Soapbox

      My job would be so much more fun if  I got to wear a cape.
     If  only I could stride to the counter when a customer rings the bell and then, hands on hips, feet spread purposefully as my cape settles in behind me (cool theme music clearly implied)  say,  "I'm here to help you"-  I just know the day would go better.

  My work cape would be super-hero length, ending just above the knees and flaring out nicely on every quick turn, which I would do deliberately from time to time, partly just for awesome style points, and also  to let my customers know that they are dealing with a woman of significant taste and ability.
    It would be dark gold with a scarlet lining. The gold color would engender trust, signal that I am honest, competent, forthright, and  they should relax  because know way more about this than they ever will.

   But should a customer get too clingy or whiney, or take a disrespectful attitude with me, I can flip my cape back over my shoulders so that the scarlet lining shows. This flash of red will let them know that I am not a person to be trifled with, say without words  shut up and take my advice.
    If I could stroll into my boss's office in a swirl of scarlet and gold, I can't help thinking that my annual evaluations would go better.  And when driving in heavy traffic, I might let a portion of the cape trail out the window to flutter in the breeze. Other drivers would know that, while I am a safe and courteous driver, they should not mess with me in a merge. You don't cut someone off in traffic when you know they are wearing a super hero cape.   

 I really should have 2 capes, though: Superhero for every day wear, but for those occasions  that require a little more presence, perhaps even a bit of sang-froid, I will need a full length cape of deepest, deepest blue… my Severus Snape cape. One that does not merely flare but positively billows out behind me like my own trailing entourage.

   In my Severus cape, as I stride the halls of the IRS, the BMV, the courthouse or even the opera house, people would step out of my way. Because you simply do not fuck with someone in a full-on Severus cape, now do you?

   You know who else would enjoy his job more if he wore a cape?  The President.

   I suppose his cape would have to be red white and blue, with stars on the shoulders. Which is cliche, I know, but it would certainly put all those stupid flag-pin wearing congressmen in their place.  Just think how it would swirl around him in an aura of power and authority as he walks from Air Force One for a meeting with some recalcitrant head of state! Suck it, Venezuela!  

   But the president really needs two capes as well. When the shit really hits the fan, when the accusations of "Socialist" and "Muslim" are flying, when they're painting his face with a bone through his nose on watermelons and attacking his wife and daughters in all those "I'm not a racist but" ways that they hit him every day; when the white hoods they have tucked into their pockets are starting to come out, he could go to his closet and pull out his other cape,  his "Leader of the goddamned free world" cape .
        And then he could call a joint session of Congress, assembling all the obstructionist, self-aggrandizing party leaders:  the ones  who are out there doing book tours and speaking tours instead of governing, who charge "traitor!" and "Un-American" but would rather shut down the entire United States government than compromise and inch .
        When the Sargent of Arms bangs his stick for attention, before he can get a word of introduction out of his mouth, the President would brush past him and stalk to the podium wearing his Darth Vader cape in it's full, ridiculous awesomeness, Secret Service detail scurrying behind to keep up. Imperial March clearly implied!
     What a treat it would be then to watch the expressions on the face of the Speaker of the House when the President talks of protecting civil rights and health care in his Vader cape. Ah-ah ah… careful gentlemen!   For if some over-excited member of the opposition should have the temerity to hiss or shout "You lie!" while he is speaking the President could pause, slowly turn his head and extend his hand slightly toward the neck of the red-faced man and say, in solemn tones,    

   "Do not fuck with me, Senator, for I am the President of the United States, and you will show some respect. If not for me, then for the office, and if not for the office… then for the cape."   

    Oh yes, I believe everyone's job would be better if they got to wear a cape.

The sins of the fathers are just water under the bridge these days. Forgive and forget!
But oh, God sends the flood to punish the sins of the mothers.

    He does it by creating new life and then breaking it, in ways large and small-
cleft lips, twisted limbs, unseeing eyes, wasting disorders, short-circuiting brains tiny holes in tiny, hummingbird hearts~
this is how the Lord of hosts, who controls the motions of the heavens whose love for the world football players write under their eyes on game days… this is how He punishes a woman.  
    So sayeth the smug politician who vigilantly guards the gates of decency against the incursion of women looking for health services and hoping to limit their family to the number of children they can afford to feed and clothe decently.
    Armed with muddy theology about divine wrath, this man- who can never know the joys and fears of carrying new life-  solemnly intones that God has revealed to him that handicapped children are divine punishment upon a woman for the sin abortion. Terminate your pregnancy, even to save your own life, and God will punish your selfishness by sending you his most precious gift: a child
… with disabilities.

     I am only a flawed and sinful daughter of Eve, so perhaps this is why I am so confused by the fuzzy math of this equation.
 ~ Why does God not similarly punish those who kill children who have already been born,
 ~ and why do so many women who have abortions go on to have healthy, happy children,
 ~  and why have so many mothers of disabled children never had an abortion at all
 ~ and how in heaven could a new, sweet life, however challenged and challenging,  ever be a punishment at all?
Why would a loving God damage a child when the child is not the sinner?
And just where exacty do the sins of the fathers figure into this divine calculus?

   If this is a punishment then, in overwhelming numbers, we are missing the message, Lord. Most of us feel just as blessed by disabled children as by the ones born whole. There are some who even seek out and adopt these instruments of divine punishment and find their lives immeasurably enriched by them.
     Our children are not weapons and their impediments are not punishments: they just draw a different rubric for success.
    When simple tasks for others are challenges the size of a wheelchair for your child, in a house where surgeries are more common than birthdays, each new accomplishment, however small, gets taped to the refrigerator of the parent's heart to be exclaimed over,  bragged about to friends and neighbors with aching pride. When limbs don't want to obey the brain's commands, the child who walks across the room becomes your olympic hero. When words are difficult, each "I love you" is a diamond sharp enough to cut glass.

   So tell me, someone, why would the God of love harm an innocent, unborn child just to make a point to a woman whose sin was harming an innocent, unborn child? Why not just make her infertile,  strike her dumb, visit a plague of insects or send one of his tried but true lightning bolt? Isn't there a clearer way for a deity to get his message across?
     I am still confused about why God killed so many abortion-less people with hurricane Katrina because of abortion. Or was it about all those wanton Mardi Gras parades? Even the peddlers of fire and brimstone can't agree,  which doesn't sound like very omnipotent communication for the guy who made the heavens and the earth.
     Still, we are supposed to believe that God, the all-knowing, all powerful deity, whose eye is upon even the sparrow, has really lousy aim and just fires random shot-gun blasts of hate at his precious children. And while we wade through the rivers of blood and pain we're supposed to figure out what in the hell he got ticked off about this time and who in the hell he was shooting at.
    God, who can put his son's face on a taco shell can't just text someone to tell them to knock it off or draw a giant crop circle in Nebraska with the international symbol for No Gay Marriage.  No, he sends spina bifida and tay sachs- a lifetime of pain to someone who did no wrong, just because he doesn't like their mother.

    Well if you have any messages for me, Lord, really,…
a simple burning bush will do the trick.

      It wasn't until I had gone 3 or 4 blocks that I realized I never even asked the man his name.

  After nearly 9 days of relapsing fever and frustrated by a diet of tylenol, cough syrup and exhaustion, I was back at the doctor's office. I was tired of fighting. I wanted him to give me something in a bottle that would make it go away.
   The doctor decided it was time to stop playing around.
  "I'm not going to play around with this" he said as I sat, hunched, shivering and miserable in his exam room. "I'm going to give you a prescription for something strong that's gonna knock this out once and for all." that sounded good to me.

   An hour later I crawled into bed, placed my brand new bouncing baby bottle of antibiotics on the table next to my water bottle, pulled the covers  up to my chin and considered the informative pamphlet the pharmacy gave me.
   The pink pill I had just swallowed was either going to make me better at last, or it was going to make an internal organ or 2 rupture. Or maybe both. A two-fer!

   Honestly, that first day, I was sick enough that I didn't really worry about any of that. But by the next day it began to prey on my mind, and I did some more research.
    And I began to wonder what I was doing. Dear Lord, these pretty little pills can cripple you for life! And I was supposed to blithely toss one down my sore throat for the next 10 days.
    Why had my doctor given me this stuff?  It's not like I had Ebola or SARS or something. Not that you would take this stuff for those diseases, because they're viruses. But what if I just had a virus, huh?
   I'd been miserable and felt sorry for myself. I wanted a quick fix, a magic pill. But was I really willing to flirt with catastrophic connective tissue failure, just to feel better a few days sooner?
    And if so- why?
   
     I have always wondered about those commercials for the latest drug that promise to make your whole life shiney and new… if they don't kill you. Like the asthma drug commercials  filled with happy people walking on the beach and playing with their dogs that oh yeah, might cause you to kill yourself, or increase the chance of asthma related death.
    Asthma related death. From an asthma drug. It will either make you better or it will make you worse. Have fun! Insomnia medication that puts you to sleep, alright, but may also cause you to drive in your sleep, hallucinate or punch your kids in the face without remembering it.
   It's like your doctor hands you a gun with one round in the chamber and saying "Here you go!"

     Now I realize that many of these Russian roulette drugs are for conditions that can be way more than just minor inconveniences. Rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, COPD- these can be a big deal. Even insomnia: you have it long enough, it can really screw you up. My great aunt had psoriasis, and it was a haunting, debilitating condition. But I don't think she'd have been willing to risk death just to be able to wear short sleeves again.
    Do the people who take these drugs really think about what they're doing? How many of them have carefully weighed their need and the risk of death, and how many of them are seduced by the happy people laughing on the beach in the commercials and just want something to make whatever it is go away?

    Well, I stopped taking the wonder drug. I decided coughing and a sore throat really isn't such a big deal after all.

    I heard a great poem last night at the Grand Slam called "What (the N-word) Sounds like". The point it made was- it sounds like "birth certificate".

    Really. That puts it all in perspective. And should you find that just a bit too harsh- oh come on, they're not necessarily all racists!  I offer this.
     The release yesterday of Barack Obama's actual long-form birth certificate satisfied the concerns of approximately eleven people on the political right. The rest of them immediately moved on to more fertile conspiracy territory: it must be fake!
    This is just a photograph of the certificate, after all: unless we can hold the original in our hands we won't believe that it isn't a forgery.
Uh huh. And unless I get to actually stand on the moon I refuse to believe that it isn't made of green cheese! Do not be fooled America!
     But the clearest proof of what that word "birth certificate" really means in the minds of the doubters comes from the megalomaniac in chief himself- Donald Trump. What is Trump's latest "trumped-up" controversy that must be looked into- his latest reason why we cannot trust this man who is president?

  Barack Obama got into Harvard.

     You see, Trump knows lots of smart rich kids who didn't get into Harvard THEREFOR there must be something sinister and un-American about an obviously talentless kid like Obama making the grade. And that sinister force is: Affirmative Action.
     So sinister, in fact, that the latest Republican "Jobs? We don't need no stinkin' jobs!" bill, on the schedule for voting in several states, is to OUTLAW Affirmative Action. 
  How dare those kids that we relegate to crappy inner city schools with overcrowded classrooms, outdated books and no lunch- those kids who sometimes get shot at on the way to school but manage to get good grades anyway and dream as big as "regular folk" – how dare they get a nod and a chance when it comes to college admission?

    Hell. Affirmative Action- that's not even a code word. We have always known what that means! It's white oppression, baby!  It means giving college admission spots, and then- gasp!- jobs, to brown people instead of white ones! It's a direct assault on Caucasian Exceptionalism, which for many people is the founding principle of this nation.

To Trump and to the lowest common denominator he panders to,  there is something fundamentally untrustworthy about our president. It's not  where Obama was born, or where he went to school, or who he played basketball with or what college he attended. (Harvard turned Trump down, by the way. I'm just pointing that out)  He's just… different. Alien. His skin is brown, and Trump doesn't trust anyone who's skin isn't orange, like his.

    Today in America, the N-word  sounds just like "Birth Certificate". It sounds like "Affirmative Action" too. We need to start bleeping both of those words on TV now, if you ask me.