Minor Meditation: Conservative Capitalism IS an Ideology!

Forced to post this reply to a crazy person who has no ability to self-reflect (let alone reflect on why he thinks the way he does) at this site when I realized that some people still think that we all crawled out of the sludge or God placed us in the garden (or however they think we got here) and we all had Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in the amniotic sac with us.
Hey ya'll!: Capitalism is an ideology, a belief system, just like anything else!
Sigh:

"The proper conservative view is we’re all equals, trading (or not) by our own decisions, right or wrong. People may end up trading in ways you and I dislike, but the general principle of freedom is valued more than imposing a specific moral view." -Antioch

Antioch here is unfortunately making an argument that wouldn't hold a feather let alone water! To argue that enforcing a Conservative/Republican agenda is to NOT force people to do as you wish is a false tautology! You are still very much forcing people to do as you wish, AND it is also forcing a moral code on everyone to boot! To situate the value and worth of a person as involving trade is already to steep yourself in an ideological tradition that not everyone adheres to, and which has very flawed moral underpinnings!

The only thing is, we're starting to realize that the moral crap that we have sunk ourselves in does not provide for any sort of viable future if we do not include healthcare for everyone. For Antioch to argue he doesn't want to be forced to pay for "those other people" (you know, like they're not neighbors, citizens, with whom we share the same water sources and food producing fields...) is the same as saying that people are not being forced right now to die and suffer and acrue debt due to inadequate or nonexistent healthcare!

Oh, you don't wanna pay for it now, but we'll ALL be paying for it in the future alright. We'll be paying when something far worse than swine flu shows up and we don't have enough doctors or adequate healthcare. We'll pay when we don't have a citizenry who have had consistent healthcare all their lives to shore up their immune systems, so America gets hit with a superbug and becomes the black hole into which no one will go or invest money because We Let People Die here.

Now Antioch, that's not a moral code that makes any sense at all.

Minor Meditation: Your Body is Not Yours

After I don't know how many comments, touches, and untold amounts of attention paid to my breasts by people of both sexes, I get it. I'm not in Puerto Rico anymore, where no one cares if its hot and you wear a tank top because its hot all the time - how lucky was I to live in a place where it was strange if you were covered up? But that's all Over. Any newfound comfort with my larger, non-traditional self that I may have learned there must be unlearned now because I am back on the mainland and my body is not mine. It belongs to the man picking up garbage, the bartender at the bar, supposed friends who feel instantly at liberty to poke and/or comment, the Black men who think they own me because my skin is brown, the gay male friend for whom women and breasts are a freakish oddity, and, well... anyone else. 

My choices are to stay fully covered up at all times like the overweight, busty girl I know myself to be, or suffer the "minor" violations and assaults, daily harassment, that we women know are our lot....

I am so tired.

I will stay fully covered up from now on.  

Exhausted White Womenhood....

There has been a lot of drama recently over the women of Jezebel whose drunken claims to the right to be raped, accept it as your fate, not report it, and assume if it happens again, who cares, were publicly declared a while ago on a late night TV talk show.  This in a battle with a woman writing at DoubleX, which Aunt Jemima's Revenge brought to my attention. So you don't have to read literally dozens of pages of angry bickering between the drunken hordes and (proud) whores or sluts as they call themselves over at Jezebel and the angry old guard at DoubleX, here's the the Jezebel's general argument: 

As the new feminist guard, they should have the right to full sexual liberation with no judgement. They can go home with whomever they want, do whatever they want, drink until they pass out, and engage in the same behavior men have allegedly been enjoying since time immemorial. They don't believe in age of consent laws, and at one point threw doubt on the claims to rape made by a 13year old girl against Roman Polanski since his giving her drugs was not the first time she had had them, and she was an aspiring actress after all. And since her mother arranged things, she had to know at least a little what was going on and went along with it... 

Very, very disturbing; and the tip of the problems is when you consider that these women are only speaking for themselves. They really imagine that what they are advocating for is what everyone should do. This is problematic not the least because of all that they do not even know they are ignoring - namely women of color!

Just when I think Feminism as a movement is realizing that you can't even think about any of the Issues (empowerment, sexual liberation, equality, etc) without considering against what these ideas are pushing, you get a mess like this! The establishment of liberty, in whatever form, in discussions of "Feminism" which are really about liberty for White women, cannot exist without the downtrodden quality of and regard for Black women! Mainly because in this country we know what we want to have based on what black women have been denied for so long!

This lends a very perverse element to these women's complaints at Jezebel. For, if what they want is the right to wild, wanton sexual lives, then we know at least in part, this is a throwback to the perception that Black women were/are endowed with some inherent super-sexual nature. We've all heard the arguments: That's why so many slave owners slept with their black female slaves. Not because it was rape, but because the women wanted it.  They were luring those men away from their wives. 

bell hooks talks about this phenomenon in Ain't I A Woman, and if you read her work, the way these women are shaping their demands is really sad. To want to be raped - as one of the Jezebel ladies did, so she paid someone to seem to take her by force - is to want a subjugation and oppression this country was once exposed to on a daily basis. White women's aspirations to be pulled from their pedestal and used as a sexual object is a desire that has roots going a very long way back.

What is even more perverse is that these women are unaware of this! They have needs and desires that they do not understand. They invoke or desire violence that, while not at all connected any true or universal sense of female empowerment, it is tied to the subtextual notions of American liberty: 

Basically, with so much actual freedom and control over the lives of millions in America, what White consciousness now requires is to be abused as those brown bodies were abused. The only missing "liberty" or "freedom" they now need is the right to suffer pain, degredation, daily  oppression, neglect and cruelty. That is why these women really 'want' to be raped. 

Much more to be said about this. But for now, this is depressing enough.

Minor Meditation: The Republican Bus

If you click the blog title, you can read the piece that my words were inspired by and are in answer to. 

However, this is the exerpted text which I am focusing on:

"Bloomberg:

Republicans are getting inspiration on how to rebuild their party in the U.S. Congress from an unlikely source: White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

California Representative Kevin McCarthy, the chief recruiter for House Republicans, said he wants his party to select candidates based less on ideology and more on their chances of winning. The goal, he said, is to seek out prospects who are ethnically diverse, female, less partisan and even supportive of abortion rights. So far, these efforts are more concept than reality."

To all this I say:

Oh, poor, poor Republicans!  

We - the diverse, the women, the fabulously attuned to the multiple currents of ideology and exisitence on the planet - Don't Want the Republican ride to where we're going! For too long your bus service has been late to the diversity stop, completely lacking in provisions for the sick and infirm (those lovely anti-universal health care arguments), and constructed for only one race's historical luggage!  

Plus, your buses don't stop in poor areas or ethnically diverse areas, you hate when I bring my meditation pillow on board (only crosses and bibles allowed), my friend has to pretend that the man next to him is just his bible study partner and not his love, and as an academic I don't make enough money to pay the fare!  

But WORST of all, you claim to believe in it, but the list of rules on the bus, that Constitution thingy, you know that everyone's bus has? Well on your bus line, it only applies to a select group! You don't want everyone on the bus to enjoy the same priviledges that you do! And this will not work!  

So, thank you very much, I'm flattered. But i will stick with my current service.

Minor Meditation: String Theory

Of all the pleasant thoughts to start out the day, of all the moments to reinforce Buddhist teachings of calm, patience and acceptance, mine came from a history channel special on the theory of Parallel Universes:

In some Universe, Hitler met some really gorgeous woman who loved his art work. After the war instead of being rootless, he went back to her and they shacked up somewhere for years in the German countryside. He painted, she milked cows, he carved the cabinets for the kitchen, she smoothed out sheep's wool into yarn to make sweaters. And never once did he think about world domination while playing with his daughter whose hair was deep, dark brown - like her mothers.

In another Universe, after serving during world war II, James Earl Ray decided not to return to the states. Instead, reveling in the different opportunity-rich feel of Europe as compared to the poverty he came from in Illinois, he settled finally in Italy. He worked for years on a family farm dedicated to Olives, Figs and Pignolia. Eventually, he married the lovely daughter of the farm owner's sister, and spent the rest of his years happy in a sea of rich red wine and sunflowers.

In yet one more Universe, my grandparents are still alive. Upon reaching their 40s and 50s and staring into the sweet young faces of their children, they decide to change habits. Stick to the diets doctors gave them cutting back on the good rich foods and recipes they brought with them on their Great Migrations out of Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Georgia, and Tennessee. And they lived and lived... To see past their 60s and 70s. 

In a final Universe perhaps I never was, or was in a different form, or am in a partial piece. Perhaps in the 1300's the Bubonic Plague left Europe empty, clean, and dry. And instead of the  transatlantic genocide which spawned my meztizo familial line, I exist partially in a woman walking a lush forest path in what we know as central Rwanda - which has never seen a genocide or a person with White skin and blue eyes. Or maybe I exist partially in a Carib Indian  woman who sits on a beach in what we know as St. Johns,  watching her child play in the surf. Worried about sharks in a foot of water as only mothers can.

Why any of this?

Because on the subatomic level, when you get too far down for general contemplation, things are... fuzzy. So fuzzy other universes are possible. Down there, atoms are unstable. Particles vibrate. Things, electrons, move when you look where you expect them to be; they anticipate your observation. And the particles that make everything up? Well, they can be in more than one place at once.

And so can we.

So today, I am on that beach in St. Johns, and the String Theory that makes me Me? Well it's a bit of Redemption Song and Canon in D and My Little Brown Book - and its vibrating slowly, along with the surf.