Me Too, Continued

I'm starting to see jokey comments about all the sexual misconduct and abuse stories coming out, and I can appreciate dark and bad taste humor more than most, but we should keep an eye on it. What usually happens is that after the initial shock and awe of things like this, we start using humor to cope. It's natural. Unfortunately, it is also sometimes signalling the start of public fatigue. This isn't some blip in the news cycle, this is a paradigm shift in how the country treats half the population. People tend to get tired of things once the novelty wears off, but that is a shortcoming in people, not the issues or those that want fair treatment or justice.

So hold off on your whining about having to hear about some person's horrible experience, and their attempt to hold someone accountable for it. If it's too much for you to deal with in such large portions, then don't look at every story you see. What you shouldn't do is cry like a baby because you have decided when it's enough because it makes you uncomfortable or bores you. You only sound like a shallow, insensitive and entitled piece of shit when you do that. You come off as a narcissist because you are taking an important issue and making it all about poor, poor you.

Continue to treat these instances with the same disgust and outrage, because each one deserves the same justice the first ones got. It's not their fault that they took longer to reach you. There is a purge happening, a reckoning for people who abused their positions to humiliate, harass and abuse, to dehumanize people, and that doesn't happen overnight. So stay angry, keep being appalled at this disgusting behavior, and keep being supportive of women coming forward with their stories. Otherwise we will soon descend back into the behavior that kept them silent for so long, and it would be a shame to waste all this momentum that's been achieved so far.

Trump Supporters

There is one thing all us rational people need to accept about the whole Trump situation that will save us all a lot of frustration and trouble. You are never going to convey your shock and outrage to his legion of fans. Every day it seems he goes too far, and the next he goes even farther. Listing his crimes and hateful comments and every stupid and disgusting thing he does isn't going to jolt them into reality or make them think twice. The things we find so horrible and dangerous about this cretin are the things his followers see as attributes. They like it. For most of them, he hasn't gone far enough yet.

I don't even know what to call this

I was going to write a post about how we can save tax money by getting rid of any advisors or intelligence people in the White House or think tanks, because the president apparently doesn't need them, he just gets all his info and policy ideas from Fox News. I was going to point out how the diversity visa thing all these yahoos are screaming about is just one more divisive tool chock full of misinformation. I thought about bringing up the fact that all the hateful racist idiots are losing their minds because some insane Muslim guy drove a truck over some people, but they didn't scream about white Christian guys when one of them killed nearly eight times as many people and injured more than five hundred more in Las Vegas last month. Instead, all I can think about is how little respect I have for you if you get even one iota of your information from Fox News, or believe anything the Republicans or Trump tells you. And don't start with any shit about how you think for yourself and you get information from all sides. Don't tell me you're an independent or libertarian or whatever other bullshit label you want to use. Don't go on about how we need to give our president a chance. Donald Trump is a malignancy that needs to be cut out before he does anymore harm. He is a complete fucking moron that has no grasp whatsoever of government or what it even means to be human. He is a racist misogynist homophobic piece of garbage. He is a narcissist and a sociopath. If you support him, if you think he deserves a chance, if you think he should have any respect at all, well... I don't know what that says about you. I know the comparisons always come back to Hitler, and in the past that seemed extreme for anyone that occupied the Oval Office. The sad fact is, we are at that point now. If you support Trump, you are as bad as the people that put Hitler in power. I know, he hasn't killed any Jews or started a war or raided the slums, at least not yet. But he is a fascist, and a lot of the things he and his administration is doing mirror the things Hitler did in the beginning. He literally has Nazis singing his praises! So that's who you are. You are a modern day member of the new American Nazi party, only we aren't calling it that so far. You are uninformed and too lazy or insecure to even check and see if you might be wrong. You are most likely lying to yourself about your own racism, misogyny or homophobia. You have been fooled into voting against your own best interests, and dooming the rest of us with your actions. You might just be too stupid to even be involved in politics or voting, although I hate to call people stupid. There are few truly stupid people in the world, there are just willful idiots. So stop being fucking idiots, and if you can't, just shut up and go back to whatever it was you were doing before you got all riled up about politics, and stop ruining the world.

Things women are better at than men

Things women are better at than men:

Loving

Nurturing

Organizing

Empathizing

Multitasking

Child rearing

Living longer

Staying healthy

Tolerating pain

Managing money

Things men are better at than women:

Making it harder for women to do any of the things on that list

Peeing while standing

Some things I'm thinking about this morning 10/29/17

Some things I'm thinking about this morning:

I generally don't like flavors mixed together in drinks. I don't like kiwi strawberry or mango peach or whatever. I drink those flavored water powders, and one day they were out of the fruit punch flavor, so I reluctantly tried cherry pomegranate. Turns out, that's now my favorite flavor. Makes sense, I like cherries and I like pomegranates. Of course, I like strawberries and I like kiwi, but not together. Here's the kicker though: thinking about this, I realized that my favorite is fruit punch, which is a bunch of fruits mixed together! It's all very confusing.

Sometimes I wonder what is wrong with me because when I'm telling someone about a friend, they always ask me things about them that I don't really know. They'll ask “what does he do for a living?” or “where did he go to school?” or “how old are their kids?” Now I know some of that information for my closest friends, but not for most of the people I know. I feel bad, because I'm obviously not asking the right questions. I'm a good conversationalist, and people generally like talking to me, but I must be a horrible person because I don't know these basic things that everyone else seems interested in.

Today I realized that my conversation style is to just let people tell me about the things they want to talk about. If they feel it's important to tell me about their job or their schooling or their kids, that's fine, but they don't. They tell me all kinds of personal things that I'm not at liberty to discuss with other people, and they talk about a lot of interesting things that they feel they can't talk to other people about. I'm interested in everything, so I usually share their enthusiasm, so they forget about their jobs or their responsibilities for awhile and get all excited and animated talking about some movie or song or article about mollusks that they read.

So I've decided that I'm not going to worry anymore if I'm some kind of sociopath, and just continue talking to people about stuff they want to talk about and not badger them with questions about their shitty job or ungrateful kids. I think what I provide them with is better than that.

I live in an apartment, and if I'm expecting someone, I'll go unlock the door and stand their with it open while they come into the building. Sometimes people think of apartment hallways like their car. They think that they're isolated, so they will talk to themselves, or burp or fart, or maybe pick their nose. I don't know about the last one, I can only hear them. Sometimes they will sing, and it's not just in apartment hallways. I come upon people singing to themselves in all kinds of random situations.

The musician part of me should probably be grimacing about how off key they are, but who am I to talk? They are always embarrassed when they are caught, but they shouldn't be. I'm just happy that they're singing, because it's hard to be miserable and sing, even if you're singing about miserable things. And let's face it, most of the greatest songs are about horrible things.

So all of you, sing whenever you want, and don't be ashamed. Well, maybe don't bust out a Taylor Dayne song at a funeral or something, but you know what I mean.

Two Groups

There's two groups of people when it comes to politics:

The more uninformed and the dumber you are, the easier you are to manipulate.

The more informed and the smarter you are, the easier you are to disenfranchise.

The more insecure you are, the easier it is to convince yourself you belong in the other group.

Me Too Part Nine

So here it is another Monday, and the weekly cycle begins again.  I know how things work these days, and a new week brings new shock and outrage and new stories to command our attention.  That’s why I took the opportunity last week to post about sexual harassment and abuse every chance I got. This week it is pushed to the back of the line, and we all succumb to our short attention spans.  Soon, we will forget about Harvey Weinstein, and all the buzz it created and the other people it exposed.  We elected a sexual predator president, why would anyone think that what some producer in Hollywood did would occupy our thoughts for that long?

But we shouldn’t let it go.  We shouldn’t stop talking about it.  We shouldn’t let a whole movement lose momentum just because we had a couple of days off and there are no big sensational headlines to draw our attention back to it. That’s what will happen, though.

We can’t control the news media or the national dialog.  We don’t have a pulpit, or hold office.  We can only do what we can.  We can continue to use social media to keep the discussion going.  We can petition, and get our elected officials involved, and try to strengthen the laws and punishments for abuse and harassment and violence.  Everyone is spread so thin these days, with so many pressing needs, so I’m not sure how much time and energy is left over to devote to this.  There are people fighting for justice everyday though, so we can help out when we can.

Ultimately, the thing all of us can do is try to keep our eyes open.  Not just for bad behavior of others.  We need to examine ourselves and see if we are helping or hurting the situation. There have been plenty of times in my life where I have responded or acted in a way that didn’t help anything.  We have to learn, and to learn we need to be open to learning in the first place.  We can all do better, all of us.  

We also need to keep our eyes open when it comes to being there for women in these situations.   Often they cannot be open about what they are dealing with, either because someone is stopping or threatening them, or because they don’t feel comfortable.  It is all of our jobs to make the people we care about feel safe and comfortable around us.  We need to be supportive, and not just dismiss what they say about their lives and situations. We need to be receptive to any signs that there might be a problem.

We need to speak out when we encounter something wrong.  We need to stop accepting unacceptable behavior and making excuses for it.  We need to teach our children about respect and understanding and empathy.

All of these things are things we can do, without help from celebrities or politicians or activists or foundations, or even people like me that just annoy you on your Facebook page about it.  We can do it ourselves because it is the right thing to do.  For women. For men. For our children.  

For the entire human race.