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!
Continue Reading »

This letter appeared in the Columbus Dispatch in June while they were doing a series on people waiting in line for food pantries around the state. I have since learned that an advocate for the working poor took it to Washington and used it in some of her lobbying efforts, which is totally cool.
Editor:

Congratulations on your thought-provoking series, “Lines of Despair”. The working poor are largely ignored in this country, despite the fact that so many of us are one illness or car accident away from disaster and homelessness. The “boom” of the Clinton era missed many working families in Ohio, unfortunately the “bust” of the Bush years has not. The families profiled in your series are not the stereotypical “welfare queens” sponging off the government but hard-working people working 2 and 3 jobs and still not quite able to make ends meet. Readers should keep these families in mind when they hear the administration tout our great “economic recovery”.

Although 900,000 jobs have been created recently, there are still over a million more people out of work now than 4 years ago. As for the jobs created: if you lose a job that pays $18/hr and replace it with one at minimum wage, you may be off the unemployment statistics, but that doesn’t mean you have enough money to eat! Education budgets are on the ropes, veterans benefits are cut, and many active-duty soldiers need food stamps just to get by! In time of war, that fact is a national disgrace.

“There’s not enough money in the budget� we’re told by a government that is giving away billions in corporate welfare and un-bid contracts. Their priorities do not reflect American values. It was recently uncovered by the Washington Post that the Bush administration plans to cut millions of dollars from education and programs like Head Start and the WIC nutrition program, after the election. During a war on terrorism, they even plans cuts for Homeland Security.

If we value these programs we must insist on an economic policy that supports them! America needs a sensible tax plan focused on funding the programs that matter most and not on rewarding corporations who out-source their work force, forcing more and more people into the food pantry lines. It is the only way to erase these lines of despair.

Poor Dispatch. A lot of letters have appeared lately accusing the paper of having a pinko-liberal, do-gooder bias. I would just like to refute that. As evidence I offer two stories that you have NOT run in the Dispatch this week, but would have if it was indeed a liberal rag.

The first is the fact that Don Rumsfeld has decided to address the issue of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib directly by…making sure there is no record next time.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/23/1085250873479.html

"Mobile phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Britain's The Business newspaper reported yesterday.
Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works."

Another story the Dispatch didn't run is the revelation that the Bush re-election campaign out-sourced its calling center. Yes, in an era when thousands of Americans have been out of work for so long that even many Democrats would gladly take a job calling people to ask for donations for the president, 125 people in India were hired for this task, presumably because they were cheaper and didn't make any pesky demands for health insurance, etc.
Both Moveon.org and the Center for American Progress carried this story:

WASHINGTON – May 21 – The Bush Administration has taken its strong support for outsourcing even further than once thought, opting to move its key political operations offshore. Specifically, the Hindustan Times of India reports that over a 14 month period in 2002 and 2003 when the Republican Party was playing up patriotism, the fund-raising and vote-seeking campaign for the Republican Party was done, in part, by two call centers located in India.

I have also seen no mention of the story out of New Mexico on the school that has banned poetry as an un-patriotic, anti-American activity,

http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/03OpOPN62051504.htm

Nor have I seen any tables comparing the costs of past wars to this one. Our current estimates place the cost of Iraq II, the sequel at $152 bill. and climbing while the total cost of WW 1, adjusted for inflation, was only $190 bill.! (Business weekly online, DEc. 2003) or of Roger Morris's open letter to the diplomatic staff of the state department.
Morris, you may recall, was the Nixon staffer who resigned when the decision was made to invade Cambodia in violation of peace negotiations he was conducting. He urges all current staffers to realize that the Bush administration is clearly not going to listen to their opinions and that they, in good conscience, need to resign also.
Nope, not a word about that. If it weren't for the internet, Columbus would never know.

I am not trying to say that I feel the Dispatch should be a liberal paper, nor do I accuse the Dispatch of being a shameless shill for the conservative movement either. I actually think the Dispatch makes an effort to try to be more balanced than in years past, and I applaud this. I also understand that there is not enough space to run every story.
My point is only that the paper need not feel stung by silly conservative critics. You have a looong way to go before you become a liberal mouthpiece.

    In today’s paper there was a column by  Joe Blundo. He lamented the publics lack of interest in really preserving the wild nature of the Big Darby Creek and the creeping development that threatens its future. It made me terribly sad to read this.

    When I was a child my grandparents had a summer cabin on the big Darby Creek not too far off Route 104. The best times of my life were spent there with my siblings and my cousins, forging a family bond that time and our political and philosophical differences cannot ever completely erase.

    It was no resort home, but a simple cabin with a tin roof, a concrete floor that could be hosed down after the inevitable spring floods and an outhouse in back. Water came from a pump into the kitchen sink and heat came from a wood-burning stove in the main room. Kids slept in a loft room whose floor was covered with old mattresses, accessible only by a ladder with the bottom rungs removed, to insure that the littlest ones could not climb up and, perhaps, fall down. And when the full panoply of family was in attendance, our tents and camping trailers were set up out front to accomodate us all.

    There were electric lights, but no TV, and the only thing we ever heard on the radio were the baseball games my Grandfather listened to. Can you imagine kids today condemned to this nintendo-less existence? But for us, there was enough to do there to use up an entire summer. There was a wonderful swing hung from a high branch of a towering walnut tree, a shuffleboard court, sandbox and a huge front yard, suitable for croquet, badminton, touch football and endless hours of just running around making noise because you were a kid and it was summertime at the cabin. What else did we need?
     We had rainy-day games of cards up in the loft and quiet places to read in the bole of a sycamore, and usually an uncle around willing to help with wild gymnastic flips out in the yard. My grandparents would throw a big picnic every year and invite all their friends from the McDowell Senior Center and the old time band Grandmother played with. We feasted on sweet corn that had been in the field just that morning, ate hand-cranked ice cream and sang along with the band.
       Will the circle be unbroken?
       By and by, Lord, by and by.

     But despite all these other forms of recreation available, the cabin was really all about the Big Darby. From the smell of the sun on the muddy rocks in the morning to its quiet susurrations that could lull a mosquito-bitten child to sleep at night, the Darby was what made the cabin such a magical place. It was the source of all things. We swam in it, fished in it, ate dinner from its bounty, canoed up and down its length, and spent endless hours playing "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers", our name for re-arranging the rocks. We came to know the birds and flowers that inhabited its banks and got angry when we found trash trapped in a back-eddy. None of us knew or cared how many unique varieties of minnows, mussels or hellgrammites lived there, but seining the creek for them on a hot afternoon was better than any "Reality" TV show.

Continue Reading »

Editor:
I write to correct the misinformation spread by Mr. Greg Moore. In his letter to the editor, (Liberal Group Misleads People it Contacts) Mr. Moore states, “This is so typical of liberals: lying and not having the guts to stand and debate the issues. They really aren’t committed to anything…” He goes on to state that “Democrats…will suck in votes from the uneducated and those whose votes are for sale.”

Let me get this straight: though he has never in his life met me, Mr. Moore feels qualified to call me a cowardly, unprincipled, uneducated, corrupt liar? Wow.

For the record, I, like many liberals, have a college degree. In fact, we often grow up to be doctors, lawyers, scientists and teachers, just like regular people. I am very committed to a variety of issues, such as a balanced national budget, affordable child care, campaign finance reform, balancing homeland security with civil rights, affordable health care, supporting our troops overseas until we can bring them home again, educating our children without over-testing them, equality in marriage rights, energy conservation, alternative fuel research, nuclear non-proliferation, trying to work with traditional U.S. allies instead of insulting them, and honesty and accountability from government officials. I serve on the PTA, volunteer at my church, obey the posted speed limits, and give blood regularly, just as many conservatives do. I vote in every election and have neither been paid for my vote nor gone duck-hunting with any vice presidents.

I also have the “guts” to respond in print to a man who allows his personal prejudices to slander an entire, diverse group of people with one rude brush-stroke. Not only that, I posses the good sense not to judge all conservative Americans by the foolish things that come out of his mouth.
.
I’m sorry Mr. Moore had a bad experience with the organization to which he refers. I am unfamiliar with the group in question and cannot address the fairness of his accusation against them. I, however, am guilty of none of the things of which he accuses me.

T. Meisky