Haves and Have Nots

The Bear Den, my home.

I bought my very first house in December of 2005, just two months after my beloved Grandmother left us. Some very dear 20 something friends came and spent New Year's with me, pulling up the carpet and painting walls. That night we watched a movie, projected on a stark white bedroom wall. We could barely hear the soundtrack coming from the laptop, but it didn't matter. We were four young people, an over 50 woman, and a beagle all snuggled in a pile of blankets and sleeping bags, doing what a community does. Helping each other.

Tiny Barton the Third, my beagle friend.

My house has central air, another first for me.  The following summer was a scorcher, and I remember turning on the air conditioner so my dog would be comfortable while I was at work during the day. I still smoked at the time, and was sitting on the back steps having a cigarette when I noticed the neighbors outside under a tree, hair and shirts soaked with sweat.

I started feeling uncomfortable. Here I was, a good 20 years younger than the old woman across the street, resting in air conditioning while she was suffering in the heat. I knew that I was better off financially than her family, and could afford the high summer electric bill. They didn't even have an air conditioner. Neither does the mentally impaired man that lives next door to me. He, too, has a much lower income than do I. I started to feel guilty. I went inside and turned it off. To this day I only run it if it is extremely hot. Otherwise, I sleep in the basement, where it is cooler. Somehow I feel it keeps me and them on the same playing field, the same level of humanness.

Some of you reading this may think I am being ridiculous. I have a feeling this way of looking at the world comes from my early Methodist upbringing - that the Christian thing to do is to share what we have with those less fortunate, that there is nothing admirable about having more than you need, especially when others are suffering. Somewhere inside there is a faint, far away voice that says "What would Jesus do?". I can't believe he would sit in the 1% while the rest of his community struggled. I am no longer a Christian, but I have discovered I still hold those beliefs. I cannot in good conscience sit in a cool air conditioned house while my neighbors suffer.

In Lansing we now have many more people standing on the corners of busy intersections, asking for help. They hold signs that say "Have Family, Need Food, God Bless", "Hungry, Please Help", "Will Work for Food", "Need Job, Must Feed Family". I don't like what I have become. I doubt them. I don't trust them. I don't believe them. Then I look into their eyes as I pass them by. I see their desperation, their pain. Feelings that are familiar to me now. They have no where else to go, nothing left to do but ask their fellow human beings for help.  Every once in awhile a car window rolls down and a compassionate soul hands them money. But most don't.


I want to tell them I am sorry I cannot help them, because I am not working either. I want to ask them what happened to them, what went wrong? I see them as children who got lost along the way, or were forced into poverty by the system. I want to take them home, give them a good hot meal, a warm bed, a song. I want to give them something to hope for, a chance. I think about my own life. I have nothing to complain about, I have a fairly new car, a beautiful home full of beautiful sacred things, I have clothes and a bed. I have dear friends and family who give me money and food. I am one step away from where they are. I don't know how to tell them any of that. I drive on.

I was once in a car with a conservative co-worker and we passed a homeless person on the corner.  "Get a job!" he yelled at the man, although fortunately the windows of the car were rolled up. Get a job. I am sure my co-worker never gave thought to what it means to have nothing. Or how one who has nothing is supposed to get a job. Especially today. No home means no stuff. No stuff means no clothes. No food. No money. No computer. No cell phone. It means that the only thing you can do every day is try to find your next meal or a safe place to stay. A job? Give me a break. I know how beaten down I feel having been unemployed for so long, I can't imagine not having my bed to sleep in. There but for the grace of God go I.

I don't think that we as a community really understand that there is a finite amount of money, most of which is in the possession of the wealthy. We non-wealthy folks don't have access to it unless the wealthy give it up. It really is pretty simple. The more wealth they accumulate, the less money that is available for everybody else. They call themselves job creators, but think about it. The major corporations show record profits. How do they get those profits? By reducing benefits, taking away collective bargaining rights and pensions, reducing insurance coverage, lowering wages, and creating jobs that pay minimum wage. Or ship the jobs out of the US. They can't possibly want to create jobs that are good paying with excellent benefits, that would cut into profits. It is all about money, remember. There is only so much, and they ain't sharing.

The definition of the word welfare is the good fortune, health, happiness, prosperity, etc., of a person, group, or organization. The word welfare breaks down into faring well. Who doesn't want to fare well? Who doesn't want everyone else to fare well, too? When did we allow the conservatives in this country to tarnish the meaning of the word? When did a certain group in our society begin to fill with hatred when the government tried to ensure that all citizens would fare well? Who corrupted the term "welfare state" to mean a country of moochers, when it really means a country that values and ensures good fortune, health, happiness, and prosperity to its citizens?

I will leave my air conditioner off this year, so as to stand on the same ground as my neighbors. And I will continue to offer help to others as well as accept help from others. We all want the same things in life. Health happiness, prosperity, and good fortune. Well fare. This I wish for you.

Time for Divorce?

I have often wondered about whether the problems in our society today are due to the fact there are so many people. Statistically speaking, the number of people who aren't playing with a full deck would increase proportionally with the population. For example, if the population numbered one million, 100 folks might be "out there". But now we have about 312,000,000 people and that would equate to around 31,200 folks who are, shall we say, different. We might never run into them when the population was low. But now? They can actually cause some problems.

There are some very obvious differences between liberals and conservatives. And it is biological, according to a study by the University College London.
"Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear," says the study April 2011 in Current Biology.

That explains everything.

Conservatives living in fear seem to have developed a case of untreated paranoia, and this is serious. They are changing laws, spreading hate, committing acts of aggression. Just watch Fox News. Listen to Rush. Hatred, name calling, personal attacks. They attempt to deny freedoms for others whom they don't agree with. Laws against abortion and gay marriage, for instance. Look at the recent anti-Obama bumper sticker, which is so reprehensible I will not post it here. It would remind you of the 1950's. All fear-based.

Liberals tend to pass laws to help others (think health care reform, civil rights). Pro-choice laws, gay marriage laws. Legislation to protect the environment, fund alternative energy. You see where I am going with this? Proactive versus reactive.

Liberals and conservatives see the world in a fundamentally different way, and given the biological basis, what are we to do?

I try to imagine the U.S. splitting into two countries (or three if the Independents want their own piece of the pie). I think the liberals would do fine. But what about the conservatives? I would worry about them devouring each other. They certainly would overpopulate their 1/2 of the country given their laws preventing abortion or birth control. But then again, maybe they would also outlaw sex. They don't want environmental regulations getting in the way of development, so they would soon pollute and destroy their lands. Most likely they would have a capitalist society, how would they deal with poverty amongst their own?

I am worried about the course of things in this country. We are becoming more divided and at a certain point I fear the pot will boil over and we will have another civil war. Many would say we are already in one.

Perhaps it is time to accept we are fundamentally different and have irreconcilable differences. Rather than staying together for the sake of the children, maybe we should think about divorce.

The New 99% - Breeders

The term "99%" has new meaning.  It now includes all women in the US who are supposedly using birth control, in other words, the Breeders.  Well, at first they said 99% of women have used birth control at some point in their lives, but now my Conservative friends figure it is just plain easier to expound "99% of women use birth control!".  Sinners!

This number bothered me for several reasons. So I thought I would do my own research and calculate out how many women I think use birth control in the United States, based on 2010 US Census data and other sources.  So here goes.

The total number of women in the US is estimated at 156,974,000 but this number does not include overseas military women.

The total number of girls 14 and under is 29,938,000. Non-breeder, we hope.

The total number of women over 50 and likely menopausing is 53,151,000.  Non-breeder, they hope.

That leaves the age group of 15-49 which is 73,874,000.  Potential Breeders.

Now, I am going to use the figure of 2%, which is commonly believed to be the percentage of the US population that is lesbian, according to our beloved census.  That gives us 1,477,480 lesbians. So if you take the total number of reproductive age females and subtract the non-breeding lesbians (although some do), you get 72,396,520 Breeders.    

However, we must consider all factors in our calculations.  For instance, what about the Catholic Nuns?  Are we to ignore the Sisters? No I say!  The only information I could find says that of approximately 60,000 Nuns in the US, only 240 Sisters are under the age of 45.  What??? So I am going to subtract 240 Nuns from the Breeder total, which leaves us with 72,396,280 total Breeders.

I almost forgot women in prison.  In 2010, there were 112,797 gals in the slammer.  Now I don't know how long they are in there or how old they are, so this one is a bit tricky, but for the sake of this discussion let's say they are in all year and most under 50.  We won't reduce by the number of lesbians because that was already accounted for in the previous calculation, so we are now down to 72,283,483.

Now of these, who is trying to get pregnant and thus would NOT be using birth control (or who had an accident)?  According to Babycenter.com, 4 million women give birth each year. So, let's see, all Breeders take away new Mommies and that gives us... 68,283,483 women that are likely using some form of birth control!  That is 54% of all women over 15 years of age.  So to say that 99% of women use birth control is just plain wrong.

Now I know that these numbers are not absolute, that some Lesbians and young girls under 14 have heterosexual sex (I won't touch the Nuns with a 10 foot pole on this one).  Some women are trying to get pregnant and aren't or can't.  And some women under 50 are in menopause and some women over 50 are not.

So take these numbers with grain of sea salt.  But at least they are a bit closer to reality than my Conservative friends' estimates. Marginalization of a population, race, or gender is never a good thing.  Except for the oppressor. 

As First Lady Nancy Reagan once said, "Just Say No!"