women need other women. If we can’t trust each other or enjoy one another, then we can’t get that need filled. Until we do, something vital will always be missing from our life’s experience. Wouldn’t that be a profoundly sad and totally unnecessary deprivation to endure?

God bless,

Mrs. Nix

Wives & WoW

2008-11-19T10:36:00.005+09:00

Those of you who know me...know that I play World of Warcraft.

How is it that such an intelligent, classy, and downright productive lady such as myself...became a video game geek? Well, I'll tell you. The reason is nothing more and nothing less than: I love my husband.

That's right. You heard me. I will explain further, though. Don't worry. Those who know me well enough to know that I play WoW also know very well that Mrs. Nix and brevity have never occupied the same sentence without the words "not" or "incapable of" preceding one or the other.

Here's the thing: My husband loves video games. Back in the way back when I was thin and gorgeous and single, I met this boy. During our shacking up period (shh...we'll talk about my hideous shameful hypocrisy about shacking up during another post), it used to irritate me to no end that he would sit at his computer and play games for hours without looking up. Why didn't he want to play with me? I would clean and do my homework and silently fume at his back while I watched him spend our together time on the computer. Many girlfriends and wives participate in this daily habit of outrage. For some wives, it's televised sports. For some, it's golf or bowling. For some, it's motorcycles and cars. For me...it was video games.

Men like toys.

They just do.

Women who want to keep the man they love happy and around need to acknowlege, accept, and find a peaceful place with this fact.

So how exactly does one do this? Well, I'll tell you (obviously).

One day, I left my apartment to get a pedicure. My adoring Ashley kissed me goodbye and was on his way to the computer before I got out the door. I was pissed as I walked out to my car. He was on the computer again. What a jerk! He wasn't going to do this any longer! I wasn't going to just sit around silently anymore and let him get away with excluding me from his free time and leaving me alone to do stupid crap like PC gaming. I decided right then, as I etched that still invisible and fateful first age wrinkle ever-deeper into my forehead, that I was going to give to him but good when I got home. I vowed that as soon as I got back from having...my....toenails.....painted......wait.

It hit me.

And it hit me like a brick wall.

What kind of vile hypocrite was I? Ashley would rather drive nails into his arms than sit in a salon and get his nails painted, but he never complained when I did it. Ashley hated shopping, at the grocery store or at Target or anywhere else...but he went with me regularly and never gave me attitude if I went without him "just for fun." Ashley hates my music, but he never gave me a hard time about it. Me? I repaid all this tolerance and loving acceptance by teasing him about his music, calling his recreational activities "stupid," and generally being hostile with him for spending time doing anything other than worshipping at the altar of Amy.

What a bitch, right?

So that very day, I came home from my pedicure and went straight to the fridge. I took a beer out, opened it, and took it to him at the computer. I kissed him on the top of the head and went about my afternoon.

Later that night, Ashley got dressed for work, kissed me goodbye, and left for his thankless job down the street. I sat down at the computer and opened up his game. It was Diablo II back then, for those who are wondering. I started up a new character and tried to get into it. It wasn't hard. It was actually pretty fun. I spent the rest of the night playing until Ashley got home from work. When he walked through the door, I told him that I had commandeered his machine because I wanted to see what was so wonderful that he spent so many hours doing it. His delight at seeing me try to play his game was beyond anything I can describe. He was like a little boy at Christmas.

A week later, I arrived home from work to find that he had come home early, networked our computers together, and neatly hidden all the cords and generally done a professional job on the place...so that we could play together. He was positively giddy about it, and he was so proud of himself that the giddiness spread. We've been a gaming couple ever since, and I cannot properly express the closeness we have together because of it.

Video games? Yes. Video games.

Every husband has something he indulges in. If he has a wife who tries to promote and participate in that little something, then he is probably a very happy man who worships his wife. It's just something to think about.

In the WoW universe, we have a label for the women who torture their men about the time spent playing in Warcraft. We'll be in the middle of something and a guild member will say, "Guys, I'm sorry but I have to go. Wife aggro." Sometimes, we start events by saying, "Are you going to have girlfriend aggro if we start this?" We all feel very sorry for these guys. Their wives are angry. The guys feel guilty for doing what they like to do in their own homes. It's just bad all around. I've actually heard wives calling into talk radio shows to complain about all this, and a lot of women are keeping marriage counselors in business to lament how horrible their men are for playing Warcraft.

It's all very sad. It's all very unnecessary.

The next time you're feeling nasty toward your husband or boyfriend for Warcraft or whatever else it is in your relationship...go put on something soft and pretty, grab a beer from the fridge...and go join your man in the garage, on the sofa in front of the game, or at his computer desk. We have a term for being intimate while playing WoW, too, but I won't get into that.

He loves you...perfume, makeup, scrapbooking, candles, nail polish, gossip magazines, handbags, shoe shopping, and all.

So love him back.

Who knows, you might even like WoW. I'm living proof of that. Not only do I love playing the game, but I also get to play it with a man who praises me behind my back, considers himself a lucky man, and who reveres the soil I tread upon as sacred ground.

Playing video games with him is no sacrifice when seen from this perspective.

God bless,

Amy Nix

(a.k.a. "Loolie," Blood Elf Priest, Tichondrius)

Wisdom from the First Leader of the Free World

2008-11-07T10:51:00.004+09:00

THE FAREWELL ADDRESS
of George Washington
PHILIDELPHIA, PA
1796

Friends and Fellow Citizens,

The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.

I beg you, at the same time, to do me the justice to be assured that this resolution has not been taken without a strict regard to all the considerations appertaining to the relation which binds a dutiful citizen to his country; and that in withdrawing the tender of service, which silence in my situation might imply, I am influenced by no diminution of zeal for your future interest, no deficiency of grateful respect for your past kindness, but am supported by a full conviction that the step is compatible with both.

The acceptance of, and continuance hitherto in, the office to which your suffrages have twice called me have been a uniform sacrifice of inclination to the opinion of duty and to a deference for what appeared to be your desire. I constantly hoped that it would have been much earlier in my power, consistently with motives which I was not at liberty to disregard, to return to that retirement from which I had been reluctantly drawn. The strength of my inclination to do this, previous to the last election, had even led to the preparation of an address to declare it to you; but mature reflection on the then perplexed and critical posture of our affairs with foreign nations, and the unanimous advice of persons entitled to my confidence, impelled me to abandon the idea.

I rejoice that the state of your concerns, external as well as internal, no longer renders the pursuit of inclination incompatible with the sentiment of duty or propriety, and am persuaded, whatever partiality may be retained for my services, that, in the present circumstances of our country, you will not disapprove my determination to retire.

The impressions with which I first undertook the arduous trust were explained on the proper occasion. In the discharge of this trust, I will only say that I have, with good intentions, contributed towards the organization and administration of the government the best exertions of which a very fallible judgment was capable. Not unconscious in the outset of the inferiority of my qualifications, experience in my own eyes, perhaps still more in the eyes of others, has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself; and every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome. Satisfied that if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my services, they were temporary, I have the consolation to believe that, while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene, patriotism does not forbid it.

In looking forward to the moment which is intended to terminate the career of my public life, my feelings do not permit me to suspend the deep acknowledgment of that debt of gratitude which I owe to my beloved country for the many honors it has conferred upon me; still more for the steadfast confidence with which it has supported me; and for the opportunities I have thence enjoyed of manifesting my inviolable attachment, by services faithful and persevering, though in usefulness unequal to my zeal. If benefits have resulted to our country from these services, let it always be remembered to your praise, and as an instructive example in our annals, that under circumstances in which the passions, agitated in every direction, were liable to mislead, amidst appearances sometimes dubious, vicissitudes of fortune often discouraging, in situations in which not unfrequently want of success has countenanced the spirit of criticism, the constancy of your support was the essential prop of the efforts, and a guarantee of the plans by which they were effected. Profoundly penetrated with this idea, I shall carry it with me to my grave, as a strong incitement to unceasing vows that heaven may continue to you the choicest tokens of its beneficence; that your union and brotherly affection may be perpetual; that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained; that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue; that, in fine, the happiness of the people of these States, under the auspices of liberty, may be made complete by so careful a preservation and so prudent a use of this blessing as will acquire to them the glory of recommending it to the applause, the affection, and adoption of every nation which is yet a stranger to it.

Here, perhaps, I ought to stop. But a solicitude for your welfare, which cannot end but with my life, and the apprehension of danger, natural to that solicitude, urge me, on an occasion like the present, to offer to your solemn contemplation, and to recommend to your frequent review, some sentiments which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people. These will be offered to you with the more freedom, as you can only see in them the disinterested warnings of a parting friend, who can possibly have no personal motive to bias his counsel. Nor can I forget, as an encouragement to it, your indulgent reception of my sentiments on a former and not dissimilar occasion.

Interwoven as is the love of liberty with every ligament of your hearts, no recommendation of mine is necessary to fortify or confirm the attachment.

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.

For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.

But these considerations, however powerfully they address themselves to your sensibility, are greatly outweighed by those which apply more immediately to your interest. Here every portion of our country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving the union of the whole.

The North, in an unrestrained intercourse with the South, protected by the equal laws of a common government, finds in the productions of the latter great additional resources of maritime and commercial enterprise and precious materials of manufacturing industry. The South, in the same intercourse, benefiting by the agency of the North, sees its agriculture grow and its commerce expand. Turning partly into its own channels the seamen of the North, it finds its particular navigation invigorated; and, while it contributes, in different ways, to nourish and increase the general mass of the national navigation, it looks forward to the protection of a maritime strength, to which itself is unequally adapted. The East, in a like intercourse with the West, already finds, and in the progressive improvement of interior communications by land and water, will more and more find a valuable vent for the commodities which it brings from abroad, or manufactures at home. The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and comfort, and, what is perhaps of still greater consequence, it must of necessity owe the secure enjoyment of indispensable outlets for its own productions to the weight, influence, and the future maritime strength of the Atlantic side of the Union, directed by an indissoluble community of interest as one nation. Any other tenure by which the West can hold this essential advantage, whether derived from its own separate strength, or from an apostate and unnatural connection with any foreign power, must be intrinsically precarious.

While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighboring countries not tied together by the same governments, which their own rival ships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. In this sense it is that your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.

These considerations speak a persuasive language to every reflecting and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the Union as a primary object of patriotic desire. Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal. We are authorized to hope that a proper organization of the whole with the auxiliary agency of governments for the respective subdivisions, will afford a happy issue to the experiment. It is well worth a fair and full experiment. With such powerful and obvious motives to union, affecting all parts of our country, while experience shall not have demonstrated its impracticability, there will always be reason to distrust the patriotism of those who in any quarter may endeavor to weaken its bands.
In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection. The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a useful lesson on this head; they have seen, in the negotiation by the Executive, and in the unanimous ratification by the Senate, of the treaty with Spain, and in the universal satisfaction at that event, throughout the United States, a decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a policy in the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to their interests in regard to the Mississippi; they have been witnesses to the formation of two treaties, that with Great Britain, and that with Spain, which secure to them everything they could desire, in respect to our foreign relations, towards confirming their prosperity. Will it not be their wisdom to rely for the preservation of these advantages on the Union by which they were procured ? Will they not henceforth be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from their brethren and connect them with aliens?

To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a government for the whole is indispensable. No alliance, however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute; they must inevitably experience the infractions and interruptions which all alliances in all times have experienced. Sensible of this momentous truth, you have improved upon your first essay, by the adoption of a constitution of government better calculated than your former for an intimate union, and for the efficacious management of your common concerns. This government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support. Respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty. The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

Towards the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion; and remember, especially, that for the efficient management of your common interests, in a country so extensive as ours, a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction, to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person and property.

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield.

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?

Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. The execution of these maxims belongs to your representatives, but it is necessary that public opinion should co-operate. To facilitate to them the performance of their duty, it is essential that you should practically bear in mind that towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant; that the intrinsic embarrassment, inseparable from the selection of the proper objects (which is always a choice of difficulties), ought to be a decisive motive for a candid construction of the conduct of the government in making it, and for a spirit of acquiescence in the measures for obtaining revenue, which the public exigencies may at any time dictate.

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it 7 It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it ? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue ? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?

In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils 7 Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?
It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.

Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.
Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism; this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated.

How far in the discharge of my official duties I have been guided by the principles which have been delineated, the public records and other evidences of my conduct must witness to you and to the world. To myself, the assurance of my own conscience is, that I have at least believed myself to be guided by them.

In relation to the still subsisting war in Europe, my proclamation of the twenty-second of April, I793, is the index of my plan. Sanctioned by your approving voice, and by that of your representatives in both houses of Congress, the spirit of that measure has continually governed me, uninfluenced by any attempts to deter or divert me from it.

After deliberate examination, with the aid of the best lights I could obtain, I was well satisfied that our country, under all the circumstances of the case, had a right to take, and was bound in duty and interest to take, a neutral position. Having taken it, I determined, as far as should depend upon me, to maintain it, with moderation, perseverance, and firmness.

The considerations which respect the right to hold this con duct, it is not necessary on this occasion to detail. I will only observe that, according to my understanding of the matter, that right, so far from being denied by any of the belligerent powers, has been virtually admitted by all.

The duty of holding a neutral conduct may be inferred, without anything more, from the obligation which justice and humanity impose on every nation, in cases in which it is free to act, to maintain inviolate the relations of peace and amity towards other nations.

The inducements of interest for observing that conduct will best be referred to your own reflections and experience. With me a predominant motive has been to endeavor to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.

Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.

Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love towards it, which is so natural to a man who views in it the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations, I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

Geo. Washington

----------------------

Give me a man like this in Washington. America, where are your men? Where is your loyalty? How can a nation that once had the wisdom to follow a man such as this one...have devolved into the mass of belligerant, arrogant, and amoral leadership we see in our capital city today?

These are important questions.

Twilight & Teenagers

2008-11-06T12:52:00.007+09:00

During the tumultuous social and political climate of October 2008, I began to suffer from what a lot of people were calling “Election Stress.” As an American, I was nervous and jittery about things that I just simply had no control over in the world. I was not sleeping, my appetite was seriously diminished, and a Mrs. Nix with sleep deprivation, low blood sugar, AND anxiety is not a good thing at ALL. After hearing my precarious emotional state in a phone call, my excellent friend, Bud Houck, said, “Honey, you need to escape into some nice and entertaining ‘fluff lit.’ Something meaningless and fun.” I felt this was excellent advice (his advice usually is), so the next time I was at the BX, I resolved to find myself a trashy romance novel or a daring historical fiction adventure epic which would require no mental effort but provide me with that fantasy life escapism which my poor tired mind so desperately needed for some relief.

After debating over a few titles, I picked up Stephenie Meyer’s first book, Twilight. I’ll admit; I picked it because of the cover. Most of my novel choices boil down to cover art. Despite the clichéd adage that claims the contrary, I have found that beautiful covers are the very best predictor of a beautiful story. Call me silly, but you’ll find my opinion on this point quite impervious to any form of logical argument that you might put forward to persuade me otherwise. Even after reading all of what I have to say about the series here, which most of you will interpret as a very negative review, I still have nothing to regret about the purchase of these books or the time I spent in reading them. My beautiful cover theory, therefore, remains to date unchallenged.

What followed that initial purchase in the Kadena AFB exchange has been a week-long binge of reading indulgence as I devoured the entire four-book series as fast as my eyes could move over the words. Ms. Meyer’s vampires are lovely and very different from traditional vampire lore. I found the romantic tension and the originality of some of the concepts both exciting and immersive.

Though I didn’t know what I was getting into beforehand, it became clear after about the 2nd chapter that I had not only chosen a mindless and heady romance novel about vampires and star-crossed love, but it was also a teeny bopper, bubble gum angst-fest aimed at an audience of 13-19 year-old girls (If you have a daughter under 15, I strongly advise that you should not allow them to read this series. I‘ll get into the reasons for that further on.) Naturally, as a grown woman with the perspective on life that most of us can claim after more than 30 trips around the sun, I caught myself rolling my eyes every couple pages, but I was smiling and nodding in recognition of the overblown emotionality much more often than I was recoiling in annoyance. I remembered it all from my own teen years, and it transported me back to that time. I even praised the author to my husband and friends as having produced one of the most accurate portrayals of the self-inflicted drama and willful wallowing in ennui--so prominent in American high school culture--that I have ever read. Ms. Meyer manages to paint the whole landscape without condescending to her characters or her readers so very well that you start to question after a while if the author, herself, might not realize that people are supposed to grow away from such behavior at some point…preferably shortly after that fateful age when a young woman first begins receiving utility bills with her name on them in the mailbox.

I further realized, after finishing the first title and looking online to see about the rest of the series, that Twilight is quite the internet phenomenon. There’s a movie in the works and there are teenagers writing reviews of the series on Amazon.com and at the iTunes store that state things in all caps like, “NOTHING ELSE IN LIFE MATTERS BESIDES TWILIGHT.” You can’t make this stuff up. Go Google “twilight,” and you’ll see what I mean. The frothing and fainting is nauseous…but what can you do? This is the stuff teenage girls’ dreams are made of. It’s promises of immortal love and loveliness with a membership card to the in-crowd that will never expire…all wrapped up in gossamer pink ribbons and presented in a designer handbag next to a wallet full of credit cards without spending limits. Escapist literature has never hit its mark so well.

So let me just get right into it here by saying that, had I been looking for literary achievement in these books…I would’ve been disappointed and seriously put out with the author. The books are poorly-written by pretty much any standard you could judge writing by. The characters are distinct but insipid and unbelievable, even with reader indulgence given for the ones who are teenagers. The heroine is unlikable in most of the series and even revolting at times as we witness her weakness of character, narcissism, rudeness, distressed damsel disease, and willful self-deception over the course of 2000 or so pages (compare her to Jane Austen’s Marianne Dashwood without the advantages of virtue, good breeding, or an ability to learn anything from her mistakes, and you‘ll be striking pretty near the point). The “other guy” in the series is an immature, irrational, and occasionally violent juvenile with no redeeming quality beyond his occasional usefulness in plot mechanics. The entire series is, from many angles, a steaming pile. I admit that with my hands up, and I will defend these statements against anyone who wishes to take up the argument with me. Despite all of it, though…I could not put the books down. They are undeniable page-turners, and who doesn’t love those?

The Twilight Saga did cure my Election Stress. Obliterated it totally, as a matter of fact…and if you’re feeling a bit of your own “New President Stress” today, may I suggest a nice fluffy novel to salve your anxiety? For adults, these books cause no harm and provide an exquisite release from reality. I heartily recommend them to anyone who wants some cotton candy and likes vampire stories.

If you have a teen daughter who wants to read these books, however, then I encourage you to read my following comments on the series. I know this column is lengthy, but if you’re going to give four novels to your teen and set her loose on the contents, I think it’s worth the sacrifice of 15 minutes to listen to another parent’s opinion of what you’re handing to her.

Should I Let My Kid Read Twilight?
Mrs. Nix’s Insightful and Authoritative Review of the Series
--------------------------------------

The Premise
Twilight is about a young girl named Bella Swan, just 17 years old when we meet her, who moves from Phoenix, AZ to Forks, WA to live with her father despite her loathing for the place. She does this because her mom is marrying a minor league jock and Bella feels inappropriate guilt over her mother’s need for time with the new stud--enough guilt to uproot herself and spend her senior year among people she has never met and with a father she doesn’t know very well. Naturally, the mother lets her do this and we are left an obvious authorial mandate to think Bella selfless and saintly for putting someone else ahead of herself.

Shortly after arriving in the small town of Forks, a young man named Edward Cullen catches her eye. He’s very rude to her, but instead of thinking that maybe that qualifies him as a jerk, she sits blushing furiously and wondering what she did to be so offensive to him. Edward sits at the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria, he’s stunningly gorgeous, and his family has more money than Bill Gates. Just about the time you start thinking Edward should dive off a cliff, even though the author’s tone indicates that you’re supposed to be as enchanted by him as the little twit from Phoenix, Edward steps up to the plate and saves Bella’s life in a rather miraculous fashion. In the course of events following, she begins to suspect that he and his family are a bunch of vampires…and for the first and very last time in the series, Bella’s instincts are right on the money.

As per usual in stories for teen girls, Bella and Edward spiral swiftly into an obsessive and unhealthy infatuation with one another after a scanty number of weeks' acquaintance. They proudly declare themselves to be irrevocably in a state of true love…for all eternity, amen, and then the story really begins.

I told you it was bad…but wait! Don’t go, yet.

The Bad Stuff

First, let’s talk about Bella Swan. The heroine is a typical teen in that she has monstrous insecurities and a propensity to marinate in drama and depression. She also has the annoying habit of blaming herself for everything bad that goes on in the world. What worries me about this trait is that the author highlights it again and again and again. In incident after incident, we see Bella in self-torture over things that are clearly not her fault in any way. She burns in self-focused blame and guilt over the atrocities of other people, and when someone else behaves badly toward her, she never blames the guilty party. She turns that guilt inward and chews up her insides believing that it is her own fault when others act out with cruelty, inappropriate anger, or grief. At one point in the book, she is a victim of what can only be classified as mild sexual assault, and Bella quickly discards her initial anger over the incident and blames herself for the boy’s behavior. She forgives and overlooks and allies herself with people who treat her poorly and abuse her emotionally consistently throughout the series. Many adolescent girls do this, I know, and I suffered through the series waiting for that point to be fleshed out in a satisfying way. At first, I hoped that the author was going to use this flaw of Bella’s wisely, that she would steer the story to illustrate the dangers of so much self-involvement. She didn’t. Instead, we are led by the author to be convinced that Bella is the ultimate self-sacrificing saint--that this habit of taking the troubles and faults of others to her own charge is a virtue or something to be emulated. In reality, Bella’s character is dangerously narcissistic. The belief that the world revolves around one person and that one person alone has power over the emotions, actions, and choices of others is the very essence of narcissism. It is so self-destructive, and I find the example the author sets for teens who might envy Bella or want to be Bella…troubling.

Second, there is the issue of Jacob Black. Jacob is a secondary character at first, but he grows in significance as the series progresses. He is a 16 year-old boy who believes himself in love with Bella from the first time he meets her, but she does not return the sentiment…simply wishing to be a friend to him. This friendship that develops with Bella is largely reviewed by an adolescent audience as one in which Bella has “led him on,” or “used his feelings,” without caring about the consequences for Jacob. They parrot this because the author leads the reader toward such a conclusion even though the facts of the plot contradict such a perspective. This concerned me a great deal…knowing that so many teen girls interpret the relationship as one that places blame for the later discord on Bella.

We are clearly meant to sympathize with Jacob’s incessant moaning over Bella’s rejection of his romantic advances and think him one of the good guys…as a true rival to Edward in both goodness and appeal. To the contrary, I contend that Jacob has very little in his character to redeem him and is, instead of some secondary hero in the story, one of its villains. Instead of accepting Bella’s steadfast, constant, and very gentle explanations that she does not love him in a romantic way, Jacob only deepens his obsession with possessing her as his own. He twists his desire for her into an ever-darker and ever-widening circle of blame and hatred. In his self-indulgent tantrums, he is often cruel to everyone around him. If you are an adult following the story, it’s pretty clear from the beginning that Jacob is cruel…truly cruel…and never considers anyone but himself until about halfway through the final book of the series. By that time, I was so disgusted with his character that his sudden charity felt wrong and repulsive. I saw no redemption in it.

Following the facts in the plot, Bella is actually very honest and careful with Jacob about her feelings from day one, but by the end of the series, the pain and suffering she has endured feeling “guilty” over Jacob’s life of rage, selfish cruelty and inappropriate pouting is just overwhelming. Bella self-flagellates for over a year with self-loathing and despair…when any grown-up reading the book knows that what Jacob needed all along was a swift kick in the ass and an admonition to “man up.” The author conveniently forgets about halfway through the second book that Jacob is 16 years old and begins taking him seriously as an adult. The adults in the book do not treat him as the minor child that he is. They treat him with the consideration of a grown man and give him the autonomy of an adult…no matter how badly he behaves…with no attempt to reign him in. Even Bella’s father reacts to Jacob’s ill treatment of his daughter with humor instead of parental outrage. And after all this…the reader is supposed to accept Jacob and love him because Bella does.

Jacob’s place in the story is, in my opinion, the most destructive component of the books. The idea that young women should put up with continual and never-ending emotional torture from a boy they have never wronged…and that they should maintain loyalty in such a relationship…is dangerous and irresponsible.

Finally, I would like to caution you about the Nightmare Factor. Though the books are not, in my opinion, gratuitously violent, they are vampire stories. There is bloodshed in this series…a lot of it. There is evil cruelty and murder. There are vampires that do frightening things to humans that I would not have young girls reading about. There are hints at sexual predators in one of the danger scenes, though no rape or assault is actually committed. Later in the series, there is one of the most horrific and gruesome birthing scenes I have ever read. There are graphic scenes describing physical pain with striking detail, and there was enough pain, injury, loss of life, and plain old supernatural creep-out in the book to make anyone shiver a few times. I tell you this because I fear that girls under 15 have no business reading this content. There is nothing in these books that you might not find in a typical scary movie…and Ms. Meyer leaves a lot of it to the imagination instead of describing any actual gore. Every parent must know his or her own child, but I cannot encourage you enough to protect the dreams of your young daughters from this material. It’s heavy stuff in places, and I solidly stick by my recommendation of a 15 and older restriction…no matter how intelligent, mature, or advanced a reader your 13 year-old princess might be.

The Good Stuff
Despite all the mud-slinging I’ve done here, there is actually more to recommend in these books than there is to condemn for a teen audience. I was positively gleeful in places to find how much effort had been placed into the effortless weaving of good moral lessons in the story. There are also examples in the book of great kindness and the rewards that are earned by being a good and thoughtful person. And…naturally…there is the central love story between Bella and Edward. Though Bella’s character wants a lot in the way of strength and sense, she is improved by Edward before the end.

Edward Cullen is a vampire. He is also a thoughtful, genteel, mannerly, moral, respectful, and faithful lover to Bella. Your girls could have very little chance of forming a better idea in their heads of the kind of boy to look for than by modeling their search on Edward. If, after reading this series, your daughters annoy the crap out of you with their incessant sighing over Edward Cullen…remember that he is just the sort of boy you’d want them to swoon over. Protective and virtuous, he refuses to take chances with Bella’s safety. He values her opinions and friendship. He is masculine and written unapologetically so…no wussified girly-man here. He feels responsible to take care of Bella and provide for her. He is respectful to her father even when the father is unfairly rude to him. He refuses to take Bella’s virginity until after they are married. He provides an example of self control and tempered reactions to an audience just beginning to learn what those things look like. The list goes on and on. Edward Cullen is a parent’s dream. I only wish that Ms. Meyer had written a more worthy Bella to deserve him--that she had as much grasp on the true virtues of a good woman…as she has on the true virtues of a good man. Having an example like Edward’s to follow, perhaps the girls who read Twilight will set their standards a bit higher in the teenage world of dating. That is a very good thing, indeed.

Ms. Meyer has a wonderful way of instilling good values about the benefits of marriage and the evils of abortion to the story, as well. Through several plot devices involving other characters, a child in the womb is able to communicate to its father as a totally sentient and fully-developed personality…long before its birth. It is illustrated in vivid and joyful detail that babies are babies…whether they’ve been born yet or not. The horror of the fact that this baby was a candidate for early termination is brilliant in contrast because of the artful and subtle way both subjects were discussed in the plot. Ms. Meyer did a beautiful job in this regard without preaching, reproaching, or condemning. It is presented as a plain truth, in simple metaphors that any teen will understand without feeling she just got a lecture. In addition to this, the inconvenience, physical pain, and life-threatening violence of the pregnancy and birth provide what I would consider an appropriate deterrent to any thoughts of some fanciful or lonely teen who might believe herself desirous of early motherhood. It’s all very well done, and I could not praise this series enough for its ability to present such basic moral issues in such an attractive and palatable way for it’s target audience.

In conclusion, I would say that you should think about what you know of your daughter and assess her ability to handle horror and romance with rational recognition of the fact that it’s all fiction. If you think she can handle it…there are a lot of good things about these books. She’ll no doubt love you for letting her have them…every teen girl in America, it seems, is in love with Twilight. Just be sure that while your child is reading the stories, you take every opportunity to engage her in conversation about what she should and should not feel responsible for. Talk to her about appropriate guilt, appropriate shame, and appropriate responsibility…then make sure she knows EXACTLY what the inappropriate versions of all those look like. In my opinion, the good in this series far outweighs the bad. So give your kid her sparkly vampire boyfriend for Christmas and feel good about that choice. Just make sure you monitor how the series is affecting your daughter and use it as a teaching opportunity.

God bless,
Mrs. Nix

Labeling Presidential Relationships

2008-11-06T12:19:00.004+09:00

After my long-winded scolding of all the people who say "nasty" things about politicians...and anyone else...in open society, I am about to have to eat a little pride and admit that I may have scolded you all prematurely. In the weeks since I wrote that blog entry, I have learned things about Barack Obama that lead me to feel what was so eloquently summed up by an English editorial writer for The Spectator named Melanie Philips. On October 14, she wrote:

"You have to pinch yourself - a Marxist radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it's considered impolite to say so."

I couldn't agree more.

I've never been one to discourage people from labeling things...as long as the label is true. Contrary to what seems to be popular opinion in our current culture of politically correct language, putting labels on things is not a bad thing to do. Labels give a name to something. They define something. Definition brings clarity. Without clarity, there can be very little hope for real enlightenment or progress or change. We shouldn't be afraid of calling things by their names. Things are what they are and people are who they are. Shying away from that or refusing to admit such a basic truth never got anybody to anyplace good.

In truth, Barack Obama (though I still contend that he believes himself a patriot and has sincere intentions to do good) is more than just someone I disagree with. I actually fear this man because he is so very radical in his ideology and worldview. The more I learn about the Obama doctrine, the more I am convinced that Barack himself is (here come the labels) a socialist with Marxist economic views. This way of thinking is decidedly un-American, and though I sincerely believe that Barack Obama is a patriot in his core, I think it is very plain that he has surrounded himself with the wrong sorts of people and ideas. By that folly, he has developed a vision for America that is hopeful and Utopian yet wholly unrealistic, totally unfounded in the American ideals of entrepreneurship or capitalist individualism, and which comes dangerously near mimicking a Soviet brand of communism in matters of economy and wealth distribution.

The scary part is that a large portion of the American electorate doesn't seem to notice any of this. At least I hope the problem is that they haven't noticed...because the alternative is that they just don't care. God help us all in that event.

I said that Barack arrived at his socialist and radical anti-capitalist views as a result of the company he kept, and I firmly believe it. There is a great deal of truth in the statement, "You are who you hang with." There are other ways to say it. "You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas." "Birds of a feather flock together." "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." And so on. The company we keep defines us as much as anything else in this life. Our friends, mentors, and colleagues are people we choose to keep company with because they provide a place for us to fit. We belong to our friends and associates. We seek out people who share our views and feelings and values...and find comfort in keeping company with those people once we've found them. Barack Obama's friends and colleagues concern me.

Let's start with The Terrorist. Yes, I mean William Ayers.

Why would I call him that? Well, he co-founded a radical communist anti-war group called "The Weather Underground" in the 60's during the Vietnam War. This group of folks not only bombed The Pentagon and The United States Capitol Building, but they also had some frightening ideas about the violent overthrow of capitalism in the U.S. and the forced re-education...Soviet tyranny style...of the American people. Other bombing targets were an officer's ball at Fort Dix and The Butler Library at Columbia University. Several members of the group were killed when a bomb they were building (designed specifically to kill people...not destroy property...by the use of nails that would spray out from the blast) blew up prematurely. One of those killed was Bill Ayers’ girlfriend.

There is a great deal more to the history of the WUO, and if you're interested enough to read about it, I encourage you to do so. The long shot is that Bill Ayers hid out like a coward until after Ford gave amnesty to draft dodgers and then turned himself in just before Reagan's inauguration in December of 1980. Charges against him were dropped...I cannot fathom why except that 60's radicals seem to have achieved some sort of societal pass for their treason. We think of them now as pot-smoking harmless hippy types, and it's become romantic and whitewashed for those who didn’t live through it. Bill Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is wholly unrepentant about his crimes. He now spends his days teaching America’s youth about “social justice” and pursuing “progressive” education reform. He insists that they were right in what they did back in the 60's and openly proclaims that "we didn't do enough."

I suppose the theory is…if you’re too old to bomb the stuff yourself, then it’s time to develop a career in a field where you can gain ready access to impressionable young people and educate them into being angry enough to bomb it for you. Winning hearts and minds…isn’t that how it goes? Sounds a LOT like Al Qaeda to me…but maybe I’m being melodramatic.

Despite all of this, Senator Obama thinks Bill Ayers is a great guy. He has taken campaign money from him (in a fund raising event held in Ayers‘ living room), and with that special politician‘s condescending smile, Obama waves off any opposition to such an alliance with, “Well…I was only 8 years old when all that happened."). Yeah. Okay. I don’t care if you were in diapers, Senator. Sharing worldview with, holding respect for, and accepting money from a notorious domestic terrorist doesn’t have a statute of limitations in the “REALLY BAD FREAKING IDEA” category when you are about to be the president of the United States.

Barack himself was only 8 when Mr. Ayers was going through his bombing and government overthrow phase...Yes. That's true. Here's the thing, though: Timothy McVeigh bombed that building in Oklahoma City when I was a kid...but were he alive today, inexplicably pardoned for his crimes, I wouldn't seek his acquaintance, hang out with him, serve on education funding boards with him, or gratefully accept his money and attention. Abortion clinics were bombed in my childhood, and I would not sit across a table and share a meal with one of those bombers no matter how many years had passed...and even if they hadn't actually killed anyone in those acts of terrorism.

If some guy down the street raped a woman, got off for it in the courts, and years later was gainfully employed by a university...teaching youngsters that he was justified in raping that woman...and encouraging them to go rape a woman of their own...I would find that pretty vile. Even if this man hadn't raped another woman in all the years since his first crime, and even if "back then" people didn't view rape the same way we do today because those were the "times," I wouldn't walk past the guy in the street without moving my skirts aside to make sure they didn't touch such a filthy human being. I certainly wouldn't engage him in conversation, and I wouldn't take his money for my own causes. If you think this is a poor analogy, I beg to differ. ESPECIALLY given that Bill Ayers is wholly unapologetic for his violent past and OPENLY espouses and vomits all over his students the same pathetic, flawed, violent, irresponsible Marxist and communist ideals he held back when Barack was a 2nd grader learning his multiplication tables.

I have to say that my opinion of Barack Obama...yes, on this point alone...cannot be one of respect or any kind of personal approbation...on any level. Ayers became a domestic terrorist when Obama was a kid, and he's still an unrepentant radical who would use the brainwashing of America's youth instead of bombs to achieve the same ends he was after in the 60's...today. Obama gratefully, with that sycophantic smile and hand-shaking, mutual ego-caressing bullshit that rich people do together at fund-rasing "events," took money and endorsement from Bill Ayers to start his life of politics. Without shame. Without scruple. Without seeing a problem with it, whatsoever.

And Obama's followers don't understand why we find this relationship important?

Please.

Moving on to The Racist.

For at least 20 years, Barack Obama took himself, then his wife, and then his two pretty little girls to church every Sunday, and listened, in the same room where he bowed his head in prayer, to a man who screamed "God DAMN America," and who called our country the "U.S. of KKK." Barack likely nodded his head in agreement with his fellow congregants and sang hymns to God before and after sermons about white people inventing AIDS to kill black people and encouragement to parents to teach their children that each of their white countrymen harbors a racist heart that cannot be trusted. The depth of that kind of blasphemy and hatred makes me ill. It is truly the most nauseous abuse of a pulpit I've ever heard about in this country. Jeremiah Wright basically excuses himself by saying, "It's a black thing, and white people don't understand." He's right. I don't understand it. I contend that my skin color has nothing to do with it. Lynching was a white thing, and I don't understand that. Nazi Germany was a white thing and I don't understand that, either. Excusing your personal prejudices by claiming a racial right to them is doubly disgusting in my opinion. Just because Reverend Wright's hatred flatters black people doesn't mean they ought to get a free pass on bathing in it. Hate is hate...even if you're a black preacher who "gets it."

And Obama's followers don't understand why we find this relationship important?

Please.

Now let's talk about the The Anti-Semite. Rashid Khalidi, to the best of my knowledge, is another professor-type with a checkered reputation. This guy hasn’t bombed anyone, thank God, but he’s an anti-Semite in the worst way. Born in New York, Mr. Khalidi is the professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and has been a friend of Senator Obama’s for years. The Obama family lived near enough to frequently dine with the Khalidi household, and Obama has nothing but praise for the way Khalidi has helped him get rid of some of his “prejudices.”

I find that an odd thing to say. You see, Khalidi is a spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (ever heard of Arafat)…which has known ties to Hamas, and is pretty much the most anti-Jew organization on the face of the earth. So…did Obama get rid of prejudice or just swap one kind in on another?

In addition to admiring the husband, Senator Obama is also quite a supporter of Rashid’s wife, Mona Khalidi. Mrs. Khalidi is the co-founder of the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which received a $40,000 donation from The Woods Fund in 2001 and another $35,000 in 2002. Obama served on the board for the foundation at that time, alongside (here’s where it gets fun) Bill Ayers.

“Just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” indeed.

Someone’s pants are on fire, Senator.

Later we found that The L.A. Times has a video of Obama at a dinner or party or some kind of event praising Khalidi…with Bill Ayers in attendance…that is apparently so inflammatory that the newspaper was given the tape with strict instruction not to publish it. Word of said tape’s existence leaked out, and all The L.A. Times says on the matter is that the tape was given in strict confidentiality and that they will not release it.

I have to say it…even I didn’t think our nation’s papers were so very in the tank for Obama that they would actually suppress information that was THIS pertinent to the election and THIS important for the American people to see. Journalism is dead.

After looking at all this...and the house he bought from The Chicago Mobster at cost through very suspicious means...and the conditions his blood relations live under...and the way his campaign dealt with people who spoke against his candidacy, and, and, and...

Well, it's a lot to take in.

It’s a pity the media didn't report all this FOR us so that everyone could see in concise, professionally-researched, fact-checked, and fully vetted journalistic integrity the truth of how all these relationships played out. Since the media hasn‘t done that, it’s left to private citizens to dig deep and piece together bits at a time to learn the truth. I learned all of what I’ve ranted about here on the radio, in the wikipedia, and from blogs. In my opinion, there is no excuse for the lack of coverage about all this. Even Fox has kept suspiciously silent on a lot of these things. So much for a conservative choice in the media, eh?

So…do these relationships of folly make Obama more apt to be a bad judge of character or a flat-out liar? I’m inclined, given this pattern of becoming friends-with-a-really-bad-person-but-didn’t-know-anything-about-it-until-the-bloggers-wrote-about-it, to answer that question with, “Does it really matter?” Either way…the man should've had no business running my country. He’s either an idiot that can’t be trusted or a liar with no honor who can’t be trusted. Or...and here's where I get scared...he's a communist who just won the lottery.

This is a man who has purposefully and with great care in choosing his company, steeped himself in radical ideas about socialist overthrow of capitalism and the communal ownership of wealth. He has deliberately surrounded himself with domestic terrorists, anti-semitic Middle Eastern activists, mobsters, and racists.

Do you really, honestly believe…that Obama has nothing in common with these people? Do you eat dinner with people you don’t like? Do you take money from people you don’t know? Do you give money to people you don’t know?

These are important questions.

These questions should have been asked…in the open…by the media.

But they weren't.

So.

I have had to ask these questions for myself…and I have one more:

Do you care what the answers are?

----------------------------

Now that Obama is our president, this blog and the thoughts/fears that compelled me to write it all out...are sort of moot.

I want to support President Obama once he takes that post. He will be my president whether I like him or not. You'll never see or hear me saying stupid, juvenile crap like, "Well he's not my president. I didn't vote for him." Unlike some of our bretheren on the left, I love my country no matter who's leading it.

I can only encourage those who currently feel that Barack Obama holds the key to all that is wrong in the world...to stop. Think. Read. And then, watch. That's what I will be doing. I will be living every day of this next four years wishing my new president well and praying that he is blessed with good health, good wisdom, and great progress. I really will be. I don't want to dislike Obama, but I refuse to sit with a blind eye while my country is overtaken by illegal aliens, apathetic ignorance, and unconstitutional overreach by a government that thinks I live to serve it...rather than the other way around.

This man is to be my president. He will decide what causes and countries my husband will fight and possibly die for. I hope to God I'm wrong about him.

Political Hysteria

2008-10-07T10:54:00.006+09:00

You know...I have opinions. I am the type of person who tends to develop an opinion about things. I don't allow myself to be passive about thematic or spiritual things in this life, and I have very little regard for the intelligence or respectability of people who do. I have religious opinions. I have political opinions. I have social opinions. Occasionally, I am given the opportunity to learn about something new. The first thing I do when such an opportunity comes along is try to make sense of it and stabilize myself by deciding what I think of it, whether or not I agree with it, and generally compartmentalizing it in its appropriate place by developing an educated opinion on it.

Lots of people share this trait with me. Being opinionated makes me rather more ordinary than it makes me special; of this, I am acutely aware. Opinions are, indeed, like assholes...ba dum bum. Among my countrymen, for that matter, being opinionated is practically a cultural imperative. We are a people impelled to be involved, and we get involved at full volume. We feel entitled to our "share in the conversation," and it matters not to any of us which conversation that might be. We believe that every man's opinion is presumably worth something as well as being created equal to all other opinions in the eyes of God...unless, of course, we're discussing whether or not God should be included in the present conversation. Oh, yes, then it really gets complicated. Sigh.

Now, finally, I seem to have brought myself around to the point, which is: In my opinion, a lot of self-proclaimed grown-ups have gotten shrill and downright hateful when giving out their opinions. Further, I find it extremely distasteful and unattractive when they do so. Third and finally, I feel a need to reiterate my most often-stated opinion, which is that if people would just listen to me and do what I say, the world would be a far better place.

There are many areas of society in which good examples of what I’m talking about abound. There is none, however, so prevalent and important as in the arena of national politics. I vowed to myself that I would not get mired down in the inertia of this presidential race. I knew what was coming and I know what is STILL to come after the polls close…no matter which candidate wins the day. In spite of myself, however, I have come to feel the need to sort out and put down all my feelings on the subject…so here it is: My thoughts on the current culture of political hysteria.

----------------------------------

Yeah, so we're electing another president, and for like the third time in a row, you have the first side condemning the second side to Hell and the second side throwing food at the first side while screaming hysterically about how immature and uneducated they are. While I observe these victims of apoplexy as they writhe in their anger and revel in their lack of self-control, a most frightening thought occurs to me: Each of these sad little creatures possesses the right of suffrage. Thank Heaven, if history is to be considered any use as a predictor, the vast majority of them will not exercise it.

It's very unattractive all 'round. And...I have grown weary of so much incivility.

Here are my chief objections to all of this nonsense as it pertains directly to the current presidential election and the chief players therein:

1.) Barack H. Obama is a patriot and a hard-working man of ambition. Very few people in this country's history have worked so hard to climb the ladder of political rank to stand where he is today...and regardless of where your loyalties and prejudices may lie, it is pretty freaking remarkable that we finally managed to get a black man into the race for the top office. Obama is an elected Senator for the State of Illinois, and he has served his entire adulthood in a series of positions of ever-increasing importance and responsibility as a civil servant. The man is qualified to run for this office. Quit saying that he isn't. It makes you look mean and petty...and in some extreme cases--yes--even racist.

For the people who support Barack Obama, he represents a new approach to things and a fresh perspective. He is a black man. He is a Democrat. He is reasonably young and an apparently devoted, loyal husband and father. He has the enthusiasm and emotional appeal of a college student at Berkeley who just discovered devotion to a "cause," but he has outgrown that overzealous obstinance and righteousness which make youthful activists appear universally ridiculous and unworthy of attention. He has given the Democrats something arguably different to be excited about, and that has energized even the most lethargic of liberal Americans. It almost makes me wish I were a Democrat.

Knowing all this, I am slack-jawed in dismay and shock at the kinds of things I see republicans saying...in public...about Barack Obama. There is an entire body of political argument that can be rationally used to discredit Obama's candidacy, but that is not what those on the right want to focus on. I suppose the drama quotient isn't high enough. No, instead of discussing his catastrophically failure-destined ideas about healthcare and the war in Iraq, they wave the Word of God in the air and scream, red-faced, that Obama is the antichrist (no wonder twits like Matt Damon believe that Christians are insane). They call Obama conniving, foolish, devious, dishonest, criminal, racist, and (worst of all) Muslim. They accuse this man who has gotten himself educated, raised a respectable family, and contributed to his communities and to our nation according to his own conscience, of being unpatriotic, deceiving, and evil. Cause...yeah, that's effective argument right there.

There is no circumstance that I can reasonably foresee that would allow me to vote for Barack Obama. He is a very liberal man with very liberal ideals and a very globalist worldview. I am an exceptionally conservative woman with very conservative ideals and a nearly isolationist worldview. For these reasons...Obama and I are not a match. I disagree with his solutions for the economic crisis. I disagree with his ideas about illegal immigration and labor reform. I disagree with his attitude towards the Middle East and the current war/entanglement we are in over there. I disagree with him on pretty near 3 out of every four voting issues about which he has a published position. He is not "my guy," and I will not support him with my vote.

With all that said, I feel confident that you will not misunderstand me when I continue by saying that I will support him if he wins the big office by remaining respectful of the position he holds and encouraging conservatives around me to temper their resentment and remain rational in their condemnations. I doubt that many will acknowlege me, but I'll do my best, nonetheless. For those of you who are thinking, “But, Amy, we’re not behaving any worse on the right than the other side is behaving! Do you expect us to just sit over here and take it?” I say this:

“Yes. Yes, I do expect you to ’take it,’ which in my world means only that you should ignore it. I expect you to be kind and controlled and considerate…in public. We are conservatives. Conservatives do not disdain the feelings of others. Conservatives are not supposed to act like hippies on bad acid at a Hendrix concert. If that isn’t a good enough reason for you to govern your thoughts and behavior, then ask yourself how you would react if your kid came home from school with a note from the teacher saying they ranted and screamed and cursed at someone in the class. If you stubbornly respond with, ‘Well, it would depend on what the other kid did,’ then you’re a crappy parent…or in denial of what your true response would be. Keeping one’s temper and learning appropriate responses to opposition is part of becoming a grown-up. Far too many American adults cannot comport themselves as grown-ups when the first hint of adversity or opposition confronts them. They just lose it. That is so incredibly unacceptable. As conservatives and Christians, we are supposed to behave with grace and maturity in our daily social interactions. It’s what God asked of us, and it’s the example Christ demonstrated for us. None of us needs more justification for forbearance or reason for repentance than that.”

2.) John McCain is not any more predictably about to drop dead of a heart attack or skin cancer than any other man in his age group. People out there using this excuse for not voting for the man are assholes. That's right...you're assholes. Ugly, filthy assholes. Seriously, I don't know what else to say to that. Ronald Reagan was older than McCain before he left office. Bush 41 was about McCain's age. The people of my parents' generation are in their late 60s and early 70s. They are the Baby Boomers, remember? There’s a metric crap-ton of them. And...they vote in much larger numbers than any other age group in the nation. Guess what...they don't like people telling them that they have nothing to offer this nation because they might die any day now. John McCain has worked, survived, and thrived through more substance in this life than the vast majority of us could even begin to put into perspective. He has spent an entire lifetime serving this country. He has survived war, torture, state politics, federal politics, cancer, public scrutiny, and this "we don’t want any old people" prejudice that's going on in the last few months. I'd pit McCain's odds of survival against men 20 years his junior any day of the week. Seriously...shut up about this. It makes you look stupid, ageist, unbelievably ignorant...and it makes you a complete asshole. You wanna criticize McCain? Look at his record on illegal immigration…conservatives and liberals alike can dog pile on that one (hint…google “amnesty bill”). There are reasons that John McCain has never been a republican party darling, and people on both sides can find plenty of substantive reasons to dislike this man as a choice for the big office. His age and integrity, on the other hand…seriously, you can do better. Don’t get in the ring with McCain on these points. He’ll win, and he will win HUGE.

3.) Sarah Palin: Wow. I don't even know where to start on the irrational and truly hysterical mouth-foaming that's been going on about this woman from the left. It's...well, it's hysterical. First, the idea that this woman is unqualified to be the Vice President is absurd. She has, like Obama, been involved in civil service her entire adult life. She has been an elected executive chief more than once, and she is the elected and highly-successful governor of Alaska. It is reasonable to argue that this woman has far more relevant political experience than Barack Obama. The whole, “this woman is a joke and unqualified to be more than a beauty queen,” shtick is vicious and tired and it’s getting old. Second, the people…the women…who challenge Sarah Palin’s moral obligation to her family vs. her ambition in political office should hide their faces in shame. Are you kidding me? No one has ever challenged a man’s ability to be a father while holding office. Women…chauvinist, backward, misogynist crap like this…from women. I’m flabbergasted. There is no rational response to this crap in this day and age. Third, let’s talk about her pregnant daughter. People are seriously saying that the reason Bristol is pregnant is because she didn’t know the birds and the bees because her mother supports abstinence education in schools. That is so unbelievably narrow and stupid and--again--hateful toward women.

Bristol Palin made an error in moral judgment when she fornicated without intent to marry at the age of 17, and she made an immediately subsequent error in practical judgment regarding birth control. Many girls and women (myself included) who believe in the moral superiority of abstinence outside of marriage or committed monogamy have made the same errors. They don’t make these errors because they don’t know how babies are made or because their parents are opposed to the condom-over-the-banana speech in public schools. That’s patently absurd, and anyone with a solid grasp on reason will admit to it. Sarah Palin is not against YOU teaching your children about sex, birth control, and “safe” methods of fornicating. In fact, she is all for it. As a republican, she is against taxpayer dollars going to support that curriculum in public schools. She is against the government having a hand in such personal matters. She takes this position, like many republicans do, because an overwhelming number of your countrymen hold that position and take it very seriously. They still feel that it is a parent’s job to instruct children in the ways of moral sexuality. Whatever disdain you hold for Christians or people of other religions who balk at having a unionized teacher show their children how to “manually achieve climax” between algebra class and study hall…they exist in large numbers and they vote. Insulting and stoning a 17 year-old pregnant girl in the media in an attempt to gut punch her mother…because you don’t align with that mother’s political beliefs…is morally repugnant. You should seriously go to your room without dinner and think about what you did if you indulged malice to join in such conversation about the Palin family.

If you want to attack Sarah Palin’s candidacy, then do it on the issues where you have a point to stand by. Talk about her inexperience with foreign policy. Talk about her inability to answer questions in interviews. Talk about her record with whatever voting issue you divide from her over. Leave her family, her genitalia, her spirituality, and her parenting practices out of it.

----------------------------------

It is my solid belief that the majority of this sensationalist and paroxysmal behavior is a direct result of basic ignorance of the issues (which leaves little but epithet slinging in one’s debating arsenal), and a very sad lack of discipline in parenting methods for the latter half of my own generation and all of the generation that followed. People who do not feel a need to educate themselves or who were never forced to exert themselves in adopting habits of physical and emotional self-control are bound to become intellectually lazy and verbally belligerent. I mean…it’s kind of basic, isn’t it? I mean, I learned this stuff in Sociology class my freshman year of college. Knowing why people behave this way, however, does not lessen my disappointment in them for it.

As a child, I was corrected when I lost my temper inappropriately or pitched a fit after not getting my own way. I was corrected harshly when I did harm to other people’s feelings or trespassed on the patience and kindness of my superiors without apology or good manners. As a result, I have learned--though it took a rough adolescence and a long hard trudge through my 20’s--that sometimes you have to man up and suck down your anger until an appropriate place to vent it is presented. It is never okay to be mean. I am not the center of the universe. My way is not the only way. Other people exist and every one of them has feelings. See how easy that was? Apparently…a shockingly large number of people have not yet learned these things.

To sum up…basically, I’ve grown disgusted with many of my countrymen, and I implore you all to take a deep breath and get ahold of yourselves. We’re talking about the future of America. So grow up…or at least refrain from voting until you do. Keep your hysteria and hatred off my future president, out of my country, and away from my daughter’s future.

----------------------------------

In closing, I encourage you to visit the following and read everything there is to read on the issues section of each. Once done with that, turn off the television and stop letting other people tell you who to vote for and why. If you aren’t going to vote for John McCain, but your only reason for that decision is something like, “McCain sucks and he is going to lower taxes for the rich,” or if you’ve decided that you won’t vote for Obama because, “His wife hates America and he’s going to raise my taxes,” then--seriously--for the love of God--go educate yourself or promise me that you’ll stay home on election day.

http://www.johnmccain.com/
http://www.barackobama.com/index.php

Just One Chubby White Girl...

2008-01-29T13:39:00.002+09:00

It's true. I am both chubby and decidedly Caucasian. Now, let's get one thing straight right from the get-go. I tell things like they are, and I call things what I see them to be. That includes my appraisals of and references to myself. When I said that I am chubby, it was not code for "I'm a fat woman who doesn't want to face that fact, so I say 'chubby,' instead, because it's not as painful to admit." Neither was my use of the word "chubby" some kind of petty self-deprecation or false modesty. No, I used the word because it is the best word for describing my general appearance in a nutshell. My body is actually a poster-perfect example of the word, "chubby." My limbs, breasts, and torso are plump. I have a round face. I am soft both in appearance and to the touch. Men who enjoy athletic or slender women might not find me sexually appealing or even especially attractive, but absolutely no one would refer to me as, "fat," unless he was employed somewhere in the fashion industry or show business.

Now then.

I went through all that chubby business because it's important that anyone happening to read something I've written here understands how I operate. There is no analysis or between-the-lines exploration to be done with me. I generally tell the absolute truth from the start. About me. About my opinions. About things that happened. I don't sugarcoat. I dig into my vocabulary and put things on the table with the words I feel most accurately describe what is. I don't live my life in shoulds, could haves, or any other form of fantasy land, and I almost never write anything when I am angry, sad, or otherwise "emotive." Unless I state otherwise at the beginning of a blog post, you should assume a neutral, analytical tone of voice and a face-value meaning for everything you read here.

There are three basic reasons that I have decided to post this blog:

I do this because I'm too lazy to journal by hand and because blogging is way more interesting than keeping all of those stray mental meanderings to myself.
Like most women, when something is bothering me, I cannot "let it go" until I have vented my entire thought process and my laundry list of emotions onto another person. It is a cleansing, purging act to vent. It allows me to throw out ugly thoughts and let go of them so that I can restore emotional equilibrium and move on. Blogging is better than conversational venting because it gives me exactly the same release without abusing the patience of my friends and family. It's win-win.
I love to write. It makes me happy.

And there you have it.

Englishmen

2008-01-22T04:20:00.003+09:00

I have always loved the English. There is a stateliness to their traditions and outward expression that just sort of demands respect. As an American, England has always felt very much like a cultural parent to me. I think a lot of Americans view England that way, and it's only natural, really, given our history. Americans have long admired the British manner of living and, frankly, their manner of dying as well. Crises hit, and historically we have all kind of looked about asking, "Well, how are the English comporting themselves?" When someone says, "He died like an Englishman," it's meant as an honor. We loved Winston Churchill (he would've made a great American, wouldn't he?). James Bond is our favorite secret government agent, and we reluctantly concede that even Jack Bauer would get his ass kicked if he stepped into the ring with 007. All silliness aside, the truth is that most Americans feel true affection for the English people and have nothing but good wishes for the nation, itself. Coming from the United States, that's a huge compliment.

'Cause let's be honest here. Quite simply put, Americans don't really care a whit from day-to-day how other nations of the world view us. Our arrogance as a people is a fundamental characteristic of our nation. Our American arrogance is the outward manifestation of our passion as a people, and it serves our nation well for the most part. We would never, as a whole, intentionally alienate others with the way our culture expresses itself, but I wouldn't advise anyone to hold their breath waiting for us to apologize for it, either. We like who we are and we're not going to change in a substantive way any time in the foreseeable future, despite the occasional New York Times editorial that says we really ought to. I mean, seriously, we'd like for Germany to like us, but we're not going to lose any sleep over it when they give us the silent treatment because we don't let them vote in our presidential elections. We truly do want be friends with Russia, but if they go back to hating us because we don't like it when they sell arms to rogue states...well, we've had plenty of practice being 1 on their shit list. We are fairly unconcerned with how Middle Easterners view the way we live. We figure they don't rate an opinion until they let all their little girls go to school and until they criminalize the beating of old women in the streets with 3 rebar when they accidentally show a bit of ankle on a windy day. And…let's not forget the French. Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, we dig the cheese, but we honestly couldn't care less about how the French feel about...well, anything. But man. If the English got angry with us, we might actually take a good long pause and reconsider ourselves. We need the English to like us. Sure, we threw a fit back in the late 17th century and ran away from home, but we still want Mommy to love us.

Anyway...

I have spent what feels like my entire life in love with Britain. I view American history the same way I view a traditional Easter Mass with all the litanies (real Roman Catholics know EXACTLY what I'm talking about). It is so dull that it makes your dental work hurt, but it is a duty to be borne with a minimum of complaining. But British history--oh, British history is full of excitement, interesting people, and fascinating stories of bravery, piety, depravity, and intrigue. The royal family trees are littered with personalities so huge that it requires a sort of suspension of disbelief to even acknowledge that they existed. There were some real sickos running the place from time-to-time, but there was also an ever-present legacy of decency, tradition, and honest faith that managed to shine through in-between the total loons and the zealots that liked to disembowel people. It's all just riveting stuff, in my opinion, and I never get enough of it.

What prompted this little nonsense bit of nothing about the English is that I watched the magnificent Helen Mirren in "The Queen" this evening for the first time, and I began to wonder--or fear, more like--that the England I have always been so happy to be on this planet with might just not really even exist anymore. When all the sad business around Diana's death was still swirling, I was not surprised to hear Americans criticizing the royals for not being more openly emotional about their grief and whatnot. We're an emotive society, and we were conceived by a group of folks who were running away from being English. So, it didn't even push up one of my eyebrows to hear my countrymen appalled at the "coldness" of the royal response. I was, however, shocked to find that the British people were doing it, too. I mean. Where was the stiff British upper lip? Didn't they understand what the queen was doing? Did the entire nation seriously just go apoplectic with grief and morph into a bunch of American Southern Baptists at an evangelical revival meeting? Seriously? Obviously, the princess was a beloved person, but it was her celebrity that had all these people in a thrush of emotional fever…not the greatness of her accomplishments as an ambassador, activist, and philanthropist. It was the 24-hour coverage, the flashing lights, the theme music, and the flood of celebrity turnout that turned Diana's death into a circus rather than a somber reflection on the beautiful work that she did in her life. People were prostrating themselves in tears on the streets and waving candles around after working themselves up into a lather that had nothing to do with genuine suffering or loss and everything to do with the powerful draw of media flashbulbs and the inertia of a crowd.
Not nearly enough time was spent on the irony of the public media spectacle that the people demanded for her funeral when it was that very same frenzy of media coverage that killed the dear woman in the first place. The royal family was nursing the loss of someone they actually knew and loved (even those who didn't like her much), and they were tending to the fresh emotional wounds of two adolescent boys who had just lost their mother on international television. Elizabeth Windsor kept with tradition and demanded that her family be allowed to grieve in private. Rather than supporting these very simple wishes, the English people all but threw stones at their queen because of them. What is this world coming to when the flaming British openly criticize their elderly and long-revered monarch for behaving...like an Englishwoman?

I have come to realize in my adulthood that I am just simply not normal. I don't weep in public if it can at all be helped. I don't raise my voice to my child in public unless it's necessary. Rather, I wait until we get home to discipline her in private because I don't believe she should be humbled in front of strangers. I don't pound tables or roll on the ground in hysterics when something makes me angry. I don't squeal, shout, or lose control of my bowels when something makes me happy. I do pee a little sometimes if something exceptionally .. funny or wonderful happens, but that's only because I got a new orifice torn up there in my "parts" when Lizzie was born. Had that not been the case, I can promise you, there would be no emotionally-driven urinary incontinence from me, either. I don't consider myself especially stoic. I mean, I'm not a hard person or an unfeeling person. I cry and I yell and I throw pillows and sulk and pitch fits from time to time just like everyone else. I just...you know, I have a modicum of self-control. I keep that stuff at home where it belongs.

It just seems to me that the world at large has completely abandoned any value of self-discipline and objectivity when responding to any sort of stimuli. Instead, they have all just jumped headfirst into this psycho-babble bullshit about "letting things out," and "loving yourself first," and "a right to express your feelings." I call this, "Just Acting Like a Four Year-Old." I figure if an adult is behaving in a way that my daughter would be corrected for behaving, and if said adult is behaving this way in public, then that person should be ashamed of himself. He shouldn't be praised for "getting it all out there," nor should he be encouraged to scorn others for handling their emotions in a more mature manner.

I think if we could all just go back to the way things were back when we considered it the highest kind of compliment to be told we handled something "like an Englishman," that a lot more work would get done and some of this gratuitous acrimony and vitriol slinging that is so commonplace in our society would go away. Not every little feeling we have needs to be voiced, and sometimes shame is appropriate.

Our daughter, Lizzie, is four years old, now. She is often found sitting with her legs sprawled every which way or running around with her skirt lifted up the way little girls are so wont to do. She gets loud and overly excited very easily. These things are natural and come with the territory at her age. Still…it is our job to gently teach her how to grow up. Part of growing up is learning to handle our bodies and our emotions appropriately. My husband takes his share of this responsibility to our daughter very seriously. Frequently, after correcting her for some misbehavior or other, I hear him lean down to her and gently say, "Modesty and decorum, Elizabeth…modesty and decorum." He descends from a line of Englishmen…very, very English men, indeed.

Homesickness

2007-09-10T11:30:00.000+09:00

So, yeah, I guess I'm not doing very well.

We've been in Japan, now, for about a month. After the obvious discomfort of the flight and processing and sitting in a hotel waiting for quarters, we are finally "settling in." We have an adequate home. It's smaller than I would like, but it's clean and sufficient to support our needs. We found a vehicle that's both utilitarian enough to serve our family's requirements and raised up off the ground enough to keep me from straining my useless back with groceries or the Lizzie Monster. We have internet service at home, cable television, and our Vonage phone all hooked up and running. Ashley even fixed my beloved computer and got me back onto WoW in the style to which I had become accustomed--improved upon it, actually. Tomorrow, they will be delivering the remainder of our household shipments. That means we can stop eating off of plastic plates, dressing from the travel hamper, and entertaining our child with scrap paper and toys she had with her in her carry-on bag (a pink satchel my mother bought for her trip that Lizzie calls "my pack pack").

Something about this last delivery has given me pause, and I've been feeling "off" about it all day long. I couldn't put my finger on what my problem was this morning. I just felt odd. By this afternoon, I was going through the house getting rooms ready to receive all the boxes and furniture...and I felt only dread. I don't want them to bring my household goods to me. Once they get here...that's it. There is a finality to getting all our things delivered to this house that kind of gutpunched me.

We officially live here, now. We are not visiting. We aren't going to see the sights and then go home. No, we're actually going to live here, and I suppose I'm much more unsettled by that than I recognized before today. From the day I watched the movers wrapping my home up into neat brown packages and stacking every thing I own in this world into a truck, I began to recoil and sort of deny that we were leaving.

I have always sort of prided myself on being an adventurous sort of person. I enjoy seeing new things. I like learning. In true nerd fashion, I can honestly report that my absolutely most favorite thing about being here is learning to recognize the Kanji and speak new words in Japanese. My Lord help me, I am a geek. I've embraced that about me, but sometimes, I surprise even myself with the level of nerd-idity I actually possess. Anyway, it's not like I'm sulking or as though the opportunities living here will give me have escaped my notice.
I mean...I know it's "cool" that we get to actually experience life in another country. I'm even grateful for it. But I am an American...and I like my home country. I like who we are, and I like what we're all about. I wasn't just born there. It's part of who I am, and it feels wrong to be separated from it.

I have so often wondered why people who immigrate to The United States wouldn't assimilate more fully--or couldn't. I get it now. The culture of my birth is not an easy thing to be severed from, and if I take nothing else away from this three years across the globe, I will come home with a profoundly changed level of tolerance for the difficulties of first-generation legal immigrants to my country. I will no longer be impatient with the heavy accents, ethnic clothing, and strange customs of my recently-foreign countrymen. Even if they want to adopt America as their new home country, they will arrive there with a lifetime of cultural identity branded into them. You don't just drop that off. You can't.

Later in the afternoon, I spoke with my father and stepmother over the phone for a bit. Shortly after we hung up, I got on comms (internet voice chat) with some friends of mine, and they immediately began to harrass me about how thick my Southern accent had gotten. That's a prime example. I don't speak with an identifiable Southern twang in my daily life. I've lived away from Arkansas for so long that I've adopted a fairly neutral Midwestern type of accent...but all it takes is 5 minutes in conversation with someone from any of the westernmost Southern states, and I'll be talking just like they do for the next several hours. It comes back every time...just like I never left The South.

It doesn't matter how far away we move from our beginnings. They follow us, and we keep them.

Culture shock is a very real thing. I am enchanted with the Japanese people. I am excited about the prospect of learning to speak an Asian language. I'm grateful for the wonderful medical care they have for us out here. The money is going to be great. Elizabeth is going to have so many opportunities that she wouldn't have if we never left America.

But I still miss home.

I miss my friends. I miss my family. I miss McDonald's Quarter-Pounders with Cheese. I miss American talk radio. I miss driving on the right side of the road and shopping in Target stores and seeing all the signs written in a language I can read. I miss having so many Christian churches to choose from when looking for a place to go and worship. I miss being in a society where I know what all of the messages and gestures around me mean...never worrying about inadvertently insulting someone out of ignorance of customs. I miss being where the world around me fits and makes sense.

I suppose you could call this homesickness. If you wanted to be really melodramatic, you could call it adjustment reactive disorder. I think it's just a temporary melancholy, though, and I fully anticipate having it pass after the first couple of months. After all, I'm one of those smiley people you want to just slap for being so freaking perky about every damned thing. I will be fine, and once I stop moping around feeling sorry for myself, things might actually be really, really good here.

I figured I should write all this down while I'm still sad, though, so that I won't forget to remember how it feels to be freshly-foreign.