swirling thoughts

This is what I have so far. (Trigger warning: rape, rape culture, rape ableism, rape apology)

It isn't just that women's magazines provide rapist language, it isn't just that rape jokes fuel rape culture, it isn't that both make it harder to get rapists convicted. The hardest thing, is that sex culture is rape culture in our society.

My college roommate (the first one) came to me once and told me she'd just had sex with her boyfriend, but she was drunk and didn't want to, but that was okay, right? It had to be okay, right? I don't know why she confided in me. Probaby because I'd just put a man in prison a few months before (though for a consensual encounter) and wasn't afraid to feel about it around her. I was already the first phone call for a lot of the girls on my floor, they called me when they needed a walk home from a party, because I absolutely didn't party. The concept of getting drunk and grinding with people has never appealed to me. It appealed to me far less at 18 than it does now.

The scariest night was the phone call to come help. And I slipped on my shoes, tossed on a jacket, and went and found out that a guy had taken Amy upstairs and none of the other guys were letting any of the other girls go upstairs to check on her. A threat to call the police and get everyone (including myself) arrested/ticketed for underage drinking, got Amyl released from upstairs and a group of left the party, but not before I was verbally abused for what I'd done. And then thanked a million times by Amy before she threw up on my shoes. She didn't remember the encounter the following morning.

It got to be a habit, rescue girls from dangerous situations, walk them home, or just walk them home drunk at all. Some of the police knew me, knew I wasn't drunk when I was seeing my floormates home safely, it became an odd sense of pride for me. It didn't really occur to me that I was rescuing them from sex they didn't want. To me, I was just bringing them home, tucking them in, making sure we all went to the res hall to eat the morning after. I was saving them from a certain ticket if they'd tried to make the walk back alone.

Lisa wasn't even the scariest situation, but she taught me to absolutely always hold my ground with what I was doing to protect these girls. These girls. I don't know when they became that, but I adopted them as these girls, all of them, any of them who needed a walk. Lisa had her walk, and had fallen in the elevator. My roommate burst into my room, telling me that Lisa fell and I needed to help. They were about to arrest her boyfriend because they suspected roofies, and no-one wanted Lisa ticketed for underage drinking. The police told me I had to leave and I asked if I'd be forcibly removed if I didn't, and they said no, and I stayed an advocate for Lisa. Including going outside, tackling her boyfriend, and threatening to beat the shit out of him. Which is where he full on confessed in front of the firefighter who had been very nicely looking the other way, that Lisa'd had a whole bottle of Jack Daniels, and nothing to eat, and he wanted to get her home before anything happened.

So it wasn't roofies, but I was the only one who could drive and her boyfriend was about to get himself arrested. So I advocated for him too, talked the police out of arresting him and drove him to the hospital, going 20 miles an hour in a snowstorm where I could barely see out the front windshield. My roommate? She asked me to sneak her into her boyfriend's dorm. Yes, the same boyfriend who had coerced sex - raped - her earlier. And I complied. I don't know what happened that night. I don't doubt that her boyfriend seems like a good guy, but I'd rather be friends with the one getting arrested because he's trying to get help for his drunk girlfriend after he tried to get her home to bed.

Alcohol. I didn't mean this to become a story of the drunk girls I've known and helped (and the ones I haven't), but there it is. Sex and rape and how it's portrayed is on my mind. My roommate said yes to her boyfriend because she was drunk and she didn't know it was okay to say no to him, and that if she did say no and he still pushed, that he was an asshole. I can think of several movies where the pushy guy gets the girl, despite her protestations. The one portrayed as the asshole? That's the guy bringing his drunk roommate home who gets her ticketed and pumped full of IV fluids. How dare he get her into trouble. Yes, how dare he not leave his girlfriend in a toxic situation and use every opportunity to take advantage of her. She fell in the elevator. He could have propped her up, carried her to her room, and done whatever he wanted. Instead, he sent for help, and somehow, I wound up involved.

Again, I'd rather be his friend 20 times over than be the friend of my roommate's boyfriend (this also wasn't the first, nor the last time that he was an ally for women's autonomy). It doesn't work like that, though. My roommate's boyfriend was friendly, affable, all around a an-all american boy. He was the boy joking at the parties, going just far enough, but not entirely across the line at these parties with the drunk girls. And when it was all said and done, he took my roommate home and raped her. They broke up, he cheated on her. I never asked details. If "cheating" was "raping another drunk woman" I didn't want to hear it. So I willingly remained ignorant.

Which is another point. The willingness to remain ignorant, to close our eyes to what happens when the door to the room with the drunk girl latches shut. 2nd scariest situation with a drunk girl involved just that, and actually choosing to go through the door and find out what was going on. That quickly became a physical battle to keep him off her, ending in a sleepless night and a litany of verbal abuse that only abated when he passed out.

Aside from Lisa, there never was any calling of the cops. The scariest rape situations other than my own that I've been in, and I never called the cops. To be fair, I never called the cops the first time I'd been raped either. It's not that I couldn't have, it's not like in any of the situations, if I desperately wanted to, I couldn't have found a way to get a phone and call them. It's that these were likeable boys, and drunk girls, and what did anyone really expect to happen? How do you explain to the cops "Well, nothing's actually happened, but it might, and oh yea, everyone's piss-ass drunk"? I was shaken up by one of these stories and told a friend, it had been on my mind, all the steps plaguing me, and she said "I have a comment about drunk girls, but I'm not going to make it now because you'll get upset." As if I wouldn't get upset at her thinking that friendly, all-american boys can't be assholes and it's the women who somehow asked for these men to stumble upon them and rape them.

The persistent guy always gets the girl, and for my own rape, on the police report, it says "there is no evidence to suggest that a crime has occured". The all-american boy was home with a girl and decided to be persistent. That's what happens in the movies. How dare I say no to that. How dare any woman rise against that socially ingrained concept and demand their own autonomy. Men don't get convicted of rape because the men who are doing the raping are the men we all either want to be like, or just want to like ourselves. How dare I even talk about what has happened to me, and, more importantly, what has happened to these other girls, my girls, all of them. The 18 and 19 college girls at parties, with roundabout good men, and I come off as an absolutist bitch. Or, more commonly than not, I say something, and people look at these men, these "good" men, and decided that something must have been misunderstood in their stories and actions (studies that I won't link to, but are easy to find, show how this wholly not the case, there is no misunderstanding, there is definitely an intent to rape these girls).

Calling out rapists is exhausting, and seeing them at parties long after you've called them out, smiling and haming it up, the life of the party, going just far enough with these girls is a stab to the heart, over and over and over again.

This is what right here, right now, I can't take. I can't take it being the only one to watch the creeps. This isn't diatrabe against all men, not in the slightest. Lisa's boyfriend was a standup guy, and I wish I'd kept into contact with him (facebook had just barely been invented when I moved off the floor that Lisa lived on). He's the guy you want at a party, the one who leaves all the doors open and calls the police when he needs to. No this has been a diatrabe against the men that someone has come to you and said "hey that asshole raped/almost raped/would have raped my friend" and you still laugh at parties with him, ignoring any and all doors he choses to close.

Maybe I worry too much, think things through too much, let things get under my skin and stay there, sometimes for almost a decade. Maybe. But I doubt it. There are so many reasons why rape is on my mind - Lisa happened about this time many years ago, I went to court for a restraining order around this time so many years ago, I stopped a man from raping a friend about this time so many years ago, I didn't attend a party a week ago because an all-american almost rapist was going to be there, old friends have found me on facebook and asked me "what's new" and I can't bear the thought of telling them, "nothing, it's the same old as it's always been."

Hobo Themed Wedding

Okay, confession time. I follow Regretsy. Don't judge me. I feel you judging me. Sometimes, in this crazy, messed up world, it's just nice to laugh. And no, the site isn't PC, and sometimes it's NSFW. But then there's April's Army, because if you can use your popularity for good, why not? Anyway, it's amusing, most of the time, but if you get easily offended, perhaps don't stray too far into the site.

Okay, that was all the preface to something Regretsy posted earlier - a link to the Etsy blog that featured a hobo-themed wedding. No, I'm not kidding. I like to tell my friends that 'Regretsy means never having to say you're kidding' and that definitely rings true here as well.

But even without Regretsy, I'd have found this offensive. Just the title of the post got that yucky feeling starting gnawing its way from my stomach. Then it got worse. As we prepared to make everything for our wedding, we collected feed sack dresses and old work boots, antique hand-stitched quilts and jug band instruments. And then I could actual taste vomit. The attire was hobo casual! They destroyed antique quilts! They had garbage can fires!

I know I don't need to remind people that we have an incredibly fragile economy right now, the unemployment rate is way too ridiculously high, the underemployment rate is even higher, people are losing their homes left and right, and we have a Congress that took us to the brink of disaster for shits and giggles. Even without that - even if our economy was robust and unemployment was ridiculously low - invoking a time and period in our history when things weren't just bad, they were about as low as one could go is just sick. Because this had nothing to do with fashions of the times. No, this was entirely about the culture of the times. Sick sick sick.

Not to mention, it took a while for the comments to turn, and that, that is why I'm writing about this, and my utter contempt for humanity. It takes until user kaytaa for the tide to start turning and people to stop heaping praise over spending $15 grand to dress up like poor people. Seriously, scroll up. It's sickening.

I just have no faith in anyone or anything right now. It's not a good idea, it's not creative, it's not chic, and if you're thinking of saying it is, you need to examine your privilege. And then you need to stay the hell away from me.

call it what you want, it's an elite super congress, and it's wrong

If my Representative isn't in this elite group of 6 House reps, then what use is he? If all he can do is vote yes/no on these recommendations OR vote yes/no on BBA, then why bother having him there at all? If he can't advocate for me, for the people of his district, in the shaping of these huge, sweeping cuts that will affect his district, then how is he doing the job for which he was elected?

How are the other 429 Reps? This country is about to be represented by 12 people instead of 535.

And that's beyond sick.

And if those other 429 Reps reject that only 6 of them have any power, their fallback is BBA.

What the hell is this country?

boehner's bill

I'm watching the live vote of the House bill. I like watching votes, no matter the bill - I enjoy the adding up of numbers to get to the magic pass number.

It passed 218-210 - one more than needed to pass.

It passed because Boehner agreed to add the constitutional amendment provision: that the debt ceiling cannot be raised a second time UNLESS Congress approves and sends to the states for ratification, a balanced budget amendment.

As if anyone needed any more proof that the Tea Party is willing to hold anyone - even their own party and leaders - hostage to get what they want. Which makes me feel sorry for Boehner, even if just a little. Because I think it's safe to say that without those tantrum throwing Tea Partiers, we wouldn't be on the brink of default. Is that really a risk to take simply to get everything you want?

Especially as it's a futile want, as the bill now heads to the Senate to die?

I understand politics better than most of my friends, but this I can't even comprehend at all.

Oslo

People were asked to leave their roses all over the city.

And they did. And they marched, and they filled their streets carrying makeshift torches. The police estimate that around 200,000 people gathered in Oslo alone.



Some of these images are incredibly beautiful. Some of these images are incredible sad. Some are both.

here, in Norwegian, but the google translator does an okay job with the translation

nice dose of humanity

Okay. The Asian markets are on their own, Boehner seems pretty damned determine to stomp his feet all the way through the crash of the fragile global economy, and things are just not happy in Norway. So I figure we could use a nice dose of humanity. Y'know, the good stuff. Feel-good things are perfectly okay right now.

So here it is:

Cadel Evans wins the Tour de France and holds the stuffed lion he won.

His nickname is also Cuddles.

My google news has Norway, the Debt Talks, and then a picture of a man in a yellow jersey holding a lion. Awww ....

on norway

“Then the devil took him into a high mountain and showed him the kingdoms of the world and said that he would give them to him if he would fall down and worship him. But Jesus said: Get thee hence, Satan. That’s the end of the story according to the good simple Matthew. But it wasn’t. The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: If thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns and death on the cross thou shalt save the human race, for greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Jesus fell. The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.”

-The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham.

I find I don't have very many words to say.

Except - that in the face of such extreme violence, and a manifesto of violence, the reaction of the Norwegian government was to say more democracy, more humanity.

There is so much hope contained in those four words; so much promise that violence never has to define us.

another very short letter

Dear Speaker Boehner (Again),

NO YOU DO NOT HAVE THE SAME RESPONSIBILITIES AS THE PRESIDENT.

Are you serious?

You, sir, are not the leader of the free world. You sir, are akin to a four year old brat, stomping his feet and saying 'no' for no other reason than you like how it feels.

I'm not sure I could hate you any more than when I do right now.

Please don't throw the fragile world economy into chaos because you have some grave delusions of grandeur.

Still absolutely positively no love,
me

a very short letter

Dear Speaker Boehner, STOP IT, STOP IT RIGHT NOW.

You are an idiot. A giant, massive idiot.

Absolutely, positively no love,
me

this is just to say-

it is ten pm and still hot as hell.

91F/31C.

But the humidity has fallen to 57% and the dew point is 74.

So there's that.

summer's eve ... wtf

These Summer's Eve ads cannot possibly be a real thing.

They cannot. Because if they were, I would have to talk about how utterly horrific and offensive they are. Especially for how racist they are. Not to mention ...

Why, why, why, why does our society which already over-pressures and over-sexualizes women by telling them what to wear and how thin/beautiful to be, feel the need to tell women how this particular organ should smell?

Groom your hair to silky shiny perfection! Look like a beauty queen with eyelash-lengthening mascara! Do up those luscious lips! Wear this perfume! And this dress! And these shoes! And if you do it, and we think you're doing it wrong, you're either a slut or asking for it! Or both!

Oh, and please make sure your vagina smells good too.

Just ... wtf? What the ever-loving fuck?

These cannot possibly be a real thing. They cannot. I refuse to believe it.

oh Marilyn, what have they done to you?

I'm not going to post a picture of the new Marilyn Monroe statue that is up in Pioneer Court in Chicago. You can Google it. I will, however, talk about how disgusting it is.

Of all of the alluring images of Marilyn that could have been chosen, one that even further sexually objectifies her is the one picked.

Marilyn Monroe is the epitome of sexual objectification. The fact that she died at age 36 and we never got to see her fall from that ill-begat grace, the slow decline of sexual allure, means she is eternally locked into it.

Why, knowing all of that, would you design a statue that will allow people to further exploit her objectification by looking up her panties, or standing between her legs with thumbs up signs, or grabbing a leg with a devious look on their faces, or anything sexual, really. Chicago Tribune has some images you can look at, if you're so inclined. But they are absolutely beyond disgusting.

Many who have seen it in person have been saying the proportions are all off; that the detail on the face isn't great, but every line and crease of her panties is perfect.

Excuse me while I go throw up.

number of the day: 6

That's the number of states that have passed recent legislation banning abortion past 20 weeks - and more states are set to follow. Great. Getting into a discussion about this arbitrary date would be ridiculous, and a waste of my time, but I am just going to gently point out that a FETUS ISN'T EVEN VIABLE AT 20 WEEKS. Not to mention wondering what we as a society are doing when we put the autonomy of a non-vialbe 20week fetus over the autonomy of the pregnant woman. But I digress.

After Ohio's women-killing bill, there is a glimmer of ... something, in Missouri's bill, passed Thursday. Because, see, unlike the Ohio bill, in Missouri, if the life of the woman is in danger, or if being pregnant will cause substantial injury to her major bodily functions, then an abortion is okay.

It's still women-killing, extremist, and, make no mistake, Gov Nixon is a coward for not signing his name to the bill and instead letting it pass without his signature.

But at least Missouri puts some of the rights and health of women above Ohio. Not that Missouri is much better at all. But in this crazy war on women, I have to find something to latch to. Because see, sooner or later we're going to realise, as a society, that you cannot recognise the autonomy of one women who is 20weeks pregnant, and not the other who is also 20 weeks pregnant. This could backfire, and we could have more Ohio bills which scream 'hey, let's kill women', but I'm hopeful that's not the case. Mostly because hope is all I have left.

SB 72

SB 72 was passed in Ohio yesterday. Gov Kasich is expected to sign it into law.

This bill ... I can't get over this bill. When I first heard about it, I got hung up on the section that said a woman can't have an abortion even if she'll kill herself if she doesn't.

don't believe me? Here's the text.

2) No abortion shall be considered necessary under division (B)(1)(b) of this section on the basis of a claim or diagnosis that the pregnant woman will engage in conduct that would result in the pregnant woman's death or a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman or based on any reason related to the woman's mental health.

This is law! This isn't genital mutilation, or genocide, or women unable to leave their homes, but this is forcing women into situations that will only end in devastation. This? This is the ultimate extremism. It isn't loud and out there, and the devastation it causes will be hauntingly quiet, tucked into the shadows, cowed in shame. This bill will kill women, there just won't be bells and whistles to go with it.

SB 72 passed and I just don't even know what to say.

war of extremism

Could we please stop the nonsense that nothing bad and worthy of talking about is happening to women in the United States? The idea that women in the United States are not seeing a war of extremism raged on them simply because the wars raged on women in other parts of the world are far more concrete is absurd.

Case 1, from Richard Dawkins on pharyngula:

Dear Muslima Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with. [...] And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin!

Case 2: Miranda Flint at South Dakota Politics

His version of extremism has nothing to do with car bombs or global terrorism. Nor does it have anything to do with female genital mutilation or the problem of gendercide. It doesn’t even have anything to do with greenhouse gasses.

Case 3: Justin Timberlake, a soldier, and Mila Kunis, at oh, everywhere, just google it.

Denying women access to health care is extremism. The idea that several Presidential candidates not only think this is okay, but seem open to the idea that the progress of women should be reversed, is also extremism. The fact that a woman can make an innocuous request not to be accosted in an elevator and then accused of over-reacting, is extremism. A man putting a woman into a situation where it is impossible for her to say no without severe negative consequences? You guessed it, extremism.

All in different forms, but the notion that extremism only occupies one form - one that is violent and easy to identify, is patently wrong, and the sooner we stop thinking like that, the sooner we stop all forms of extremism.

e-verify

Quick! Prove to me you have the legal right to work in these United States, in order to correct an e-verify false-negative.

Drivers license? Are you kidding me? Those things are handed out like candy and don't prove anything.

SS card? Not actually proof of identity. I know, right?

Birth certificate? Well, now we're getting somewhere. Wait. You changed your name? This seems fishy to me ... got anything else?

Passport? Excellent! justsolongasitisnotexpired.

Now. Let's play a game. How many Americans do you think have passports? Don't look it up, that's cheating. Give up? GOA put it at about 28% as of 2008. That's about 86 million passports for 305 million people. The labor force is about 153 million. Applying the same stats, that means about 43 million of the labor force has a passport. Sounds okay, doesn't it? And that's actually assuming that none of those passports have expired. Expired passports don't prove identity. Hell, even with the new outrageous Voter ID proposed amendment, an expired ID counts.

So, AT BEST, less than a third of the current US labor force can prove that they actually can work in the United States. It's a crime not to be able to, for whatever ridiculous reason It's also a crime, fyi, not to change your address w/in 30 days of a move, but under Voter ID, you can still use that as proof of identity, and oh yeah, y'know, VOTE. Under E-verify, an expired passport [or other ID, I am assuming] makes you a criminal. Okay, well, you're not technically a criminal, you just can't prove you're not.

As with Voter ID - these are some really interesting parallels I might have to post about later - the people with the least amount of resources and agency are going to be the ones most negatively affected by this.

And if that weren't enough ...

Let's keep playing a game, okay?
This, I am going to steal directly from Dan Crawford @ Angry Bear

When E-Verify finds an inconsistency between a name and that person's work authorization, it issues a "tentative nonconfirmation" (TNC), after which an employee has several days to contact SSA or DHS to correct the error or risk losing their job. Unfortunately, a significant number of these TNCs are issued in error. (Errors are usually due to clerical mistakes from inputting data, especially with hard-to-spell names or ones that have been hyphenated or changed, as well as errors by the workers themselves when filling out government forms.) In 2010, of the 16 million E-verify queries by employers, 128,000 (0.8 percent of the total) required the employee to go to SSA or call DHS to fix the problem. Of those 0.8 percent errors, 0.3 percent were discovered to be in error and were later corrected. But 0.5 percent -- over half of all errors -- were falsely issued "final nonconfirmations," essentially forcing their employer to wrongly fire them. 0.3 percent may not sound like very many, but with a total American workforce of 154 million, that translates to over 770,000 jobs lost.

That's ... impressive. That is, in fact, beyond impressive. And not in a good way.

Someone tell me why we're even DEBATING e-verify. Someone else please tell me why we thought it was a good idea to make it a crime to not be able to work. I'm pretty sure those rotting fields in Georgia wouldn't be rotting if that weren't the case. In fact, I'm not just pretty sure - I'm goddamned sure there would be oodles of blueberries if it wasn't criminal not to be able to work.

the republic of south sudan

There is a new country in the world, right at this very moment. I find it fascinating that we can have mapped the world entire, and yet new countries can spring forth. This country, like so many of her sisters, was sprung forth from the ashes of violence and hatred, brought on by a scramble for Africa that ignored any and all cultural, ethnic, and religious divides.

But from the peace the people got to choose their own destiny, and they chose independence, a way to move on to a continued peace and a free peoples.

Happy Birthday, South Sudan. Hope it's all you dream it'll be, and more.

"Almost-rape" and consequential silences.

trigger warning: rape

"Keep your head down, don't say anything, get through this. After all, you don't want a reputation." - Advice from my mother on how to work with a man that I stopped from raping a friend of mine.

When Timothy raped me, I had no problems letting anyone who asked what I happened. On the other hand, when Timothy raped me, I had a piece of paper saying he couldn't come within 500 feet of me. This time, there were no calls to the police, nothing formal and legal ever filed, no protection of the truth except by its witness. No, I didn't call the police, I was too busy physically preventing a man from attacking an incapacitated woman. Believe me when I say that during those moments, it was not an option. Thus the greyest of grey areas was entered, the realm of the 'almost rape'.

He didn't actually rape her, but I can see how haunted she is by it. How she avoids events he might be at, how she sits in the corner of the bar to keep an eye on the door to make sure he doesn't 'happen' upon the very same bar; and the subtle hauntings that I can't figure out how to describe, but they're there in the thin layers of vulnerability that sit just under her skin.

It was supposed to be a party, that night. It was supposed to be a party, but the mixers weren't very good, and they ran out of beer fast, so I wasn't really drinking. It was supposed to be a party and it took me a while to figure out what happened, why the bedroom door had latched closed with such finality. It was supposed to be a party, our overlapping circles, social and work both. It was supposed to be a party. Instead it was night of hard choices and even harder consequences.

One of the choices was the silences I chose to keep, the decision on my part not to call the police, and the consequence of him still falling in those overlapping circles. He showed up at the place I'm interning and I hadn't spoken to him in months, but it felt exactly like the day after that party, with the choices hanging in the air between us, and the slow, steady panic of not knowing what to do.

Keep my head down, keep that silence, hold those consequences. Right?

What Stephen Colbert Learned From My Mother

Okay, so maybe he didn't. But I knew her first and they both taught me a lot about standing for people who have no power.


As a kid, we were forbidden from buying or receiving Nike products. Because Nike was going through a lot of bad press about the policies and conditions that were applied at their overseas plants. It definitely wasn't the only company to so egregiously violate the human rights of their workers, but it was the most public, and my mother decided the best way to take a stand was to boycott their products, even if it was only one family in a sea of over 250 million. I remember in the seventh grade ~1997, Nike really taking off, and kids drawing the famous Nike swoosh over everything; you couldn't walk twenty feet in my middle school without seeing it on a backpack, a shoe, a binder, a notebook, or even etched into the stalls in the bathroom. It was a fad that I wasn't allowed to participate it, for reasons I didn't fully comprehend, other than my mother saw them as human rights abusers and refused to allow their product into her home.

As I entered high school, I took on her view after learning more about the use of child workers and the horrid working conditions they were forced to live in. Several of my classmates told me 'at least these kids have income they can take home, would you rather their families have nothing?' which is a rather fallacious argument, as I'd rather these kids' parents be able to learn a human wage and these kids be able to have a childhood, and no kid should be forced to work under horrid conditions to make ends meet for their family. Trying to twist it any other way is trying to justify why it's okay in any way, shape, or form for these children to endure what they are.

About 2001, Nike came out and admitted that they'd messed up and used child labour. They then went a step further and said they weren't sure how to end the practice, or if they'd be able to. One step forward, two steps back. Shortly after that, my mother came home with a pair of Nike shoes and I was horrified. She proudly proclaimed that she wasn't going to, but they were 'only $5,' which to her, was apparently the right price for undermining her entire value system, and pretending that some fairness had been applied to society. I'm incredibly lucky that she didn't do this when I was far more impressionable and hadn't made up my own mind that sometimes quiet protests are the only protests that we can take.

The idea that morality is fluid, and that ideas can be put the test came hard with the release of a book called Nobodies, which details the use of American slave labor in today's national and global economy. I'd always known about migrant workers, and the conditions that they lived in, but Nobodies go after specific examples - oranges in Florida to steel in Oklahoma to even 'made in USA' products that aren't really made in USA and are made under terrible working conditions. And then how does one quietly protest? Boycott the entire world, even the USA? Everything becomes so overwhelming with quiet protests, moral indignation that isn't voiced to anyone, and the act of nothing changing.

Enter Stephen Colbert, who took what my mother taught me and went a step further. Only he did it with migrant workers. And he sat in front of the US Congress and gave voice to people who have no power. Anyone, I suppose, could have gone and did what he did, and then testified about his experiences, but he had a way to give voice and he didn't sit quietly by it. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure Colbert enjoys a Georgia peach in August, and the strawberries that roll out in June are to just die for, and in between, he eats his salad as a part of his balanced diet. Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe Stephen Colbert has been quietly boycotting produce - that's not the point. The point is that he took his moral outrage and gave it voice. And in doing so, he - if only for a moment - gave voice to the powerless.

Which brings me to Mario*, who is not a orange picker in Florida, or a steel worker in Oklahoma, or a migrant worker across the agricultural US. Instead he cleans the big-box stores, like Cub foods and Target, and the fact that his working for them isn't even a little bit ironic makes me sad. It's sad that it's not even the slightest ironic that stores whose products are secured with unethical labor practices allow their stores to be cleaned by companies whose labor practices are unethical as well. It's also outrageous, and demonstrable affront to the idea that we are a free society. Mario worked for a cleaning company that has no union organization, and whose workers have no power in how they are treated. All these workers want is a code of conduct that would provide really simple, basic things. Things like job security, and a fair wage. I said Mario worked. That's because Mario was [illegally] fired for trying to secure this code of conduct.

$5 is definitely too high of a price to pretend that we are indeed a free and fair society.


*You can read more about Mario and others struggles with cleaning companies and big-box stores here: http://ctul.net/

Me and my father vs the packers and bears.

The Packers just defeated the Bears and made the playoffs. The birthday letter to my father last year was about football and chasms, and 16 weeks, and trying to stand on the same piece of a plane for a few moments. And the Packers made the playoffs and the rift between us is larger than it's been in a very long time.

I feel like a failure.

I can't call him and talk to him because something would be my fault and we couldn't go back from there. So, a lot of things are my fault. Things I can't really talk about. Things that come with stamps of failure on them. Lies he doesn't even know about. I don't know when this got so hard. I struggled with the letter this past year, it took me a few days to figure out what I wanted to start saying, and a few more to figure out how to say it, and even then, I restarted the letter about a dozen times before just rolling with it. And then it was football season, and election season, and angry phone calls and passive-aggressive emails and the chasm growing wider and wider. and and and. I wish I could say 'and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' but all I have are the ands and no idea what anything about tomorrow will be.

Except a wider and deeper distance between me and my father.