Vice President Barbie

According to Karl Rove, having a unmarried 17-year-old pregnant daughter makes Sarah Palin more sympathetic to millions of Americans, presumably not  those Americans who would have cast stones had the pregnant daughter been Democrats, or just some body who lived down the street.  Sometime during her "abstinence only" lecture, Palin might have added that having unprotected sex is not the best choice for a child still in high school. Should McCain win, I hope Palin has a clearer line of communication with the military, or with whomever the vice president communicates. "Families are off limited," because the family in this case is White and Republican, can you imagine the field day Palin would have had if the unwed pregnant teen had been Obama's?

The Conservative Right, and maybe the whole right wing, agree with Sarah Palin that birth control is a form of abortion. Sarah Palin does not believe that women should have birth control and she believes that educating girls about condoms is wrong because it prevents them from becoming pregnant. Sarah Palin believes that if you are raped, even by a member of your family, you must prolong your agony by carrying to term and giving birth to a child of that rape or incest. She is also against helping pregnant women in any way. And she now has the power to make these beliefs law. Can you imagine what she will be able to accomplish as vice president or president.

Statistically, John McCain is more likely to suffer some catastrophic illness or die while in office than any of  the other candidates or the incumbent. That means that the United States will have a woman president, who, in this case, is the female version of our current Commander-in-Chief. Statistically, we now have a better chance of having a woman as president. And although Palin has compared herself to Harry Truman, that buck won't stop at her desk. When Harry Truman became president he had served as a judge and a US Senator, he had more than 40 years experience as a public official, a politician, and a businessman. Palin's comparison of herself to Harry is dishonest and uneducated, and maybe designed to attract those who are ignorant of their own history.

The Republican Party seems to think that a female, any female, is enough to attract the votes of disenchanted Clinton supporters. And they think that because they have nothing but contempt for women. Sarah Palin is the female George Bush, she is as sarcastic, she is as mean-spirited, she is as narrow, and she is as dangerous. She is a sideshow that pulls attention away from John McCain 's inability to understand the economic ills of this nation, much less propose a solution. The Republican elite have created a situation in which any criticism of Palin can and will be characterized as more proof of Democratic elitism. The Republicans have thrown Palin to the media wolves in an attempt to draw attention away from John McCain whose answer to our fuel crisis is to increase drilling for more oil--or maybe Palin believes that if she prays hard enough her God will replenish the Earth's depleted fossil fuel sources and all will be well for us and the oil industry.

All in the fragmented family

I was born into a working class family, white collar only because my dad had an administrative job at a university (so that we could obtain a free education), but blue collar in an economic sense. I have never felt the need to apologize for my upbringing or my ethnic heritage, although I do not think of myself in hyphenated terms.

We were different from everyone else in the neighborhood because we had a summer home--a cottage on a lake in a town known as the Blue Collar Riviera for Chicago's working class. Wauconda, then a farm community on a lake with cheap summer rentals--and my grandmother owned property on which a house was built by my dad (an in-law), uncles and various extended family members. We spent our summers there, although I often dreamed of going to a sleep-away camp, which we could never afford. Our summers were perfect, spent in the company of various cousins, watched over by various adult relations, in a then idyllic setting outside the city. I always knew when we reached Chicago city limits, the air pollution made us ill.

The house and land remain but my mother was not included as one of the owners in the will. Instead, she was left some property in the city, which was lost in a harbinger of what would happen to the summer home when all the uncles were dead. The property fight for the remaining city building was ugly. One cousin wanted to buy it and live in it, another, wealthier cousin wanted to buy it as an investment and eventually sell it outside of the family at a profit. Regardless of what the majority wanted, the wealthy cousin won the property and I knew then that unless I won the lottery, the Wauconda property was doomed once the last uncle died. And that has happened.

So what does this mean? Do I hang on to the past because I have no future? Do I need the cottage because it gives me a sense of my place in this world? Do I simply love it because I was once so happy there? Yes, the property will be sold and others will profit and that is the way of the world. But I feel poorer for it. My full name was inscribed in the concrete cover of the cistern for god's sake! The ramshackle place with it's many expensive peculiarities is part of my life. And I had hoped to be dead when it was sold. I feel again my dad's disappointment and hurt when he discovered that regardless of all the work he did on that place, he was not considered enough a part of the family to participate in ownership. I remember once when he had an opportunity to buy a smaller property nearby and turned it down saying, "Why do we need that when we have the big house?" Little did he know.

Someone once said of me that I'd be poor within a year of winning the lottery because I would give it all away. Yes, but I would have done what I can to ensure that that stupid house with its iffy plumbing would be kept together until there was no one left who cared--and that is only one generation away. People who claim that money does not buy happiness have enough money to make sure that their dreams and hopes become real.

I hate that they are selling that property. I hate that I cannot save it. I feel raped and robbed and left bleeding by the side of the road. This is progress and what happens when it steam rolls over the majority.

Nuts anyone?

Pity poor Jessie Jackson who was caught saying out loud what he really thinks when it comes to Barak Obama.  Nothing is more galling to Jessie Jackson that Obama's success. According to Jessie Jackson, white people are racist until they can prove otherwise. Only he can determine who is and who is not a racist, what is and what is not racist. Along comes Obama who claims that some of the problems are self-inflicted, who challenges people to take responsibility for their own actions, and who acknowledges the existence of racism but does not accept it as the reason form people's failure. Jackson has been nipping at Obama's heels for some time. And while he could never say it, no one hopes for an Obama loss as much as Jackson because it will be an affirmation that the old extortionist ways are best. 

Following orders

Today, June 1, in 1962, Adolph Eichmann was hanged after having been found guilty of crimes against humanity. He remains the only civilian executed in Israel, which has a general policy against using the death penalty. Since his death, some argue that Eichmann was unfairly tried and condemned because he was only following orders. But I think, given what we know about Eichmann, and others like him, everybody is capable of committing horrendous crimes under the appropriate set of circumstances. In this instance, it was the German governments policy to eradicate Jews from Europe by any means possible. And in doing so, Eichmann was following the law. What hasn't been adequately address is how people allow the enactment of these laws. In every instance where the German population acted as a group to stop the slaughter, the SS backed down. Of course, in those instances, German citizens believed that THEIR rights were bring trampled, because there was little hue and cry when the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935. We do the same thing in the United States. In our misguided attempt to protect ourselves, we allow our government to abrogate our rights, believing that somehow when the threat eases, the government will back off. Of course, the threat never eases and the government never backs off. Worse, we assume that the laws do not effect us because we are not identified as "the other."  Once you allow  the government to listen to the conversation of others, you invite scrutiny of your activities because who is to guarantee that what is legal today will be legal tomorrow? It has never been against US law for any citizen to be a member of a political party, including the Communist Party, and yet under McCarthyism citizens were deprived of their right to work simply because they were a member of the Communist Party or, if not, knew someone who as. And this happened on the heels of World War II when we should have known better. We are all in danger when the government decides that it can determine who is and who is not an enemy combatant and who can be incarcerated indefinitely without being charged. If we are not willing to protect our own freedoms, then we must accept what follows, and if we accept what follows than we are all guilty of what happens next.