life and politics -- i am doing my best
Aug. 7th, 2004 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmSometimes, in the fact of the current election, it is hard for me to think, or to function. The entire situation makes me nearly apoplectic, on a nearly constant basis.
I do not, for the record, think Bush is Satan, which is of course what those who are planning to vote for Kerry are generally accused of. Nor do I think Kerry is the answer to all of our woes, and I think I've talked about that enough to not go into it here.
What I'm realizing is some people I know are going to vote for Bush. And when it's people on my friends list who live far away who I don't really know and that I've had intelligent conversations with, I feel okay about that, and I feel okay with feeling okay about that.
What I'm realizing though is that when it's people I know face to face, I feel betrayed and threatened on a nearly illogically visceral level.
Except, when I think back to certain events in my life, I realize it's not that illogical, even if it's not entirely rational.
I've talked a great deal about my political involvements in university, and many of you know the far longer version of the story I am about to tell.
In my freshman year, I had a horribly stormy relationship with my roommate, and eventually moved out. When I wound up dating a woman, I then received threats of rape on the phone, and to my face, from her friends who were College Republicans and members of Young Americans for Freedom, and in the course of these threats invoked campus and national politics, and attempted to pin some of the threats on the president of the College Democrats. Aside from having guards psoted outside my dorm door and losing my scholarship (which led to a debacle of proportions I don't care to go into with my family and finances), I was also the subject of an editorial debate in the school papers.
It was, in short, extraordinarily awful.
As a fan of small goverment and social freedoms, and without a personal adhearance to a Judeo-Christian faith or many of its accompanying moralities, voting always puts me in a difficult place. I am much less liberal than many of my friends on many issues and much more so on many others. And while I believe that 99% of anyone who thinks they understand economics without being an economist is a complete jackass, I'm certainly more informed, if not more comprehending than most.
Certainly, I know that many of my friends face the constantly annoying choice as to whether to vote on money or social issues. I'm just always surprised when they choose money.
To me, money is always something that can be sorted out. I've always found a way to scrape, struggle or survive. I've been fucked by tax policies from both sides, and I've been both wealthy and dirt poor. But, as hysterical and emotional as it makes me, at the end of the day, money is just money, and maybe I feel that way because I'm a woman. I may be a tom boy, but more than anything girls always know about plan B. Hell, it may be because I don't have a family, but truthfully, I don't really think so. I vote on the social issues because money I can sort out, I can finagle, I can solve. And even in some very black moments, several of them this year, money is never what's keeping me alive and will never be what kills me.
So I vote on stuff like civil liberties, abortion and gay rights, effectiveness on the war on terror and just a general sense of whether a candidate seems to think America is for all Americans or just the ones that agree with them. I know that a lot of people may think this childish, or naive, and I suppose my only defense is to tell you that it is neither of those things... just womanly instead.
And it is womanly not because I am weak, or a single issue voter or ignorant of finances. Rather it is womanly because one of those shits I went to college with is a senate aide now. And he raped a friend of mine, and he broke her collar bone doing it.
I don't think anything dumb like Republicans or Democrats are rapists, or that our leaders would condone the sort of behavior I both witnessed and was subjected to (a list which is far longer than anything I've written here). But my experiences stay with me, and my sense from my university experience, or just watching Dan Quayle on TV all those years ago is that the Republican party doesn't want me -- in their big tent, or in my country.
Because I'm a woman. Because I am queer. Because I've had an abortion. Because I am from the Northeast. Because I am from New York. Because I am educated. Because I am a Jew, and even less white than that in small measure besides.
Somewhere along the line I learned that your government holds your life in its hands. I don't know when I learned it. I don't know if I learned when I had my Soviet penpal who was never able to write me, or when I wrote for a history class a diary of a woman living in Chile under Pinochet (a project that probably sounds absurd now, but it got me into advanced creative writing classes at Yale as a 15-year-old). Maybe I learned it when I did clinic defense and women prayed for me before spitting on me. Some stuck pins into my legs. Maybe I learned it in Act-Up protests or lying on a bed in a hospital hallway in DC, when there wasn't anywhere to put a girl with a kidney infection because of all the people coming in with gunshot wounds (you see that, and you don't have problems, and fast). Maybe I learned it when the nurse with a pentacle necklace shushed me when I recognized it, or when the head of Women's Issues Now at University had "kyke" scrawled on her living room window. Maybe I learned it in rape threats or abortion or in walking seventeen miles through Washington DC with a friend of mine who served eight fucking years in Vietnam and had never gone to the wall until he went there with me.
It doesn't matter where I learned it, I only know the experiences I learned it in, all strike me as horribly ordinary and that the knowledge sits with me as utter unshakeable truth. And while I would never attempt to compare my patriotism to anyone's because I think it crass, I do love this place and believe in it both as practical fact and idealistic concept, which I should damn well hope is evidenced by a good chunk of my writing about all of this.
But to get back to the point -- while I've always been a little uncomfortable when my friends vote Republican (even when I've toyed with the idea more than once), it's a little different now. And I'm sorry. I want to be a bigger person about it. I want to be able to say what I feel when I hear Barak Obama talk about one America.
But I can't. Because I'm scared. Because to me, all elections, and specifically this election, is about my life -- not the quality of it, but its mere existence. So when people I know vote for the other guy -- I don't think they are evil, or stupid or anything dumb like that. They're being Americans -- Hell, at least they are voting, that's awesome! But it's very hard for me not to think of them as self-interested, and even harder for me not to think of them as unsafe for me to be around. Certainly, it's nearly impossible for me to consider that they could view me as their equal, and it presents without a doubt a fairly plausible barrier to friendship, as I'm not real down with people who think it's cool or comfortable to hang out with or play with the marginalized groups, but aren't real comfortable with the marginalized groups not wanting to be marginalized (this goes for people that want "crazy creative bi-chicks" to date but not marry, as well as fandom people who write slash and don't support gay rights, and white people who want hip hop played at their parties as long as the crowd isn't "urban" -- to list just a few trite and hideous examples of which I've seen a bit too much).
I don't know if it's insanely rude to write this, but it seemed more decent to, than not to, because I don't want people I know to feel guilty or weird, and I don't want them to think I'm an asshole either. I just kinda want them to know why this election is making me so nuts, and what this body means to me and to understand that a lot of us who are crazed about this election aren't apoplectic because we've been ingesting dogma or like being contrary or aren't patriots or whatever -- it's just for some of us... it's more personal, and less abstract. Rightly or wrongly.
So I'm trying, okay?
I do not, for the record, think Bush is Satan, which is of course what those who are planning to vote for Kerry are generally accused of. Nor do I think Kerry is the answer to all of our woes, and I think I've talked about that enough to not go into it here.
What I'm realizing is some people I know are going to vote for Bush. And when it's people on my friends list who live far away who I don't really know and that I've had intelligent conversations with, I feel okay about that, and I feel okay with feeling okay about that.
What I'm realizing though is that when it's people I know face to face, I feel betrayed and threatened on a nearly illogically visceral level.
Except, when I think back to certain events in my life, I realize it's not that illogical, even if it's not entirely rational.
I've talked a great deal about my political involvements in university, and many of you know the far longer version of the story I am about to tell.
In my freshman year, I had a horribly stormy relationship with my roommate, and eventually moved out. When I wound up dating a woman, I then received threats of rape on the phone, and to my face, from her friends who were College Republicans and members of Young Americans for Freedom, and in the course of these threats invoked campus and national politics, and attempted to pin some of the threats on the president of the College Democrats. Aside from having guards psoted outside my dorm door and losing my scholarship (which led to a debacle of proportions I don't care to go into with my family and finances), I was also the subject of an editorial debate in the school papers.
It was, in short, extraordinarily awful.
As a fan of small goverment and social freedoms, and without a personal adhearance to a Judeo-Christian faith or many of its accompanying moralities, voting always puts me in a difficult place. I am much less liberal than many of my friends on many issues and much more so on many others. And while I believe that 99% of anyone who thinks they understand economics without being an economist is a complete jackass, I'm certainly more informed, if not more comprehending than most.
Certainly, I know that many of my friends face the constantly annoying choice as to whether to vote on money or social issues. I'm just always surprised when they choose money.
To me, money is always something that can be sorted out. I've always found a way to scrape, struggle or survive. I've been fucked by tax policies from both sides, and I've been both wealthy and dirt poor. But, as hysterical and emotional as it makes me, at the end of the day, money is just money, and maybe I feel that way because I'm a woman. I may be a tom boy, but more than anything girls always know about plan B. Hell, it may be because I don't have a family, but truthfully, I don't really think so. I vote on the social issues because money I can sort out, I can finagle, I can solve. And even in some very black moments, several of them this year, money is never what's keeping me alive and will never be what kills me.
So I vote on stuff like civil liberties, abortion and gay rights, effectiveness on the war on terror and just a general sense of whether a candidate seems to think America is for all Americans or just the ones that agree with them. I know that a lot of people may think this childish, or naive, and I suppose my only defense is to tell you that it is neither of those things... just womanly instead.
And it is womanly not because I am weak, or a single issue voter or ignorant of finances. Rather it is womanly because one of those shits I went to college with is a senate aide now. And he raped a friend of mine, and he broke her collar bone doing it.
I don't think anything dumb like Republicans or Democrats are rapists, or that our leaders would condone the sort of behavior I both witnessed and was subjected to (a list which is far longer than anything I've written here). But my experiences stay with me, and my sense from my university experience, or just watching Dan Quayle on TV all those years ago is that the Republican party doesn't want me -- in their big tent, or in my country.
Because I'm a woman. Because I am queer. Because I've had an abortion. Because I am from the Northeast. Because I am from New York. Because I am educated. Because I am a Jew, and even less white than that in small measure besides.
Somewhere along the line I learned that your government holds your life in its hands. I don't know when I learned it. I don't know if I learned when I had my Soviet penpal who was never able to write me, or when I wrote for a history class a diary of a woman living in Chile under Pinochet (a project that probably sounds absurd now, but it got me into advanced creative writing classes at Yale as a 15-year-old). Maybe I learned it when I did clinic defense and women prayed for me before spitting on me. Some stuck pins into my legs. Maybe I learned it in Act-Up protests or lying on a bed in a hospital hallway in DC, when there wasn't anywhere to put a girl with a kidney infection because of all the people coming in with gunshot wounds (you see that, and you don't have problems, and fast). Maybe I learned it when the nurse with a pentacle necklace shushed me when I recognized it, or when the head of Women's Issues Now at University had "kyke" scrawled on her living room window. Maybe I learned it in rape threats or abortion or in walking seventeen miles through Washington DC with a friend of mine who served eight fucking years in Vietnam and had never gone to the wall until he went there with me.
It doesn't matter where I learned it, I only know the experiences I learned it in, all strike me as horribly ordinary and that the knowledge sits with me as utter unshakeable truth. And while I would never attempt to compare my patriotism to anyone's because I think it crass, I do love this place and believe in it both as practical fact and idealistic concept, which I should damn well hope is evidenced by a good chunk of my writing about all of this.
But to get back to the point -- while I've always been a little uncomfortable when my friends vote Republican (even when I've toyed with the idea more than once), it's a little different now. And I'm sorry. I want to be a bigger person about it. I want to be able to say what I feel when I hear Barak Obama talk about one America.
But I can't. Because I'm scared. Because to me, all elections, and specifically this election, is about my life -- not the quality of it, but its mere existence. So when people I know vote for the other guy -- I don't think they are evil, or stupid or anything dumb like that. They're being Americans -- Hell, at least they are voting, that's awesome! But it's very hard for me not to think of them as self-interested, and even harder for me not to think of them as unsafe for me to be around. Certainly, it's nearly impossible for me to consider that they could view me as their equal, and it presents without a doubt a fairly plausible barrier to friendship, as I'm not real down with people who think it's cool or comfortable to hang out with or play with the marginalized groups, but aren't real comfortable with the marginalized groups not wanting to be marginalized (this goes for people that want "crazy creative bi-chicks" to date but not marry, as well as fandom people who write slash and don't support gay rights, and white people who want hip hop played at their parties as long as the crowd isn't "urban" -- to list just a few trite and hideous examples of which I've seen a bit too much).
I don't know if it's insanely rude to write this, but it seemed more decent to, than not to, because I don't want people I know to feel guilty or weird, and I don't want them to think I'm an asshole either. I just kinda want them to know why this election is making me so nuts, and what this body means to me and to understand that a lot of us who are crazed about this election aren't apoplectic because we've been ingesting dogma or like being contrary or aren't patriots or whatever -- it's just for some of us... it's more personal, and less abstract. Rightly or wrongly.
So I'm trying, okay?
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no subject
Date: 2004-08-08 11:32 am (UTC)That sort of resentment is rather understandable in the US. The US has a greater disparity between rich and poor than in any other First World nation. I while back, I ran into some hard data on this. PBS has a site with a pop-up which lists relative wages gaps between worker on the factory floor and executives. The figures listed are very disturbing.
Nation----------Wage Gap
Japan--------------11
Germany-----------12
France------------15
Canada------------20
Britain-------------22
Mexico------------47
Venezuela---------50
United States-----475
From my PoV, this sort of wage-gap simply not acceptable. To make matters worse, 20% of the population holds 83% of the wealth in this nation. As a result, resenting the wealthy makes perfect sense to me. In the rest of the First World (and for that matter in many of the less wretchedly-off nations of the Third World) the members of the lower middles class and the working poor are not supporting an ultra-wealthy class.
When I hear some of my fellow liberals eager to make sure we make the rich "pay their fair share" when taxes are raised and to make sure that tax decreases should only be for the middle and lower classes, it's not hard to see where a few cycles of raising and lowering taxes would lead under that scheme;
I simply do not agree. I would very much like to see the US have a tax structure more in line with the EU. The wealthy do need to pay their fair share, which (from my PoV) is a whole lot more than they are paying now. With that sort of money, we could have working social programs, guaranteed healthcare for all citizens, and the other benefits that residents of almost every other First World nation takes for granted. In short, one of the few things I agree with Kerry about is the absolute necessity of raising taxes for the wealthy.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-08 12:55 pm (UTC)You say, "The wealthy do need to pay their fair share", but the whole point I'm making is that I think far too many people have this category of "The Rich" in their minds, and that this category is made up of people that aren't really human to them and don't really deserve the same consideration and protection of law that the rest of us do. I'm concerned that there is a kind of class bigotry at work here and that it affects the way that some of my fellow liberals think about tax policies.
Please don't misunderstand what I'm saying; I think that some rich people and some CEO's have a lot to answer for. There's no reason to think that the upper classes are bastions of moral conduct, any more than the lower classes. But there's something very wrong with the principle that "The Rich" are different from us and they have things that we want so they don't deserve the same protection of law that they rest of us get. When I hear things to the effect that the rich need to start pay their fair share, and when I know that they already pay a far higher percentage of their income in taxes than the poor, I have to ask what it is about that logic that is different from, "They're different from us and they have what we want, so we should take it."
Nothing in your post offers the slightest suggestion of what protection "The Rich" might have from excess in our plans for their money. Whatever this nebulous "their fair share" you are thinking about is, it appears that the already disproportionate share in taxes that they pay is not enough for you. Is there anything in your philosophy that "The Rich" could look to for some hope of fair treatment?
Adrian
no subject
Date: 2004-08-08 02:42 pm (UTC)Certainly. However, this fair treatment would look a great deal like the fair treatment the wealthy receive in most of the rest of the First World, ie high taxes, but far superior government services that they can use as freely as everyone else. That sort of social contract works well in the EU, in Canada, and in Australia and New Zealand. I see absolutely no reason that it could not work here. The only obstacle that I see is the fact that people in the US have (from my PoV) a completely unreasonable assumption that earning a large income entitles you to keep most of it and a similar blindness to the fact that such high incomes are only possible because there are many other people making far less. The entire capitalist system which so greatly benefits the wealthy could not function if there were not also many people in low paid service and manufacturing jobs. As a result, I firmly believe that people who are well off should have to pay considerably more than they are in the US. The model that I am advocating works in many other prosperous nations. Is there any reason that it can't work here?
no subject
Date: 2004-08-08 03:04 pm (UTC)Also, I think you vastly underestimate what higher income workers may do to earn what they make. I'm not saying that everyone is always treated fairly by their employers, but I am saying that there are a lot of people in the workforce who really don't care about gaining formal educations, learning new skills, trying to understand what their employers' need, or doing what work they are assigned well. In your ideal world, why should anyone bother doing these things? To me it's pretty obvious that people should keep most (more than half) of what they earn, because we want them to want to do the things that earn them that income.
I still don't see any difference between your theory and "they're different from us, and we want what they have, so let's take it." I think you need to keep in mind that when you make laws, you are mobilizing the machinery of government violence to force other people to behave as you want them to. It should always be done with a great deal of thought and be guided by careful consideration of principles. This "we could do it sorta like them" doesn't cut it, unless you can demonstrate that what "they" are doing is actually according to sound principles.
Adrian
no subject
Date: 2004-08-08 06:01 pm (UTC)I was actually willing to consider this a reasonable debate until you started with the same old "the poor are just lazy" argument that I've heard from far too many wealthy conservatives. Take a look at Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich for some info on what being poor is really like. As I see it, being fair to the poor and the lower middle class comes first. Given that this is so incredibly far from true in the US, I'm not going to worry about being fair to the wealthy until that has happened.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-08 06:19 pm (UTC)I was actually willing to consider this a reasonable debate until you started with the same old "the poor are just lazy" argument that I've heard from far too many wealthy conservatives.
Actually, with that mischaracterization of my position, I'm done with this. I really don't have much patience for straw man arguments.
As I see it, being fair to the poor and the lower middle class comes first.
A more thoughtful person would, I think, want to be fair to everyone. Unless this discussion turns to principle instead of thinly veiled class bigotry, I'm done with it.
Adrian
no subject
Date: 2004-08-08 03:11 pm (UTC)My point though is that Germany has massive unemployment (near 10%), huge issues for those entertaing the work force (due to the apprenticeship system), massive barries to women in business (due to business hours laws), and a whole host of other massive concerns when it comes to competing in the international business community.
This is not caused by their smaller wage gap, but the regulatory processes that have created this smaller wage gap, are very much what is making everything else go utterly haywire.
So the wage gap statistic is interesting, and even disturbing, but if you look at other aspects of the economies cited, it's contextually much different information, and honestly, doesn't support your argument except at the most cursory level.
In fact, knowing a decent amount about half of those economies (again, because of my job), I'd have to argue, that I don't actually think a pattern emerges.