Being Nice

I swear, after this, I’m moving on from HB600, but, like I said, I think what happened during that vote brings into stark relief the problems we Democrats have. So, Steve Ross has a good post about why it’s counterproductive to be mad at the handful of Democrats who voted for HB600 and not the Republicans. I, of course, am also mad at the Republicans, but I expect nothing different. I do expect people ostensibly on my side to, you know, be on my side.

Ross says a couple of things specifically I want to address:

It’s natural to be more mad at people on your side that vote against you. They’re right there. That other side is so far away. But to what effect? Do you really think any of those 8 Democrats are going to listen to you after you throw them under the bus? Probably not. So the question I ask myself before I start, “what is my intended outcome?”

and

Discrimination aside, at the end of the day, this bill restricts the ability of a community to hold itself to a higher standard for the good of the community, and removes a community’s ability to contract according to local standards. This bill restricts Nashville to a lowest common denominator, which is ultimately anti-competitive in a world where community standards are constantly being raised.

I want to be clear that this is not a matter of me thinking that Ross is wrong. This is just a point in the conversation where we’ve reached a fork in the road and where he wants to go is not a place I can travel. For me, there is no “discrimination aside.” I don’t believe that, for instance, for Glen Casada or Jim Gotto, there was any “discrimination aside.” This was exactly about a small group of self-identified businessmen who met in semi-secret at Lifeway to plot how they could continue to fuck over gay people and transgender people AND continue to do business with Metro and how they’re getting the state to let them, when they couldn’t make Metro do what they wanted.

I don’t care how they framed it to be palatable to the less pro-discrimination Representatives who voted for it. I’m not interested in treating the cover they gave those cowardly fuckers as if it has equal weight to the truth of the matter. And I’m not interested in coming up with ways to make doing the right thing more palatable to cowards.

Probably that is valuable work that needs to be done. I’m just not interested in doing it.

I don’t think you can be so nice to people who are more powerful than you–and let’s not be mistaken into thinking that you and I are on the same footing as even the representatives in our state legislature–that they will do anything more than make your particular life comfortable. You can be so nice that you become the exception, the pet that needs to be spoiled.

But I can’t think of a single historical example where people who behaved themselves ever got people with power over them to give them real justice. And I’m not that interested in whether Eddie Bass, Charles Curtiss, John DeBerry, Bill Harmon, Michael Ray McDonald, Joe Pitts, David Shepard, John Tidwell, and John Mark Windle listen to me. They didn’t listen to me before.

I’m interested in them rethinking this bullshit pro-discrimination stand they’ve taken, whether on purpose or inadvertently, and not doing it again, because I’m interested in not only living in a state where it doesn’t suck to be a woman or gay or transgender or some combination therein, but also because I’m interested in belonging to a party where “should I help bigots fuck over vulnerable people?” isn’t even a dilemma for Democrats because the answer is always “no.”

If people feel thrown under a bus because I can’t play nice when they’ve helped make life harder for people, then I don’t really know what to say. Maybe they should feel thrown under a bus. Maybe while under that bus they should take a long hard look at the people they threw under there when making that vote.

The Weather, Day Two

My brother is in North Carolina, driving back to Georgia tonight. He called to shoot the shit on his drive and I was like “You’re doing what?!”

“I’m driving back to Georgia.”

And inside I was screaming, “Fucking West Georgia Motherfucker?!” He didn’t know I’m sitting here watching the weather channel point to all the tiny towns he hauls us all over whenever we’re down there, watching the weather people move their fingers across the name of the town where my nephew lives.

I should stop watching the TV, but I feel like, if I keep an eye on it, it won’t dare hurt anyone I know.

Anyway, my nephew says he’s planning on sleeping through it. My brother had no idea any of this was going on. I insisted he pull over and check the weather, maybe find a hotel for the night that will let him sleep on the bottom floor.

I’m waiting to hear that’s what he’s done.

A Few Quick Things

1. I really love that “Shady Grove” is the girl’s name. I used to think that it was a town, but listening to the song, no, clearly that’s his gal’s name.

2. A movie with Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, and Ludacris?! I’ve never seen any of the other The Fast and the Furious movies, but I swear, it’s as if they made this one just for me.

3. I think Missouri is wrong here, but my heart goes out to them. The Corps has no credibility in the Midwest and that makes a tough situation tougher.

4. Yep, I’m also disturbed by this trend to treat questioning Palin’s account of the birth of her son as somehow anti-feminist. I firmly believe she is reckless enough to have had her son exactly under the circumstances she claims to have had him and I’m not that excited about analyzing every detail of her story. That’s not what interests me. What interests me is that she says, repeatedly, that she’s released Trig’s birth certificate and she demonstrably has not. Why, after all this time, when she brings it up and says that she’s released it, doesn’t someone say “Excuse me. You have not.”? How is it not sexist to let Palin lie to you to your face and you just take it, like maybe she can’t help it, you know how women are. But that’s just me.

5. I have a lot of thoughts about this post, but my immediate reaction was “You know, I always wondered if internet trolls would dare behave that way in real life and…yep.”

6. The pun at the end of this post is practically legally required. I defy you to write about this without including one terrible pun. Donnie Wahlberg, wooooo! Ha, this post is apparently brought to you by celebrity guys B. has had crushes on.

The Weather: Day One

Well, we made it through Day One of the Weather Apocalypse in one piece. The dog is being weirdly antsy this morning, though, which is making me nervous. It’d be nice if we could name these weather events so that people had some sense of what it is we’re going through. “An endless, days-long line of storms, kicking off tornadoes” lacks brevity. And is there a scale, like there are for tornadoes? They’re making me feel like this is a Category 4 or 5 Shitstorm, but it’d be nice to have a term and an objective measure.

It’s supposed to be worse this evening. But… and what I am about to say you should never say, lest you come home to a flattened house… I’m feeling pretty okay about our safety. Knock on wood. The storms have been moving to the northeast and all our bad storms all come from the northwest–the tornado that took the trees down came right down Clarksville Pike from the northwest. The direction the tree in the back yard is lying? From northwest to southeast.

Which is not to say that we don’t get some wind from the southwest sometimes, but the terrain doesn’t really let it pick up the necessary steam from that direction. From the northwest, storms basically get themselves a chute down the ridge and then into some nice flat land towards Briley. They can really get going in that space. But from the southwest, it’s harder for them to get in here. They’d have to keep power over a lot of really hilly land.

Which isn’t to say that storms can’t.

Ha, but it is to say that I guess I’m trying to convince myself that it will be fine.