Early November is in Two Weeks

If you care at all about women’s health, I invite you to go read all of Left Wing Cracker’s post today. I would just like to point out one thing.

If you follow the local news, you are probably aware that Christ Community  competed for a family planning grant to provide services to low income uninsured people; these funds were previously awarded to Planned Parenthood.  Our application scored highest, we have been offered the program and we are now gearing up to begin the program in early November.  Please pray that we will have the endurance and integrity to withstand the onslaught of those who are intent on our failure.  Daily, we are confronted with refuting the half-truths and misstatements coming primarily for the leadership of Planned Parenthood.  Daily, we have needy people intentionally sent to us by Planned Parenthood  even though they are fully aware that we are not yet able to deliver the services. Their intent is to embarrass us and report to the local media that Christ Community is unable to deliver the care.

Please, linger on the bolded parts. Early November is a week away. By the time you get to November 10th, you’re in mid-November. Is Christ Community going to be ready in a week?  I mean, you can say what you want, Christ Community, but as of right now, you are indeed unable to deliver the care you told Memphis you could deliver. If you weren’t ready for patients, why did you ask for them?

Nobody wants women to go to Planned Parenthood, but when Planned Parenthood sends patients to Christ Community, Christ Community is the victim of big bad Planned Parenthood? So, Planned Parenthood is evil? But they should go on being evil in a way that benefits Christ Community until Christ Community has its ducks in a row?

I’m sorry, but that looks to me like the exact same mindset that lets “pro-life” women have abortions at Planned Parenthood, because their abortion is okay. Planned Parenthood is just supposed to take all their abuse, but continue to provide them all the services they need, because they’re “good.”

That’s not integrity. That’s hypocrisy.

Bad News for Republicans: There’s More than One Little Old Lady with Moxy

Woods is reporting that yet another little old lady had difficulty getting her photo id in order to vote. Even worse? She seems to know what the score is. “I’m just afraid people will say it’s too much trouble.”

Mary Mancini is writing about the people affected by this “Go stand in line for hours” nonsense and has numbers. “Advancement Project studies show 25 percent of African Americans, 15 percent of those earning less than $35,000, 18 percent of citizens age 65 or older, and 20 percent of voters age 18 to 29 do not have government-issue photo Ids.”

Hmm. I wonder why Republicans would want to discourage those Tennesseans from voting?

 

Today in “Ha, ha, You’ll Have to Parent a Middle Schooler Through This”

Oh, lord, you know, I have this feeling that I’m going to hit “Publish” and some hottie with four eleven year old daughters is going to walk through my office door, fall madly in love with me and insist on a quicky wedding. This, people, this is why I sit in my office, eating my sad sandwich from home, singing “Rose-Colored Glasses.” It’s to keep away the office-wandering, four-almost-middle-school-kid-having agent of karma who is out there waiting to find me delightful.

Anyway, I don’t really have anything for “Today in ‘Ha, ha, you’ll have to parent a middle schooler through this.'” I’m just teasing.

I am upset by the injustice of the Bell Witch Cave being Tennessee’s scary thing. I should have made a chart for the Scene. Because really, let’s compare.

Harassed a prominent family? The Bell Witch’s prominent family was in Robertson County. The Thing harassed people in Nashville. Point: The Thing.

Shaped like a dog? The Bell Witch had a rabbit’s head. Oooh, dog with a rabbit’s head. I’m so scared. No, I am not. That sounds adorable. That thing, as a puppy/bunny, would have overloaded Cute Overload a thousand times over. The Thing was shaped like a dog and legitimately terrifying. Point: The Thing.

Bored people with gossip? Fine, point to the Bell Witch, but that’s not even scary.

Killed a person? I guess, yes, the Bell Witch killed someone and The Thing did not. You know why? Because The Thing had a good gig and did not fuck it up by killing a member of its host family.

Had a cave? Is that what it takes? A motherfucking cave? The Thing had a house.

People, I just feel like The Thing really got screwed over by fate. And I find this injustice galling.

Speaking of Alabama

One of the things that bugs me about the whole “undocumented workers” issue is that there’s a side to the “they do jobs Americans won’t do” that really bothers me. It’s how the rhetoric on the side of undocumented workers also starts to sound racist–“they’ are just capable of working harder, longer. Like “they” aren’t quite human, because “they” have stamina “we” just don’t have.

This is one of the things I suspect about the United States. We’re a very young country, still, founded on a belief in self-reliance in principal, but in actuality, shit rolls downhill. In reality, we were and are set up like a pyramid, socially, and the further up you are, the more people under you that you expect to do things for you. A man in 1850 might have had nothing but a sod house and a wife, but he expected his wife to put in a lot of labor for his benefit. A farmer’s wife in 1850 might have had to take a lot of shit from her husband, but she could heap a lot of shit on her household slaves. House slaves, when they got the opportunity, heaped on field slaves.

Hell, Reconstruction was undermined basically on the principal that black men and northern whites were going to start heaping on white southerners.

And I feel like it’s this shit-heaping that we’ve never stopped to analyze. We all know slavery is bad, that segregation is wrong, that you shouldn’t beat your wife, blah blah blah.

But did we ever step back and say “We are not owed someone else’s cheap or free labor”? And believe it? I’m not sure.

I saw this picture this morning and I was reminded of just how much of this state and this country was built on the backs of people who worked for free under terrible conditions, building shit they were never going to get to live in, picking shit they were not going to profit from.

But, you know, except for craftsmen, we don’t make brick by hand anymore.

So why do we still pick produce by hand? Oh, no, I know. We don’t have machines that can pick it as efficiently as people can. But we’re paying those people shit wages for back-breaking labor they perform under incredibly harsh weather and social conditions. We’re not actually owed the labor of people we want to shit on.

So, it seems to me that either we need to sit down and innovate some fucking farm equipment or we need to stop shitting on the people who will do the work.

And then we need to learn from our history and be better.