Lisa D. Hull
Myth_Lisa@yahoo.com
“What does the Lord require of you but to do justice,
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)
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Totally swiped from Sir Robin, the “If I was a book” quiz. I don’t know this book, have never heard of this book, and now I must read this book. Damn. Take the test and leave answers in comments. Unless i find some hapless soul who will let me abuse their computer, I’ll be gone from the internets till Monday afternoon.
You’re “Master Harold”… and the Boys!
by Athol Fugard
Even though you should have realized it for years, you’re only just
starting to understand how bad your society is. It’s been keeping some of your best
friends down for ages, and even you have been complicit with this system. When you
make a mess, someone else is quick to clean it. When you need help, someone else is
quick to your rescue. But when they point out injustice, you’ve pulled the wool over
your eyes. Until now. If you ever need a cast, it will be small.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
I finally found a therapy clinic that will take my insurance and had an intake appointment with them a week or so ago. From that appointment, they scheduled me with a therapist.
I just talked to my new therapist on the phone and OH MY GAWD- she sounds like she’s been drinking thorazine cocktails. She……………Just…………………Can’t………………..Get………………Words……………….Out………….Of……………….Her…………..Mouth
I’m fast and snarky. I can’t deal with a therapist who sounds more depressed than me.
Fuckles
I’ve had much quiet thinking time over the last few weeks and one thing I kept coming back to was why non-violent action only sometimes works to create social change. Since yesterday was MLK day and I think I’ve got a few things figured out, here goes.
Non-violent action works to bring about social changes only under very specific circumstances.
1) There MUST be sympathetic media coverage of the actors.
2) There must be a marked visual difference between the actors and the enforcers
3) You need an iconic image to rally people to the actors’ cause that both glorifies that actors and shames the enforcers at the same time.
4) Combination of media pressure and social pressure must be great enough to push the enforcers into retreat over a length of time. Short term actions will not be enough to change the course of society.
Let’s start with the images, cause they are what really gets this going.
The image is the thing. The most important thing. if you think back on successful non-violent actions of the past, you can probably pull some iconic images into you head with little thought: Gandhi in homespun white cotton, a flower in a machine gun, well dressed black kids on soda fountain stools, tiny Rosa Parks in her hat on the bus.
The image is necessary to hold the ideal of what is trying to be accomplished in the heads of people. Without it, the entire exercise is one whose point will be lost on the vast majority. They don’t care about the who, what, when or where. They need something that tugs on their conscious and sticks in their head when they close their eyes. They need to see the stark contrast between what is the status quo of the enforcers and what is possible from the actors.
Hello hello hello!
As Wonder pointed out, the lights are on but the computer is dead. If you’ve ever had an alternator go out on your car, then my compy problem will be familiar. As soon as the power was back, I started up the frankenputer. I got half way through typing an email to a hot French musician who is going to show me a museum or two in Paris when the thing just shut off. Each subsequent attempt to start the beast had it powering on for shorter and shorter spans and now it just turns on for half a second before dying.
It is not a Windows problem. I could get into the bios, but it still shut itself off. It is a hardware problem of some sort. So far i have replaced the battery on the motherboard, cleaned the cooling unit for the CPU, and tried to replace the power supply. No luck.
I also tried to take the ethernet card from an old computer and shove it into the Kid’s super craptastic computer (it won’t run XP) just so I could have internet access. No luck there either.
So I am without a computer at home. Considering the travesty that the last 2 months have been, it sucks but it isn’t going to break me.
In the mean time, we have light and heat and hot water. Oh yeah, HOT WATER. I have been taking long, luxurious baths every day in water hot enough to turn me pink.
Thank you everyone for your kindness and generosity. It means almost as much as a bath tub full of scalding hot bubbles. 🙂
The lights are back on at the Red Queen’s Palace,(YAY!!!) Â however, the Royal Computer-Thingy has been severely wounded, and is currently out of commission. Â Problem with the power supply, she’s taken it apart and made valiant attempts to fix it, to no avail.
OK, for starters, let me just say, i have a great appreciation for what my sister refers to as “old guys”. Â
Of prescription drug abuse.
First- Holy Shit! The Donate Button works. I don’t know who you are, but that helps get my bank account out of the red. You are awesome and after spending this morning alternately being yelled at by charity people and sobbing down the phone to Wonder, I have a wee bit more faith that humanity is not mostly peopled by asswipes. Okay, it’s still mostly peopled by asswipes, but still. If you were here (and I had electricity) I would make you the bestest dinner on the planet and drink to your longevity. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Now on to the topic of this post.
I am a huge fan of the philosopher John Rawls. He basically turned the golden rule into a blueprint of how society should function with his veil of ignorance ideas on justice. I try to live by that idea. Before I say something mean or judgmental, I try to think of myself in that person’s place. This doesn’t always work, I’m human and fail. But I try.
Over the last week I have noticed two distinct types of behaviors from social service people, and these behaviors are dependent on what kind, if any, help they are going to give.
Behavior #1: Non-judgmental, helpful, kind. Returns phone calls and offers as much assistance as they can as promptly as they can.
Behavior #2: Accusatory, judgmental, condescending and out and out mean. Vicious, actually. They do all of this and don’t offer help. Actually, they seem pretty put out by the fact that I am asking to begin with.
In the last week I have been yelled at for: being poor, not working enough, working too much to qualify for welfare, being a single parent, not receiving child support (seriously, that’s one thing that I really have no control over), being poor and having no excuse for it (sorry, I’m not a drug addict, I don’t have a bunch of kids, and I’ not disabled). I have been treated like shit by more people than you can imagine. Certainly by more people than I could imagine a week ago.
And every single person that treated me like shit refused to help. But they told me that after berating me for all the poor choices I’ve made with my life. They could have saved me the time and effort with a simple “no” but they had to spend an average of 7 minutes each telling me how awful I am.
So I have to wonder why the hell the viscous people went into charitable work to begin with. Did they start out nice? Is it that after being hit requests for assistance that they can’t help with day after day, they have just given up on the helping people aspect of their job and now use their time to vent their petty anger out on their clients? Would they have been nicer to me if they had the assistance to give? (There I go, trying to put myself in the place of the awful social workers).
I could take all that meanness coming at me if I knew that at the end of it, I could get the heat back on at home and the Kid wouldn’t have to spend another night bundled up like a polar bear on the living room floor reading by candle light. I could take a whole lot of shit if there was help attached to it. But I can’t take the shit in place of the help. And I don’t think I should have too. I don’t think being poor is a crime. I don’t think poverty is a moral failure. I would think these things even if I had money (and at one point, under President Clinton, we did) because you have to imagine that the only way to create a just society is by designing a society where you don’t know what you’re place in it will be. In a just society, you don’t know if you are going to end up a poor single mother or a rich tycoon. But I want to live in a society that was kind to both.
Is it not enough that the Kid and I have been suffering in the cold, damp powerless house for the last week?
Apparently not, cause now it’s supposed to fucking snow. Snow.
And of course the damn fuckwads that are supposed to be helping with winter heat bills aren’t returning my calls. Nope.
Seriously. This is too fucking much.
I could cry, but if I do the tears will freeze to my face and I’ll have no heat to melt them.
