I’ve been immersed in the comic (?) A Softer world.

It makes the dark and twisted part of my heart sing.

I watched the planes fly into the towers on morning TV. At first I was stunned. WTF was that? Then when it became clear that it was a terrorist attack, I became angry. Boiling blood could rip out people’s throats with my bear hands angry.

But I am a grown up. And it took me about 24 hours to get past the red rage point and come to my senses. Blood for blood was not going to fix this or prevent another attack from happening.

And our bloody policy hasn’t prevented another attack from happening, it’s just changed the location of the attacks. In the mean time we have given up so many of our rights in order to be free. But as Benjamin Frankin said, “Those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither”. We grow more like our enemies using our current methods to defeat them.

The people of Afghanistan are begging us to stop bombing their children from the air. Even the Iraqis want us out. I think they finally realized that as long as we are in Iraq, there will be no peace for them.

The American people haven’t been made safer by these wars. The ideal that we were going to fight the Taliban and make Afghanistan a safe place for women is a laugh. Iraq was pretty secular already, with some of the most liberal laws for women in the region, and now women are murdered for being audacious enough to leave their homes.

We’ve become torturers on a grand scale (though torture has long been a part of our toolkit) and crushed the rights of humans under our black boots in fear.

So 7 years on and we are neither free nor safe.

There are a large number of proggy types who love to watch The Wire. Even the head unity Pony has said it’s his favorite show. I tried, but to be honest it wasn’t groundbreaking or interesting to me because I was living in that environment. I want shows that give me an escape from poverty and violence, not a reminder of what my daily life entails. 3 shootings with a football fields space from me and the Kid’s numerous muggings/near muggings in the last few years have kinda numbed me out to the thrill of urban street war.

But I do like that there is a show out there that depicts what life is like for the rest of us. And I sincerely appreciate David Simon’s work of trying to get the other America to open its eyes and ask the question. Why? Why is it so different for us?

Now it’s time for the confession that will officially end any hopes of a political career. 15+ ears ago- I sold drugs. I was never a big time dealer, just acid and pot and for a very very brief period of time, crystal meth. I never made much money, usually only enough so that I never had to pay for drugs myself. But I always thought I had other ways out of poverty, like work and education. Those hopes hadn’t been so thoroughly dashed at 17 and 18 as they have been at 33. I can understand how someone, say a young African American male, who is already looking at severely diminished prospects in even getting a job at McDonald’s, would turn to the one career option where his race won’t matter.

We are 30 years into this war on drugs. 30 years. And nothing is better for it. We rarely ask why people might turn to drugs to make them feel better. We assume it is a willpower failure. We don’t even imagine a state of such hopelessness in this country that one’s only escape comes from the masking effects drugs have. Oh if I had ever let myself use cocaine on a regular basis, I would be a goner. The few times I have used it, it hit the happy making part of my brain like a freight train and for a few brief hours shook off the paralyzing effect my near constant depression has on me. I could see how dangerous it was for me, and made a point of staying away from it.

And there is an entire underclass of people like me. People who are without hope of improving their lives in the ways we are told that work. So they do what they can. they find whatever ways they can of just getting through the next day, the next hour, the next few minutes. Whatever they can to keep the giant pit of despair from pulling them under. It is a lot of work to live on the edge. It takes a lot out of you. Drugs can seem like a tiny escape from that pit.

I have this not that far fetched idea that all addictions are just self-medicating for untreated mental illness. Anyone who spends most of their waking hours under the violent threat of poverty is surely shorting out the neurons that keep us going during times of stress. Humans weren’t made to live under this constant pressure.

Then I have this much farther fetched idea that the reason why drugs are illegal in this country is for the same reason that prostitution is illegal. Prostitution is one of the few jobs where women make consistently more money than men. Drug dealing is one of the few jobs where being a black man doesn’t hurt your chances of advancing.

In my ideal world, all drugs, even those ones that are this years current scary menace (when I was a kid it was crack, as a teenager heroin, and now crystal meth is the big scary boogey man) would be legal. We’d throw open the prison doors, and put the money from the unused beds into treatment of addicts and education (not anti-drug education, but get you a job education) of the poor. Cause right now with the War on Drugs all we are doing is paying the lower middle class (as police officers and prison guards) to keep the bottom locked up and/or scared. It’s costing us a lot in terms of time, money, and lives wasted and it’s not eliciting any benefit except for the owners of the private prisons.

The gods of irony are smiling on this little edit of the Republican convention.

Or socialism is a fine and dandy thing as long as the people who benefit are the people who can afford to get other people to pay for their bailouts.

Ouyangdan and I were having this conversation the other day. It seems to us like rich people really are socialists at heart when it comes to say bailing out the banking industry (cough*freddie mac fannie mae*) but when it comes to the small individuals who are losing their houses by the thousands, they can’t be assed to do a damn thing about it. Oh wait, yes they can. they complain about those greedy bottom feeders trying to get the American dream.

So in the never ending tale of woe that is my recent life, the water is out.

Kid and I are housesitting while Ruth is on vacation and when I sent the kid in to do the dishes, we realized that there is no water. None. Not a drop.

And I can’t seem to get a hold of anyone who might be able to tell me why there is no water here.

Fuckles.

It’s official peeps- I get a stalker and lose a dear friend cause I won’t vote for Obama and admit that Unity Ponies are real, and I lose a different dear friend cause I won’t vote John McCain, Maverick at large. Apparently not voting for McCain makes me a coward, yet not voting for Obama makes me a dumb slut.

WTF peeps? I think I am officially in Bizzarro Land.

And after checking the sitemeter stats for today- I know it’s true. Since I am too tired (spent the day cleaning house for a friend. It’s not a lot of money but I was down to bus fare when I got to his house) and am too angry to blog about anything coherent at the moment, you get a list of the weird google searches that get you to this blog:

Cookie Porn

free chimpanzee fucking woman

Center of a twinkie – I’m number 1 on this at Google. I’m so proud!

catch more flies with honey type analogies

Cute Indian Boys

And the still popular- why do men hate their women

A few nights ago a saw a thing on PBS about Socrates and his tendency to ask profound questions of random strangers on the street.

Then tonight the Kid handed me his geography homework. Which is really homework for me. I have to explain what I think Geography is (as a person in their 20s or 30s). I also have to find someone under 10 and 50 or older to answer the same question. Sorry 40somethings, you’ve been left out.

So darling peeps- what is geography? Do you have a wee child you can harass until they answer that question? Will you help me to help the Kid do his homework?

I’ll post my response in comments later.

But what is geography?

With all the talk of presidential spawn, doncha think it’s a wee bit funny that all we hear about are the girls. Obama’s girls. Palin’s Bristol. McCain’s bloggette. Sure we hear a bit about the down syndrome baby, but only in relation to Palin’s uterus.

So I am here to break with feminist tradition and cry “but what about the mennzzzzzz”.

Specifically, McCain’s son Andrew who has recently resigned from the board of Silver State Bank, a bank that federal regulators shut down Friday because of its failings.

Now while the Dems all have their panties in a bunch over the possibility that estrogen might actually come near the White House (and not just to design the new Oval Office rug) they seem to have missed Andrew’s little career failure.

If Andrew shares daddy’s views on economic policy, and a bank that Andrew worked for fails, does that perhaps mean that the McCain family idea of winning economic policy is failure? Shouldn’t the Dems be spending their time pointing out the Republican economic policies are failing our country, using Andrew as a prime example of “What would daddy do?”

But Andrew, alas has no uterus to control or shame. Poor Andrew. If he had only been born a girl, he could be taking the center of the political stage right now while the Dems point out that “girls suck at math” or economics or something. Though truthfully, Obama and McCain both share a hands off the money of the rich approach to economics, the Dems would more likely take the tack of saying that Andrew had to leave banking cause his uterus couldn’t be in two places at once, caring for his family and working a job.

But boys will be boys and banks will fail when run with little oversight and regulation. And the NeoDems don’t get off their ass to fix the country unless there is some slut shaming to do.

(HT to Lambert, who is quickly becoming my latest blog crush)

ETA: Oh my gawd- bank failures really are the McCain family business. I was just a wee 14 year old girl when the Savings and Loan failures happened and so I didn’t know that McCain was part of the Keating 5. Holy shit, Batman, you would almost think the republicans believe that robbing from the poor to give to the rich is sound fiscal policy. .

Sarah Haskins- can I marry you? Will you be my replacement mommy in similar pants? Anything just so long as you keep bringing teh funny.