Justifing Myself

Blegh, y’all. It’s been a hard lunch hour. I feel like a shitty friend. It’s not important why except to note that I don’t normally feel like the most fucked up person on the block and then something will happen, like someone will be all “Why don’t we have peanut butter and jelly for lunch?” and I’m all “My grandma did too love me” and… I don’t know… it’s just hard.

I know we all drag our shit around behind us;–speaking of Scrooge–we wear the chains we forged in life. But I find those moments really hard. I explain myself. The person clearly wants to move on. I feel compelled to explain myself again. They clearly, more than ever, want to move on. And I want… I don’t know what I want. I guess to feel like the choices I’ve made are the best choices I could have made, given the circumstances.

And I get really difficult to deal with when I feel that that’s threatened–my belief that I’m making the best choices I can.

And I feel bad about inflicting that on people.

I don’t know.

It’s fine. It’s just some shit I’ve got to work through.

Edited to add: See?!  Even now.  I’m still upset about it and am trying to justify to myself why I’m upset about it.  It’s like never-ending circular stupidity.

Detaining U.S. Citizens

I realize it’s been all immigration issues all the time here at Tiny Cat Pants and I promise we will soon get back to our regular man-hating ways soon enough, but once you start looking at something, you see some shit, you know what I mean?

And so today I’ve just learned that not only do we round up the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and whisk them off to “detention centers,” we’re rounding up U.S. citizens and sticking them in detention centers, too. Yes, if your parents break the law, you, U.S. citizen, can go to the most prison-like non-prison in America.

Check the interview with the lawyer from the ACLU talking about these kids, who “In their prison garb, they play guard-detainee, where the guard screams in the detainee’s face as the detainee cowers and cries.”  Seriously, America, if the fact that we’re rounding up tiny U.S. citizens, sticking them in prison uniforms, and locking them up for no reason other than that they have the wrong parents doesn’t chill you to the bone, what the fuck will?

Make You Laugh. Make You Cry.

Funny for Funny’s Sake

The Recovering Baptistspeaks French.  This just reminds me of how poor my Russian skills are.  If I’m ever hanging out with a Russian three year old at a bar, just having us some pivo and vodka, we’ll have a lot to talk about.  Otherwise, I’m pretty shit out of language skills.

I’ve been brushing up on my Spanish, just for Mack’ssake.  Sadly, I realized that all the Spanish I know I learned from Sublime and Cypress Hill.  So, yeah, I can say, “Mucho gusto, me llamo Bradley” and “Yo quero fumar.”

Sadly, my name is not Bradley and I don’t want to smoke, but if and when, baby, if and when…

Eye-rollingly Funny

Sean Braisted tells us how three out of ten Republican presidential candidates don’t believe in evolution.

Don’t believe the fossil records? Fine, just look at viruses; they evolve to counter-act new drug treatments. One of the difficulties with treating HIV/AIDS was that people would stop taking their drugs in the middle of a treatment, and the virus would evolve to adapt to the changes.

Thank you, Sean. Exactly.  You want to run the country and you don’t believe in a basic fact–that things change and adapt to new circumstances?!  Holy cow.

Right On, Dean Dad, Right On

My choice was to either excerpt the whole post and just add in a series of [holy shit] [me, too] [exactly] type bracketed comments or to just send you over there.

I’m going to opt for giving you a taste and then encouraging you to read the whole thing.

This was also a time when America took a breather between bouts of jingoism. For a while there, it was actually acceptable to question whether bombing brown people is always a good idea. In fact, I recall conversations in which it was asserted, with a straight face, that a real patriot fixes his ethical gaze on his own country. Some people believed – and I found them convincing – that if you really care about your country, that you bear witness to its failings,and tell the truth about them. Not in a superior way, but out of real concern. The idea was to protect the honorable parts of ourselves from our baser instincts. In a sense of the word that has been lost to history, it was truly – and honorably –conservative.

This post is so brilliant and moving and so thought-provoking to me that I wish I’d written it.

Break Your Heart

I don’t know if it’s just because I haven’t had my tv on as much as usual (though I don’t feel like I haven’t been watching TV), but, if not for blogs, I would have had NO idea that police were shooting rubber bullets into throngs of peaceable protesters in LA, no idea that they thought the best way to break up a crowd full of children was to turn their weapons on them.

I can understand why one might have to turn away in the face of that, but I just want to reiterate: If you hadn’t talked about it, I would have never known.

Magniloquence has a post about her feelings about the whole thing.  Her account of one police officer’s take rings so true to me I about can’t stand it.  I grew up believing that any time the police showed up, shit was going to rain down on everyone–guilty or innocent.  But it still breaks my heart to see how many people are willing to just accept that the police are at war with most of the community.

I don’t know how to say it any clearer than that, but if you think the police, in general, are really into that “protect and serve” stuff, you must be naive or rich.  The rest of us experience the police as a force for bringing uncontrolled chaos into any situation.

If we want real justice in this country, we somehow have to demilitarize our police force and reintegrate them back into the communities they serve.  It’s got to be a lot harder to beat a seven year old when you coach that seven year old’s baseball team.

At least, I would hope so.

There are good guys and there are bad guys, but the amount of people who are actual enemies of the police (and thus the people they serve) are few and far between.

Treating demonstrators like your enemies is just unacceptable and there ought to be outrage.  We have the right to peaceable assemble and petition the Government for a redress of our grievances.

If we’re willing to look the other way when the Government shoots at those petitioners, we have some problems, as a country with a Constitution, to put it mildly.