In which I spend a lot of time online, reading stuff. And then I write about it!

It’s important that we all become aware of, and defend against, the “natural family revival.”

There are some batshit crazy Xians out there, and they’re all banding together – some even with (gasp!) Muslims – to bring back the “natural family” (patriarch, baby machine wife, and offspring only: no non-traditional family structures allowed) because it’s the ‘natural basis of society’ and its loss is directly responsible for all kinds of terrible moral degradation.

They dislike the rights individuals within families have been slowly accumulating in the past few generations, and are, essentially, against women’s or children’s rights where they conflict with the family’s (read patriarch’s, I assume) goals.

Scripture

According to this article at The Nation, this coalition wants to increase birthrates. (Well, white birthrates.) How they rationalize this in terms of the earth’s available resources, I don’t know, but they’re really taking the old biblical injunction to multiply very seriously.

They’re even making movies about it. Behold the pseudo-science of Demographic Winter:

The bottom line, essentially, is that heathen brown people are breeding too fast and we gotta keep up in order to preserve our way of life, and our women had best be making babies, and don’t even start on the whole gay thing, please, and the best way to do that is to keep girls out of higher learning and build a culture that celebrates their womanly duties: pregnancy, lactation, and, one assumes, cooking.

Due Diligence

Because I believe that most people are essentially good and that no one is really that crazy, I went and found a rebuttal to the Joyce article.

The author claims that global birthrates are falling alarmingly and that we’re going to run out of people to drive the trains by 2050.

Really? Is that true? Are birth rates really that low? Is contraception and abortion really that common?

I googled ‘birthrates worldwide’ and as far as I can tell, yeah, birth rates are dropping from where they have been, but world population is still increasing and there are no serious trends indicating that it will stop.

In fact, the Wikipedia article linked above states that the world’s population increased by 220,980 people every day in 2009, and that only one of the UN’s multiple estimates indicate a growth rate of zero:

“In 2006, the United Nations stated that the rate of population growth is diminishing due to the demographic transition. If this trend continues, the rate of growth may diminish to zero, concurrent with a world population plateau of 9.2 billion, in 2050. However, this is only one of many estimates published by the UN. In 2009, UN projections for 2050 range from about 8 billion to 10.5 billion.”

I’m religious. I believe in God. I even pray. I understand from experience how a person can believe in and even fight for something they don’t understand: I’ve heard my own Guru speak against the genetic engineering of food crops, and I’m inclined (although I haven’t sided yet) to be against it too even though I don’t know why. (When people are starving it’s hard to be against a strain of rice that produces in difficult conditions; it just is.) But I cannot understand how an otherwise rational person can possibly move forward with a “go forth and multiply” world view just because it’s in the Bible: the world simply cannot sustain 1960s-level birthrates infinitely. It just can’t.

Which indicates a whole ‘nother motivation for the “natural family revival,” and that freaks me right the hell out.

Population

The research seems to show that poor and uneducated people have more children. (They also lose more children so birth rates don’t necessarily equal population.) When people get access to education, they quit having as many children. And very educated, urban people tend to drop the birthrate to less-than-replacement levels.

Maybe that’s the plan, huh? When you get a bunch of us all together thinking about stuff, we stop breeding like animals and start acting more… human?

Jesus was way cool. Religion is good. The Old Testament is a lovely historical document. I think it’ll be awesome when the world’s all brown. Because seriously: white people just don’t look that cool in comparison.

In which I post about my life on Facebook, because the Internet is self-reflective like that.

I don’t know if it’s The Curse^TM coming or I’ve just used up the day’s compassion for sloppy thinking, but when I logged into Facebook and saw the utterly meaningless meme traveling through it, I got a little worked up.

Many people are posting this as their status: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

So, being me, I posted this: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care (unless they spent all their money on stupid shit and actually deserve to die), and no one should go broke because they get sick (unless it’s their own fault because they ate at McDonald’s three times a day for 27 years).”

Heh. Pretty clever, huh?

Apparently not. My friend Jake asked, “So… You don’t think we need health care reform? How disappointing, Mush! Who are you?”

Well, when your friend asks you who you are, you gotta answer! And this is what I said:

“Of course I want health care reform. But it ain’t just gonna suddenly be free awesome health care for everybody, now is it? I know from reading my Vonnegut that people are NOT all equal, and pretending that we are is idiotic because it leads to handicapping and I will be damned before I’ll accept handicapping to make me as dumb as the chick I just got off the phone with!

“In some schools, they don’t let sports teams win because they don’t want the losers to feel bad. This is what happens when we try to homogenize and make everyone equal. We’re not equal. Some are much better at living, much better at liberty, and much better at pursuing happiness. Others are stupid, or lazy, or ignorant, or entitled, or just plain nasty.

“We are not all equal. We are entitled to equal opportunity under our country’s constitution, but we are not inherently equal in value or talent.

“Some people are deliberately more expensive, health care-wise, than others: smokers like myself, addicts, and the grossly obese, just to name a few. Do you want to pay for that?

“Right now we have a country full of obese, addicted, and old people. Do you want to pay for that? Do I? Hell, I’m poor enough I can’t pay for my own healthcare; how can I afford to pay for that family down the street, who, because of their choice to eat nothing but fast food, will all have diabetes and heart disease by the time they’re 35? Those conditions are both expensive to treat and avoidable.

“And although I respect the idea that everyone deserves to live, we don’t all deserve it equally. Pretending that every life is equally valuable is absurd: I myself don’t have as much value to my society as a gifted heart surgeon, but I do have more value than a 90-year-old with terminal cancer.

“So while I think that every effort should be made to save every life, I know that the world doesn’t work that way. If it did, we wouldn’t have the word ‘triage.’ In the UK, they say that deaths go up significantly during the last two months of the year because surgeons have quotas to fill and tend to quit doing operations after they’ve achieved them. People who need surgery in March are not inherently more valuable than people who need surgery in November, but they’re a lot less likely to die. Studies show that only one in five people who need surgery to reduce the risk of stroke actually get the surgery in time due to the way the healthcare system works there.

“Over here, if you’ve got the money, you get the surgery in time. So at least a portion of society gets adequate care… it just doesn’t happen to be the portion I’m in.

“There is in my estimation no way to make a perfectly fair system of health care in this world as it is, so today’s “post this as your status” Facebook meme is essentially empty. It doesn’t mean anything other than that we care in a half-assed way – only enough to repeat something toothless when it only takes us 5 seconds to do so.”

Let’s all remember that not too long ago I needed surgery myself, and I had no health insurance. Because of my extreme poverty the hospital gave me their services for free (somewhere around five grand worth) and it took me slightly over two years to pay off the surgeon, the lab, and the anesthesiologist. The only reason I’m not still paying it off is that my rent was only $50 a month during that period. That was LUCK, not worth. I didn’t “deserve” the excellent care just because I draw breath, and as a grown person I certainly hadn’t taken the responsible steps to grow an emergency nest egg or obtain health care insurance on my own. My results were, as I said, simply good luck.

So I’m not being a heartless bitch; I’m just saying, THINK ABOUT THIS, PEOPLE. Our system sucks, yes, but it may be that it sucks less than it could.

Thoughts?

In which I like him. I really, really like him.

I’m not a political animal.

I think politics are in equal parts numbingly boring and distressingly childish. While legal language is probably a neat game, I particularly loathe political talking heads and find them to be a most repugnant breed of humanoid: self-important and brash, and doing nothing but deconstructing the work of others and contributing nothing but dissent. Ick.

I think it is impossible to govern a capitalist democracy because it’s impossible to please everybody all the time. It’s impossible to be fair to everyone. Impossible to guarantee rights, when one of those rights is to have more wealth than everybody else does, and another is to be a total fucking ignorant moron that the state cannot legally or morally allow to starve to death.

But I really dig Obama. It’s nice to have a proper orator in the White House. It’s nice not to cringe when imagining his meetings with leaders of other countries. He probably actually reads his briefings and manages not to look like an American punk.

I watched much of his address [transcript] while eating my omelet and toast this morning. While I don’t care enough to speak to specifics of policy, I do have to say that I like the man. (He’ll be reviled and feared by the time he leaves office, but that’s the office’s fault, not the man’s.)

I like that he is still responding to public opinion (they all quit doing that after they’ve been in office for awhile). I like that he states opinions in the first person, like, “(A)nd I promise you, nobody is more frustrated than me with AIG.” I like that he explains his administration’s rationale with care, as here:

“And although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of to banks — one of my most frequent questions in the letters that I get from constituents is, “Where’s my bailout?” — and I understand the sentiment. It makes sense intuitively, and morally it makes sense, but the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in $8 or $10 of loans to families and businesses. So that’s a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth. That’s why we have to fix the banks.”

I like that he rather scolded us a little for our greed and short-sightedness. I like that he seems to think our educational system sucks, and that he’s pro-science. I even like the Biblical references. Not because I’m Christian, because I’m not, but because it’s a time-honored tradition to reference one’s own culture’s historical documents. (I call the Bible an American historical document because we wouldn’t all be here if our ancestors hadn’t been such total whacko splinter Christians in the first place.) The Bible’s a powerful piece of literature when properly used, and I liked his use of the ‘house upon the rock’ parable. It worked.

I live with a woman who remembers The Great Depression. She lives frugality. She saves rubber bands, gives plastic bags back to the newspaper boy so he can recycle them, eats all of the groceries she buys (no slightly-soft tomatoes in her garbage), and buys nothing on credit ever. When Obama said that his administration intended to create legislation that would protect future generations from ever experiencing this sort of recession, she snorted because she knows shit happens; she’s seen it.

I waste a tremendous amount of resources. My whole generation does. We buy food, don’t eat it, and throw it out. We replace tools and electronics rather than bother to repair them, because we consider our ‘free time’ to be more valuable than money because we have more of one than the other. I can’t even guess how much paper I’ve wasted in my lifetime of using computers and printers; just today I printed two addresses on two sheets of paper, cut out the addresses, and threw 95% of the paper into the garbage.

I toss clothes rather than re-purpose them; I have an attic full of computers that still work but just not well enough; I’ve filled landfills with household waste and empty plastic bottles and bleached toiletries for forty years. I’ve lived in the bubble all my life. I don’t really know how not to.

But I know that I like having someone who seems intelligent (and less than wholly corrupt) in the office of president for once in my life. You couldn’t pay me twelve times his salary to do his job; and I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to be the president of the United States and therefore distrust any creature who self-selects for the position, but the dude really seems to be well suited to it.

I wish him luck with it. I really do.

In which I’m trying to figure my own shit out by observing my reactions to others.

Let me preface this whole thing by saying I know I’m hideously flawed myself and that I’m hardly one to talk about anything, ever. I’m sorry in advance if you see yourself here and get mad at me. I’m talking to myself as much as anyone, k?

That said, I need a t-shirt that reads, “Shut up and listen.”

It drives me nuts when people – my roommates are the most ready example [but not the only ones by far and they mustn’t, when they read this, assume I’m speaking only of them, because I’m not, m’kay?] – pick at each other. It doesn’t upset me in a ‘mommy and daddy are fighting’ sort of way, it offends me because they’re communicating badly and they’re doing it on purpose. And it reminds me of my own failed relationships… He’s not hearing her subtext, and she’s not hearing his, and they’re both saying the same thing – “I need you” – but are too busy being hurt and going on about themselves to listen.

Listen.

You know what the root of virtually all communication is? It’s simply, “I need you.” That’s what we’re all saying when we’re talking to each other. I need attention, love, validation. I need you to see me.

Love me.

The actual content of the majority of our talking is irrelevant. On our death beds we won’t remember the content, but the feelings. Looking into someone’s eyes while you spoke and seeing love and acceptance is what you’ll remember, not the gossip you were actually speaking at the time.

Lately I’ve been noticing a trend when my friends tell me their stories. “So-and-so was a jerk to me,” they say. “And I’m mad, so I’m not telling him. I’m telling you.”

Oh, great.

In other words, they’re upset, so they ‘punish’ their friends by not telling them what they’ve done. They nurse these hurts and avoid the one whose ignorance (or selfishness, or awkwardness, or laziness, or stupidity) caused the hurt in the first place, and triangulate another person to bolster themselves.

Love me.

And just how, I ask you, is anyone supposed to improve themselves if, when they fuck up, their victims slink off into brooding silence?

I realize that we’re supposed to say nothing at all if we can’t say something nice, but there’s a limit to this axiom, people. Defend yourselves. Stand up for yourselves! Love yourselves! And love me enough to let me improve by telling me your truth, rather than brooding silently and vibing me bad, won’t you?

If I ever hurt you, let me have it. I want to know. (I rarely try to hurt anyone on purpose, so it follows that any pain I may have given was an accident.) Give me the chance to fix it, please.

But. If your hurt is so incredibly stupid that you’re ashamed to bring it up to me? Then adjust yourself. You’re an adult. Do it. No, it’s not comfortable but it’s not exactly difficult, either. Be the person you know you’re supposed to be. It’s that simple.

Listen. Are you being loving? As loving as you can? Are you giving enough? Are you doing all you’re capable of? Or are you just being a horrible, selfish, petty little baby?

These are important questions, people. And if we don’t ask them, who the fuck will?

I read a blog post last night by a young woman who had survived surgery. She said that it had pissed her off to listen to people bitch about such petty, stupid shit all the time. The message, in a nutshell, was that life’s too short to waste.

So, shut up.

Listen.

In which I wonder about content ownership and self expression as they pertain to the act of blogging.

One time I wrote something on my site about a friend of mine, and woke up freaked out realizing that if she read the post it might hurt her feelings. I got up and deleted the passage in the middle of the night, sick with worry that she’d already read it.

I didn’t take a job once, for several reasons but primarily because the non-compete wouldn’t have allowed me to blog about it. I was threatened with a law suit after I posted about a bad experience at a hospital. A friend once told me off for posting about the death of a mutual friend’s dog, saying it wasn’t my story to tell. An employer had me remove a post because I’d said I thought the company was broke when they laid off some staff. And just last week, a member of the Band That Never Gigs read what I had to say about a recent practice and got pissed at me.

Now with a track record like that, it must seem that I write whatever I damn well feel like. But I don’t! You have no idea how much stuff I don’t write about! (My God, I should get a gold star for reticence, for real.) The truth is that I carefully consider every single scrap of content, comparing it to a veritable array of mental indices I’ve developed to help me determine if a story is actually mine to tell or not before publishing it on the web:

• If the topic is common knowledge, I can write about it.
• If the event took place in public, it’s common knowledge.
• If I’m telling only my experience or my reaction to something, and obfuscating all identifying details, I can write about it.
• If it doesn’t endanger anyone’s feelings, livelihood, or reputation, I can write about it.
• If I’ve been given permission to write about it, I can write about it.
• If it’s totally about me, I can write about it.

I never write about secrets. I have deliberately not written – several times – about what a burden it is when someone tells me a secret, even though I could write about the burden itself without revealing any details of the secret. (If I were to write that post, it might go something like this: “I hate secrets. Right now I’m worrying over two, and I didn’t ask to hear either of them. One requires me to not offer love and help to someone who’s needing it, because I don’t officially know it’s needed. The other involves two people directly and their spouses indirectly, all of whom are my friends, and requires me watch my tongue so that I don’t reveal what I know – what I never wanted to know in the first place – accidentally in front of the wrong person. Why do people do this shit to me?!”)

Yeah, secrets suck. Moving on.

I try very hard to make sure I actually own the topics I write about, but sometimes it gets really complicated. Take the hypothetical breakup of two of my friends: let’s say the breakup is common knowledge, but what each of my friends have told me about it is, of course, private. My thoughts about and reactions to the breakup are mine, but if I can’t frame my thoughts without revealing private details I’d have to give that one a pass as far as writing about it goes. Like secrets, private pain (no matter how deeply it moves me or makes me think or gives me perspective on my own journey) is not mine to share. So I’m effectively denied writing about part of my own experience, which irks me, but eh, it’s all for the best.

When I was writing about The Ex back when we were married, I felt that my marriage was totally mine to write about. I have no secrets myself (I wrote about my panic disorder and miscarriages in great, raw detail, and I’ll tell you any embarrassing or private or shameful thing you’d ever want to know about me), so I may not be qualified to decide, but I hardly think the fact that the man wouldn’t use a laundry basket was private. Some people wondered that I’d just say whatever I wanted to on the Internet about my husband, and they thought I was effectively talking shit behind his back. My position was that I never said anything on the web I didn’t say to his face, and since it was a public forum he was welcome to read it if he wanted to.

So to recap: I will keep things off the site if they’re secret, or private, or might hurt your feelings, or because you asked me to, or because I haven’t yet said it to your face, or because you threatened to sue me, or because it’s totally illegal (like cocaine or something), but everything else is mine, damn it.

What I’m trying to say is that I really do try to be discreet as I write about what affects me, but the point is that this is my story. I use nicknames for nearly everyone and will always remove anything someone asks me to – I’m not trying to out people, I’m trying to tell my story – but sometimes my story comes from yours. And if you know me, you know that you’ll eventually end up on goblinbox.

Which brings us, finally, to yesterday’s post. I wrote about public knowledge that affected me directly – I mean, my gawd, my household was all atwitter over the fight between my roommate Truck and his boss, The Ex. It happened right in front of my face, and involved parties who talked to me about it, too, so I figured the story was both harmless and mine to tell.

Ooops.

In other words, the guy that The Ex and Truck are currently contracting for? Yeah, you guessed it, he reads this site! So it turns out I narked The Ex off to his employer, because the boys didn’t go to work on Tuesday!

It’s very, very bad blog form, I have to admit. I mean, does anyone ever want to find out their boss knows they weren’t at work due to brown bottle flu? I think not!

I probably deserve to be spanked or something – it’s a good thing we’re divorcing. Now I have to hide for a few days whenever there’s a chance The Ex is here dropping Truck off after work! LOL!

In which I won’t die with the most toys, but I may just die with zero stress… and nothing to show for it.

The winner isn’t the one with the most toys, she’s the one who has what she values most. I don’t value stuff all that much, or fame, or any of those quantifiable things: I value feeling good. (And yes, I realize that means I can redefine success whenever I need to: I’m not stupid, people.) Feeling “good” to me means I’m not tired, I’m not angry, and I’m not frightened.

Perhaps it’s lame to define happiness in negatives (how not-frightened am I? and how not-tired?) but I doubt it. I mock folks who define happiness by their stuff: look at my house! My car! My trophy wife! My nice stuff!

In a conversation with Truck the other night, I heard myself saying, “I live here because this way I can stand the world. I must live in a world where people are more good than evil, more smart than stupid, more kind than cruel. If they’re not good, smart, and kind, then I need to be able to believe that it’s generally for a good – or at least understandable – reason.

“If I have to live in a world where everyone is an idiot, I just don’t see the point in doing anything at all.”

Living in this little town – population 9,500 – allows me to live a mentally comfortable life. I’m confronted with no overcrowding, no senseless crime, and none of the little painful cruelties of life in the big city: I don’t carry 4 lbs of keys everywhere I go; everything is within walking distance; I know everyone by sight. Nearly everyone here is from somewhere else, so people tend to be well-traveled, open-minded, and well-spoken.

I often wonder if I’ve taken the easy way out: my life here is a success because it’s nearly impossible to be unsuccessful here. The status quo is practically level. We all live in the same old buildings in the same old tax bracket and we all wear the same old Walmart clothes.

Avarice here is kept to a minimum because there’s nothing to want. Most people I know concentrate their buying on their hobby mainly, and all other purchases are made from necessity. We don’t wear chic clothes, we don’t drive chic cars. Functionality nearly always trumps style because the weather here sucks.

In other words, I’m not confronted with beautiful, expensive things I can’t have unless I travel.

So I live here, and my life is simple and clean. I have what I need and I’m grateful for those things. I’m grateful for the food I eat and the shelter I enjoy. I feel nearly smug when I consider how little I own these days: some clothes, some books, a guitar, a vehicle, and a knitting bag.

Hey, me? I’m not some conehead filling up space with crap. I’m an aesthetic!

I used to feel smug about my vegetarianism, until I realized it’s easy for me not to eat meat. I think the same just might be true about how lightly I live in the world: I’m not confronted with gorgeous crap I want, so I should hardly get points for not buying it.

They say it’s easier to be a renunciate than a householder. I suspect I’m beginning to understand why.