cannot and should not ever make them “illegal”.
It goes against the laws of physics. It goes against human rights. It goes against every strain of morality I can think of.
A person exists, regardless of what boundaries are drawn on a map or checkpoints they have crossed. A person’s mere existence cannot be illegal.
70 percent of child support cases in this country are in arrears. That means 70 percent of non custodial parents owe back child support. In some states, 50 percent of custodial parents haven’t seen a single child support payment in the last twelve months.
I’m one of them. Kid’s dad owes over $40k in back support, and his monthly payment isn’t huge, just $328. That’s not even close to half of what it costs to raise the kid. But hey, if his dad paid that much every month we wouldn’t be homeless, in debt (my total debt is way less than $10k)or needing to rely on public assistance.
As much as I would love to blame dead beat parents alone for the failures of the current child support system, when you have a 70 percent failure rate it is the system that is failing, and not the individuals in that system.
It’s been more than a decade since Bill Clinton included child support reforms in with welfare reform, and despite mandatory employment reporting and better information sharing between states, we still have a 70 percent failure.
So I am glad to see that someone is talking about it.
But- and this is a big ass but- as long as women and children are still seen as property instead of people by their exes, reform will be difficult. How do you make a fair parenting system when one half of a couple thinks they own the other half? How do you get kids the things they need in life when non-custodial parents ignore them at best, and are abusive and dangerous at worst?
And would all of this be moot if we, as a society, looked at the raising of children as a necessary job for the good of society and provided the resources to do that job well, instead of looking at children as the property of their parents not dissimilar to an automobile. Why are some kids left to rust on blocks in the yard when one of their parents walks away?
one to complain about obscenity on tv. I will bitch about the way women and and non-white, non-straight, non-ablebodied people are represented, but obscenity, wevs. Janet Jackson’s nipple didn’t bother me.
That said- Tom Delay on Dancing with the Stars is gross. And I don’t watch the show, but every single news channel has posted a clip. And MY EYES! OMG MY EYES! I feel like I need a bleach bath and a thousand hours of masterpiece theater to rid me of the terrible image of Tom Delay in brown polyester pants trimmed with leopard print and sequins shaking his gross ass and lip synching to Wild Thing.
I am traumatized, peeps. Trau-Ma-Tized. It’s been several days and I still can’t erase the horror from my memory.
I should totes put a trigger warning on this post for anyone else who has been traumatized by Delay. He looks like the dirty old man stereotype. He gives me nightmares. For the love of god, please someone stop him before he tangos again.
but a severe case of malaise, or ennui, or I don’t know what.
I’m not in the mood to keep writing about the thousand ways the world is awful.
Instead I give you the Last Puppet Bender. OD should be amused.
Since we have just got internet access today the Kid is chomping at the bit for me to hurry up and give him some internet time. Having just spent several days watching newsbunnies scream on tv, this is what I said to him
Me: Dude, some conservative douche said that porn makes you gay, all porn, especially teenage boys. And since we all know that the internet is for porn, I can’t let you on it or you’ll be gay.
Kid: You wouldn’t care if I was gay.
Me: No I really wouldn’t. But conservatives think that having a gay son is the worst thing ever. So no internet for you.
Thank you conservatives, for giving me a reason to hog the precious precious internet access.
Anglachel has been writing again. She thinks about food a lot. Us poor folks, and those who grew up poor, think about food a lot.
It can become almost an obsessive thought. When we are broke, like we have been this summer, I think about fruit. I’ve had exactly one nectarine, my favorite fruit, all summer. When money is tight, fruit is the first thing to go from the shopping list. It’s a snack, it doesn’t have enough calories to count as a meal. We should be eating5 fruits a day. We can’t afford to eat 5 fruits a week.
I think about the virtuous foodies, people with the luxury of buying all organic, or who have the money to live on a raw food diet and still get enough calories that they don’t spend all day in the hunger fog.I think about the Kid’s wheat allergies, and I feel mountains of guilt because I can’t afford to be as careful about gluten free products as I should be. Frozen pizzas are cheap, sandwiches are cheap. Make them gluten free however, and a 2 dollar pizza is now 8 bucks and half the size. I think how nice it would be to load up a pantry full of rice noodles and gluten free bread and all manner of fresh fruit so that the bottomless pit of teenage hunger known as the Kid doesn’t have to feel bad about what he’s putting in his mouth. I know that for him, every bite of whole wheat bread will shorten his life as surely as if I handed him a pack of smokes and told him to light up.But I have to feed him something now.
I think about how food stamps don’t actually help us be healthy, just less hungry. The allotment is supposed to be for an emergency diet, just enough to get you through. All us poor people live on food stamp rations, like people in WWII, with the best and healthiest food going to those more virtuous than us, those with money. I think about how those virtuous foodies look down on those of us who can’t afford organic milk for our kids, like we are some kind of child abusers because quieting rumbling bellies is a more urgent need than tracking the provenance of our produce.
I dream about out of reach foods, bloody red rib eyes, giant salads with fancy cheese, the perfect black berries, grape tomatoes so ripe you can eat them like candy. I wish that the Kid didn’t worry so much about food. He has the poor kid habit of scarfing as much as he can of whatever he can in secret, like being hungry is a shameful flaw instead of a biological fact.
But I even if I tell him to slow down, not to worry so much, that it will be okay, I know that he know the truth. Having enough to eat is not a given, not even in this country of overabundance. A full fridge is as much of a fantasy to me as owning a private jet.
And give a big round of applause to Gidget Commando for doing a helluva fill in job!
Kid and I made it, whoopee. We are still without regular internet access, though I have hijacked a laptop and wifi access at the moment. Until we get this resolved (I don’t know when) I’ll keep checking in as often as I can. But we are ok. Very ok. I knew that the mountains of stress I had been under was taking a physical toll (details are a wee bit tmi, even for me) but within 36 hours of landing I am back on the right path, if not 100 percent yet.
I’m getting ready to homeschool the Kid and just had a little meeting with a math tutor so I can figure out where to start him. I had a pretty good idea, but damn his old school fucked him over on the math teaching. He spent the last 2 years being an unpaid tutor and not learning much of anything. It makes me steam out the ears, the amount of wasted time and energy. But I think it will work out.
Having family around is awesome and weird. I am so used to it being just me and the Kid and quiet. But now there’s 7 to 9 of us around at any given time. It’s loud and crazy and there has been lots of hugs and tears. But good.
And hot. OMG people. I am a northern city girl in a tropical farm town. I love sweaters and knee high boots and trench coats in shades of black and grey. And none of that is wearable here. I may have to become one of those people that wears capri pants in sherbert colors. Stop me before I lose my gritty edge!
Much love to all of you that helped me get here, and sent good wishes. You kick ass.
Smooches!
So my little blogfriends, in the interest of radical vulnerability, I got news.
After many many years of doing this whole single mom on her own thing- I’m tired. No, I have not found some dude to cozy up to. But I miss having a family, having other grown people to share burdens and triumphs with. After Ruth went to go stuff her brain with math in grad school, I really didn’t feel like I have that here anymore. And shit is too bad and too constant for me to get through this on my own.
I could stay in a lovely progressive city with a job that I love but that after 6 long years still doesn’t pay me enough to pay for both rent and food in the same month, or give me benefits, feeling stuck in a bottomless pit of crisis after crisis after crisis of poverty, and left to deal with the mechanics of crisis solving on my own when the world has worn me down so much that my phone ringing causes an anxiety attack.
Or I can go to a state I am not too fond of, a swing state with decidedly conservadouche leanings, where I can’t see myself living forever, in a tiny rural town away from what us city folks like to call “civilization”, but be surrounded by people I love and that love me too. And the Kid. We will still be broke as fuck, and now I will be without a job. But when the phone rings I won’t have to figure out the latest disaster alone. That means the world right now.
I am not sure how internet/ computers will work there. As you all know, my frankenputer is on it’s last legs and I am ripping out the hard drive and sending it off to the computer graveyard. I will be begging for time on someone else’s compy or maybe finding a library.
So we are on a plane. All our stuff has been packed up and stored.
I’ll write and let you all know how it’s going as soon as I can. And for those of you godless whores who have done so much to keep us afloat this summer, you have my undying gratitude. You peeps were the only thing that kept me going.
I promised Dead Men that if I had time I would write about capitalism, and since Gidget Commando gave me the best damn quotable quote on capitalism since Marx, here’s your post. In other words- you demand, I supply.
I believe in hybrids. I believe that there are some things government should never be responsible for, and some things that business should never be responsible for. And I think there is a good way to figure out which one should be responsible for what. If the ultimate goal of profit is at odds with the welfare of society, then business should stay the fuck out of it. This is why military contracting is bad- it incentivizes war. Military contractors make money when we are at war, they have a vested interest in starting and perpetuating wars. Health insurance companies have a vested interest in supplying as little care as possible. This is how they make money. It is not a flaw, it is the system.
As for things government shouldn’t be involved with, I don’t want some dude in a cheap blue suit deciding what this year’s hot fashions will be, or what movies should get made, or which books will be published. Governments are notoriously bad at responding to market forces. Look at the current health care debate for an example. A huge percentage (I think it’s in the 70s) of people want a public option, but that’s not what we are going to get. The government is not responding to the demand.
Now here’s where the overlap is (and where Gidget Commando comes in.) Capitalism is, at it’s root, single minded, unconcerned, and amoral. It’s not evil. It’s not suddenly come down with some terrible disease. It always has and will always be looking for ways to cut costs either in labor or environmental concerns or product safety, because that is how it is designed.
Government’s job is to keep capitalism in check because as Gidget Commando says:
It’s like a perpetual adolescent. Capable of great energy, innovation, movement–but y’all really wouldn’t want to leave it to its own unchaperoned devices, lest it throw a kegger and destroy the entire house.
Capitalism will skip class, get high, shoplift lipstick, and forget to use condoms. Government is there to be the parent with restrictions that keep capitalism from reckless driving into a bus full of us regular folks. Even Adam Smith knew this (but you’d be hard pressed to find a libertarian who will admit to it). Smith urged suspicious attention be paid to any proposed new law or regulation that comes from business, because they “have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public.” Or the teenage capitalism will promise to stay home alone while you’re gone for the weekend and then throw that kegger. It can’t help it. It’s a teenager.
So I am fine with capitalism, as long as it’s tightly regulated and on it’s best behavior with clear consequences for every miss-step, and only if we have a strong social welfare system and capitalism is kept out of issues of national or global welfare.
Go read this article about the welfare state and the ethnic divide in America.
I agree with the premise, that(some)Americans (some white Americans) are resistant to social welfare programs that benefit people who they think are “unworthy”, even if those programs would benefit themselves.
But I also think those people are the screaming, rabid mouthed, teabagging minority.
I think that as we all get pushed further down the ladder into poverty, more American’s are thinking that social welfare programs aren’t so bad. Most people want universal health care, for example. Most folks want single payer or a public option. The one thing about the downward spiral that only the wealthy are immune. When middle class white people can’t get jobs with health insurance, or when that insurance fails to provide actual health care, then the cost/ benefit of racism & classism and even sexism gets to be too high. We’ve seen that with working class households, where dads perform more unpaid family care than dads in upper class houses and where a female bread winner not making the same wage as her male counterparts has a direct effect on their male partners.
No- I don’t think we are a post- anything society. But I do think we are all rational people in the end. Industrial age capitalism ended slavery, and the last Great depression brought us social security, perhaps technology age poverty will bring us something else that is good.