Soapbox

John Kerry’s campaign sent out an e-mail inviting people to write in with their stories about why they support his campaign. While I doubt they were interested in a book- hey, they got me started! And I’m not a one-issue voter, anyway. So here’s what I wrote.

Dear Senator Kerry-

I am an Ohio housewife and mother of two teenagers, PTA president, choir director- pretty typical middle class, I guess.
While I always vote in every election and make a point of educating myself on the issues, I have never been politically active beyond the occasional letter to the editor.

The past 4 years has changed all that.

When George W. Bush was elected (sort of) I was disappointed but resigned. “How bad can he be?” I thought. “If he surrounds himself with good people like Colin Powell, the country will muddle through somehow.”

Boy, was I ever wrong!

I watched with ever-growing dismay as environmental safeguards were rolled back, treaties and other agreements were abrogated and the working class of America was given the added burden of carring the wealthy and corporate class on their backs. Crucial issues of our times, such as the future of social security and energy independence were being ignored, and over and over the president displayed an alarming affinity for distortion, dis-ingenuiousness and outright lies.

Then came the tragedy of September 11th. On that day I sat in my neighbor’s living room and watched the towers fall, and we held hands and sent up fervrent prayers for the president of the United States, and for our armed forces, whom we knew would be called upon, sooner of later, to answer this attack. We prayed for our leaders to show wisdom and discretion, strength and humility.

Instead I saw our president resort to a course of belligerance, entitlement, imperialism and uni-lateralism. Day by day it became clear to me that there are only 2 crayons in the box of George W. Bush: black and white. For a world leader to be unable to see any shades of gray is tragic and deadly thing.

While my immediate family is reasonably well-off, many friends and family members are in a much more precarious situation. My sister lives in rural south-eastern Ohio and her adopted son was just thrown out of his Head Start program because the entire program there has just been shut down due to budget cuts! My mother runs a food pantry in Athens county and is alarmed and saddened to see the growing lines of people, many working 2 or even 3 jobs, who cannot afford to put food on the table by the end of the month.

I have always believed in public education, but my kids are now in a small private school and a charter school. This is because the republican-controlled Ohio legislature can’t be bothered to do what the Supreme Court has ordered them to do over and over and change the school funding formula, so our schools are crumbling. “No child left Behind” is leaving a lot of kids behind, and we are just fortunate enough to be able to make our own way.

My son doesn’t know yet where he wants to go to college or what he wants to study, and we don’t know yet how we’ll pay for it. We have managed to stay out of debt but haven’t put away nearly as much money as we shoud have for college. Thanks to Bush policies, it is not a good time for kids entering college- either for paying their bills or getting a job when they graduate.

And the thought that my son is now 17 and soon will be a prime target for the military has not escaped me. I am not anti-military and have a cousin who served proudly in the Marines. But “No child Left Behind” also requires school to turn over info to the military recruiters! My son is an ardent environmentalist and pacifist, and I am concerned that world events will soon cause him to lose his choice to even go to college and help protect the earth, because he’ll be drafted to the army to protect George Bush!

I began looking for something, anything to do to change things. I wrote more letters to my local newspaper, and to friends online. I spent hours talking with my kids about politics and world events, and I turned to other news sources, such as BBC, CBC and eventually, Air American Radio, for my news, as I no longer trust the mainstream media to even care about the truth, much less report it. The Bush presidency seems to be a run-away freight train taking us headlong over a mountain but I get called unpatriotic for pointing that out and suggesting we pull the brake lever!
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We average Americans can rest easy tonight, knowing that the U. S Senate is on a never-ending quest to make this country a better place for mom, apple pie and Lassie. Putting aside for a moment those petty distractions such as health care and the war, they have focused their laser-like sights on a new constitutional ammendment to define marriage as only between a man and a woman, thereby pummelinging states’ rights and preventing that horror of horrors, gay marriage.

A few of our champions of justice, while quick to condemn the icky idea of gay people being allowed to be like everybody else, are still a little hesitant to tack a bill of “non-rights” on the end of the hallowed Bill of Rights. Not all of them, though. Say what you will about him, Senator Rick Santorum does not shirk his duty when it comes to making someone a second-class citizen.

“I would argue that the future of our country hangs in the balance, because the future of marriage hangs in the balance,” he said in a speech before the senate. “Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?”

Oh my God. I had no idea we were in such danger! Thank you for your vigilance, Captain Courageous! Why I can see the headlines now:

“Gay couple terrorizes nation with marriage license! Martial law declared!
Terror Alert level raised to Pink!”

The ultimate homeland security?
No, it’s just the ultimate bullshit. Is there nowhere these guys won’t play the terrorism card? First the Bush administration compared abortion to terrorism, now Santorum is equating people like my friends Byron and Steve with Osama Bin Laden. Rick, don’t you think you might be overplaying it just a tad?

The future of our country hangs in the balance? Over gay marriage? Clearly this is a guy who has no freakin’ idea what life is like for the average American today!

Tell you what, Senator, I guarantee you, if you ask someone who is out of work, who can’t find a doctor to treat their kid because they’re a Medicaid patient, someone who got out-sourced and is now working at Walmart or who is afraid they will have to put their spouse in a Nursing home but knows they’ll lose their house if they do- they will tell you that worries about gay marriage becoming legal is NOT the thing that keeps them awake at night! While they may not approve of homosexuality and or gay marriage, most middle class Americans are too concerned with just paying their mortgage and hoping their kid isn’t killed in Iraq to lose any sleep over it.

Get a life, Rick, and leave everyone else’s alone! Better yet, why don’t you spend your time and energy into passing legislation that will help people instead of discriminating against them. If you were really concerned about marriage, you would advocate that all couples get counseling before being issued a marriage license, and work to provide free services to low-income couples whose marriage is in difficulty. You would be trying to prevent divorce instead of preventing marriage!

Instead you are trying to establish a new section of the Constitution: just after the Bill of Rights you’d put the Bill of No Rights for People we Don’t Like.

Do you really think this is the proper role of the federal government? How scary that a guy like you is a U.S. senator. We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Is your or your child’s personal information being released to the recruiting office of the US military without your knowledge or consent?

Under a newly activated provision of the No Child Left Behind Act, high schools across the nation must provide the Defense Department a directory with the name, address and telephone of all juniors and seniors or risk losing federal funding.

Sharon Shea-Keneally, principal of Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington, Vermont, was shocked when she received a letter in May from military recruiters demanding a list of all her students, including names, addresses, and phone numbers. The school invites recruiters to participate in career days and job fairs, but like most school districts, it keeps student information strictly confidential. “We don’t give out a list of names of our kids to anybody,” says Shea-Keneally, “not to colleges, churches, employers — nobody.”

But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush’s sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law’s 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student — or face a cutoff of all federal aid.

The military complained this year that up to 15 percent of the nation’s high schools are “problem schools” for recruiters. In 1999, the Pentagon says, recruiters were denied access to schools on 19,228 occasions. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, says such schools “demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive.”

To many educators, however, requiring the release of personal information intrudes on the rights of students. “We feel it is a clear departure from the letter and the spirit of the current student privacy laws,” says Bruce Hunter, chief lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators. Until now, schools could share student information only with other educational institutions. “Now other people will want our lists,” says Hunter. “It’s a slippery slope. I don’t want student directories sent to Verizon either, just because they claim that all kids need a cell phone to be safe.”

The new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone — leaving students without any say in the matter.

Educators point out that the armed services have exceeded their recruitment goals for the past two years in a row, even without access to every school. The new law, they say, undercuts the authority of some local school districts, including San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, that have barred recruiters from schools on the grounds that the military discriminates against gays and lesbians. Officials in both cities now say they will grant recruiters access to their schools and to student information — but they also plan to inform students of their right to withhold their records.

Some students are already choosing that option. According to Principal Shea-Keneally, 200 students at her school — one-sixth of the student body — have asked that their records be withheld.

Recruiters are up-front about their plans to use school lists to aggressively pursue students through mailings, phone calls, and personal visits — even if parents object. “The only thing that will get us to stop contacting the family is if they call their congressman,” says Major Johannes Paraan, head U.S. Army recruiter for Vermont and northeastern New York. “Or maybe if the kid died, we’ll take them off our list.”

To me, being against this isn’t about being anti-military. Although I think my kid would make a lousy soldier, I thank God for the people who do join the military, and all they do for the country. To me, it is a right of privacy issue. Schools have no more business giving names and numbers to the military than they would to a religious group or a phone solicitor. If the military wants to recruit our teenagers, they know where to find them.

More information on who and how to request your child’s name be left off the list is available at Wagingpeace.org. Go to

http://www.wagingpeace.org/menu/action/ongoing-actions/no-child/

…and are you quite sure it will even matter?

Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world isn’t nuts!

Are you a one-in-a-hundred guy? If you vote on a Diebold voting machine, you just may be. A recent study of the new Diebold computerized machines in the Florida primaries found that one out of every one hundred votes cast were not counted by the machines! They were also 8 times more likely to tally votes incorrectly than the old paper and pencil voting ballots.

It was also proved that not only could these machines be tampered with to change the vote count, but they could be tampered with from a remote location, leaving no trail back to the hackers. Plus, despite the fact that these are ATM style machines, and we can all get receipts from our ATM, these machines currently can’t give a paper receipt to allow a re-count.

33 Ohio counties were scheduled to get Diebold machines to “improve” their voting process, but due to recent controversy, 27 of the 33 have withdrawn their Diebold contracts until such times as the gross inefficiency of these machines can be corrected.

So just when progress is being made toward more fair elections~ the buzz is that the government wants to find a way to “postpone” the November elections in the event of a terrorist attack. No kidding. The plan is being presented to Attorney General John Ashcroft, who apparently thinks he has the power to set up a procedure to do this under the Patriot Act. (This remains to be seen, but if he does, there’s one more thing to love about the Patriot Act)

The idea is that in the mass confusion following a big terror event, some people might not be able to get out to vote, let alone think clearly about who they’re voting for, so we should wait until the country is more settled down before we have an election On the surface that doesn’t sound too illogical, but does the plan pass the sniff test?
Here are a few things to think about on this subject, in addition to the interesting timing of this whole thing.

1) Letting the terrorists win: Kind of a minor thing, but aren’t you sort of letting the terrorists set the agenda for the elections if you say “well, if you guys blow something up we’ll allow it to disrupt our entire system of government as never before” ? I mean, didn’t Bush tell us after 9/11 that if we didn’t go shopping and take vacations and stuff we were “letting the terrorists win”? So how is it not doing that very thing if we give them the power to stop our election?

2) Never been necessary before: We made it through 2 world wars and a Civil War without ever needing to postpone an election… but if someone blows up an airport we must be ready to put democracy on hold? How weak have we become? Spain didn’t postpone their elections after the terrible tragedy they suffered. ..but they did vote out their incumbent government.

3) Is it Legal? The Constitution of the United States (remember the Constitution? It was in all the papers) states that the election shall be held on the 1st Tuesday after the 1st Monday…not may, but shall. Which sort of sounds like, short of a nuclear attack, it would take an ammendment to the ole Constitution to give someone in the federal government the authority to postpone the election. I could certainly be wrong- we’ll see what Constitutional scholars have to say about that.

4) Is it necessary?: The states already have the power to suspend their elections- NY did it for their primary which was being held on Sept. 11th 2001. If something really big were to happen, I believe the states could each vote to suspend their elections. (But it would have to be something really big, of course, to get them all to do it)

5) Asleep at the wheel? So how big of an attack are they expecting here? What are they doing to prevent it? Certainly not giving more money to the department of Homeland Security. And if they really thnk that, for example, LAX and JFK might get bombed the day before the elections- mightn’t that indicate that our “war President” is doing a crappy job and should be voted out?

6) Who makes the call? The chairman of the Federal Election Assistance Commission wants to be given the authority to throw the switch on this. Who is this guy? I believe Bush appointed him in ’02. What would be the criteria by which he could decide to change American history? How much openness and disclosure would there be about the factors that influenced this decision process? Shouldn’t we should find out? I don’t think it’s out of line to suggest that, given the current administration’s record of secrecy, this is something we should be verrry concerned about!

Today is NOT a good day to piss me off.

I just turned off some idiot on my local radio show saying that she doesn’t underdtand all these liberals who don’t love America. Gosh, they should “stop whining and complaining,” about things that aren’t perfect, and if they don’t LIKE America then they should just leave!

I want to shake self-rightous middle-class, whitebread morons like this until their perfect teeth rattle. Here’s another person who can’t separate the freedom from the flag, the policy from the people and the ideals. There are only 2 crayolas in her box: black and white. Either you approve of everything the president does or you hate this country. No colors in between.

OK Ms. Conservative Worthington “my world is fine and that’s all that matters”, assuming we had anywhere to GO, lets look at your suggestion.

First of all, of course we love America! If we didn’t, we wouldn’t care that the constitution is in danger, our reputation in tatters and many citizens do not enjoy the basic benefits of a wealthy nation. If we didn’t believe in this country, we’d say “Hey- I have a job and a house and an SUV so… whatever.” (Oh wait- that’s sort of what you said, isn’t it? Hmmm.)

When the law of the land said that slavery was Ok, you think that those who felt it was wrong to buy and sell other human beings should have just moved to Canada, instead of trying to change things?

When 1/2 the population of this country (women) was another kind of property and denied the right to vote and have decent jobs, we should have put up or shut up?

When children were sent to work 10 and 12 hours days in mines and factories, those who thought it was wrong should have just left them there and headed for the border?

When workers were locked in their buildings in unsafe conditions (ala Triangle Shirtwaist factory and others) we should have just left instead of insisting on laws to protect them?

When black citizens were denied the right to vote, and sometimes beaten or killed if they tried to exercise that right, we should have just shrugged and hopped a plane?

When not just the air and water but even our children were being poisoned by industrial pollution, lead paint and DDT, we shouldn’t have insisted on the laws that now limit that and have made us all healthier? When uninspected meat-packing plants were poisioning us, we should have stopped whining and complaining and eaten our pot roast?

Well you had better thank your lucky stars that “we liberals” didn’t leave, or just imagine the stink-hole you’d be living in today!
The conservative arguement that we should just leave this country to wallow in its own ignorance, bad decisions and corruption instead of trying to make it better seems to be the very anthesis of patriotism. They are saying that a slave-owning, wife-beating, child-working, death factory is the best this country can be!

Wrong! That sounds more like a description of someplace like China, which, incidentally is one of places conservatives always tell liberals they should move to if they don’t like the US. But that’s the sort of place where you’d be living without dissenters, radicals, agitators and whiners like us keeping this country on its toes.

Your idea of “Put up or shut-up” is the most misguided, ignorant, counter-productive idea of patriotism ever. It’s akin to saying that if your child is messed up, hanging out with a bad crowd and engaging in dangerous, destructive behavior you shouldn’t try to change that behavior and set up new rules to get them on the right track again, because if you try to change them, you don’t love them.

It is patriotic to insist that your country and your leaders llive up to their potential and be all that they can, just as any parent would try to encourage the same for their child.

Instead of the blindly patriotic “America: love it or leave it” jingo-ism, I propose a new slogan.

“America. Love it? Then FIX it!”

Or in place of the “Proud to Be An American” bumperstickers, I’d like one that says
“Proud to be an American…embarassed about George Bush.”

And I’m tired of people telling me to stop whining, because I am WAAAY beyond whineing!