PeTA Asks Gov't to Buy AdSpace on Border Fence to Offset Costs, Promote Veganism

PeTA Puts Offensive Signage On Border Fence



Yours truly was quoted in Feministing.com's community posting about PeTA's new marketing campaign targeting Mexican immigrants at the border. The proposed signage would read, in English & Spanish, "If the Border Patrol Doesn't Get You, the Chicken and Burgers Will. Go Vegan!"

I support animal rights and protection, and I totally agree that the factory farm system is a vile, cruel machine that poisons our bodies with impure products attained by unethical means, and is driven by the bottom line with no regard for the fact that its products are meant to be consumed for nutrition and sustenance by FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS. I have never disagreed with PeTA on this front, and applaud their undercover work and other efforts to expose the abuses and disregard for safety standards in the factory farm setting.

However....

This signage is ethnically insensitive and highly offensive, plain and simple.
"If the Border Patrol doesn't get you, the food will?" Really, PeTA? What brilliant firecracker team of middle class white marketing people came up with this one over soy lattes? Because they need to take this one back to the drawing board.

When a reasonable person takes a step back to examine the wording of the ads and takes into account the location and the socioeconomic standing of the target audience, the true essence of the message PeTA is sending these people who are risking life and limb to cross into this country to seek work to better their situations is one that is inherently racist, classist, and reads like a cheap unfunny joke at the expense of the audience. It smacks of the smug flippancy afforded to those with privilege who assume they know what's best for others.

Individuals attempting to make the crossing are already terrified undertaking the long and often dangerous journey. It is doubtful that they've forgotten for one second that the Migra is on the lookout for them, nor are they unaware that they will likely be doing agricultural work under grueling conditions because as undocumented workers, they will have to take what they can get to feed themselves and their families. The wording of these signs is flip and almost taunting when you consider the hardship and the perspective of the people to whom these ads are targeted. If it's meant to be tongue in cheek or funny, I don't think anyone trying to cross the border would agree.

As a vegetarian Latina with some EMPATHY and some COMMON SENSE, PeTA will be winning no hearts and no minds on the border with this one. But some people who aren't in this situation, who enjoy all the freedom and privileges of being American, think this is a great idea. Way to have your head stuck up your ass, guys! Why don't you get off your spoiled asses and take a trip to México OUTSIDE of the resort towns in Cancún and see how most of the rest of the world truly lives before you go trying to assume you know what's best for all the poor downtrodden brownpeople of the world?

Does PeTA or its members have no sense or shame? Who do they think picks of all the fresh veggies in this country??? MIGRANT WORKERS.

How about advocating some rights for the Mexican migrants and their families, who move constantly and can’t educate their children, who have limited access to healthcare, who are exploited and abused by employers without any recourse working in the factory farms? Their lack of training, rights, and fair wages contributes to the overall cruelty of these institutions. If PeTA and its supporters really care about promoting ethical treatment of animals and providing a cruelty free and safe food source, the same concern should extend to the humans suffering within the factory farm system.

A so-called "ethical" organization should not engage in careless, insensitive marketing for the sake of shock value to gain attention, because it detracts from the mission of the organization and cheapens the message.

The lack of accountability and common sense consistently displayed by PeTA's marketing campaigns (including the ones that display & objectify naked women whose bodies fit the "ideal" like they're selling designer jeans and not an animal product free diet) is disgusting.

Their tactics are as deplorably cheap and common as any other business organization's, and does vegetarians and vegans everywhere a disservice by giving us the appearance of being as crazy and self absorbed as these fools in PeTA's Marketing division.


FOOD IS A SOCIAL/ECONOMIC JUSTICE ISSUE. All justice issues are interconnected, which means labor rights, feminism, animal rights, immigration reform, poverty, environmental protection, healthcare reform, and food safety/health/availability are all part of the same overall mission to make the world a more reasonable place to exist. PeTA's willingness to happily exploit the female form and minorities to promote their individual mission is sickening, hypocritical, and just fucking lame.

No wonder the general public thinks you're all wackjobs!

Wow.

Someone just sent me this and it rocked my world.


A snippet:

"Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed."


...and on the way to being obsolete.  They're too cool even for themselves to continue to exist, and with the economic crash, I predict that trust funds will shrink.

Peace With Honor: Vietnam, Redux

While Richard Nixon & Henry Kissinger are credited with ending the United States’ involvement in Vietnam and brokering peace, they were not able to achieve "peace with honor", per se, keeping in mind a strict interpretation of the word “honor”. They inherited the conflict from previous administrations, as our next President will inherit Iraq from Bush Jr., and acknowledged that the effort was already a failure. The mark of peace with honor by the time Nixon took office would have been, in the minds of many, a complete withdrawal from the disastrous campaign and the region without committing any more troops.

Many Americans who voted for Nixon did so because he promised to end the war; Nixon himself played into their hopes, echoing the words of Woodrow Wilson in one of his campaign speeches, saying "Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try?" As the conflict raged on, it became obvious to the increasingly skeptical American media, civilians, and military, and to the opposition that any decisive victory for the United States was highly unlikely. There are many indications that Nixon’s primary concern with regards to Vietnam was not achieving peace with honor, but rather, achieving peace through just enough compromise to end the unpopular war with minimal public humiliation to the United States as an international player and world power.

To this end, he deceived the American people, Congress, and even members of the military of which he was commander-in-chief, and when all was said and done, he abandoned the ideals and goals on behalf of which the United States became involved in Vietnam in the first place. His abuses of executive power during Vietnam came into focus four years after Operation Menu, and were being considered as articles of impeachment when a disgraced President Nixon resigned during the Watergate scandal. Nixon, while professing to want to end the war, increased U.S. military presence with B-52s flying secret bombing missions in Cambodia, known collectively as Operation Menu, hoping that the show of sheer firepower of the US military would rattle the North Vietnamese and compel the NLF to agree to his diplomatic terms and compromise. Instead, Hanoi responded to the Nixon administration’s show of actual force much in the same way it responded to their previously unanswered threats of force; it made no statement about the bombings in Cambodia in public or private statements, and never acknowledged the presence of their forces there. They quietly steeled their resolve, and continued to make a mockery of the supposed unparalleled power of the United States.

It is said that Kissinger gave the impression that an eventual Communist victory would be tolerable so long as it was suitably delayed as to avoid openly embarrassing the United States. The real source of difficulties in winning the war, Nixon and Kissinger felt, were not the Vietnamese, but the American dissenters in the anti-war movement. In his November 3, 1969 Silent Majority speech, Nixon declared “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” The assertion that it was the publicly voiced disapproval of anti-war protesters and not the failed policy of the government that was causing the immense economic and human losses of the war to continue to spiral out of control was indicative of Nixon’s refusal to accept the harsh reality of our position in Vietnam. “I will not be the first President of the United States to lose a war,” he said. Nor would he be the last, it would seem.

Between 1965 and 1973, the United States spent $120 billion on funding the war, resulting in Nixon not only losing the war after squandering an incredible amount of human and economic resources, but also setting up the country for tough financial times ahead with a large federal budget deficit.

Although President Nixon was cognizant that American troops withdrawing under his (failed) Vietnamization policy needed to be protected from attacks by the North Vietnamese, his decision to continue the futile secret bombing of Cambodia not only escalated the war he had vowed to end, but also increased the political tension and social division in the United States, leading to massive outpourings of anti-war/anti-government sentiments. The incursion was deemed necessary to destroy Communist bases and supply lines supporting the war in Vietnam, to protect American servicemen and women, and to guarantee the successful withdrawal of America from Vietnam. Nixon’s April 30, 1969 announcement that the U.S. had launched an “incursion” into Cambodia sparked a massive demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio. On May 4^th that day of protests and calls for peace ended in a scuffle between National Guardsmen and students, leaving four protesters shot dead and several wounded. Photographs of the dead and wounded youths at Kent State were distributed world-wide in newspapers and periodicals, and served to amplify anti-war/anti-Nixon sentiments at home and abroad.

The newly instituted draft played a large role in stoking the fires of controversy with regards to anti-war sentiment among the youth of America. The conscription protocols provided exemptions and deferments more easily for middle and upper class registrants who could claim they were full time students making active progress towards an undergraduate or advanced degree. Thusly, the draft inducted disproportionate numbers of poor, working-class, and minority registrants who were unable to afford higher education. Upper class families with sons of service age who were concerned with the family image signed up for the National Guard, which was rarely deployed overseas. In some cases, these families that were able to use their connections to gain a position in the National Guard, which had limited openings, also leading to a perception that the wealthy were using the National Guard to ensure that their children were assigned low-risk duty in the U.S. while the sons of the poor, who were mostly Black and Hispanic, were being shipped off wholesale to die in the jungles of Vietnam.

The economic costs of the war on America were also a cause for concern among the poor who were already suffering on home soil. Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor as long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube." Other Civil Rights leaders, such as Eldridge Cleaver pointed out that in many parts of the South, Jim Crow laws prevented many blacks from voting and, yet they were sent in overwhelming numbers to die for the very government that disenfranchised them.

But Nixon and Kissinger had far more to worry about than the kids not being alright. The administration’s concerns for the loss of face in the global community were deeply rooted in the Domino Theory, which was common foreign policy at the time. The fear that appearing ineffectual in Vietnam would hamper the United States’ ability to maintain leverage in the Middle East and other regions of the world where its interests lay, pushed Nixon and Kissinger to devote their entire effort toward building up an image of strength in the face of their rivals, the Soviets. In order to maintain nuclear credibility in the eyes of the global community, it was crucial for the Nixon administration, already under enough fire at home, to ensure that the outcome of Vietnam was viewed favorably in the world as a show of America’s effectiveness and resolve as an ally. By then, all other goals of the intervention had long fallen to the wayside. In the end, the terms set forth in the Paris agreement did not remotely address the issue as to who was to rule South Vietnam at all, nor did it provide any sort of feasible framework for meaningful negotiations to take place.

Therefore, to blame the shadow of doubt hanging over Nixon’s “peace with honor” on the media, so-called revisionist history, or on Congress can be construed as an apologist effort to defend the administration’s bullheaded tactics for the sake of maintaining appearances and supporting nuclear deterrence policies. While posturing for the Soviets can be seen as a vital piece of political theater that set the U.S. up for foreign policy into the 80’s, the end of the Vietnam war achieved with the Paris agreement can be viewed as a successful brokering of peace, but perhaps not an honorable one. Coupled with the myopic focus of the Nixon administration on the idea of "saving face" and protecting the United States' credibility, the decision to escalate by entering self-declared neutral Cambodia put the final nail in the coffin and effectively robbed Nixon and Kissinger of any claim of true honor or victory both at home and abroad. These policy choices left America shouldering the weight of the beating its clueless Congress and beleaguered military took in the worldview during and after Vietnam.

Today, Dubya is sitting pretty in the White House, riding out the last days of his 2nd term, and acting like our actions in Iraq & Afghanistan have decreased the terrorist threat that shook our nation to its core on September 11th. I still wonder how ANYONE deludes themselves into thinking this, when we already know the government was aware of the threats posed to America by Al Qaeda before the World Trade Center Tragedy. We also know that Osama bin Laden is still at large, and that Al Qaeda continues to flourish and train in Pakistan and all over the world because as a group with no central leadership and many cells operating throughout the world, the only way to can stop them is to cut off their economic resources.

For all of opinion polls that show the dramatic decreases in Bush's approval ratings from the beginning of the war in '03 till present day, it's a wonder anyone with even an inkling of what occurred when the U.S. became involved in Vietnam approved of this plan, though I will say that from the beginning, sensible people were at least scratching their heads going "Why are we attacking Iraq?". Not that it helped us at all. Why not attack Pakistan or Iran, where we have REAL enemies hiding out? Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a bad made for TV movie about all this.

The war in Iraq & Afghanistan continues to rage on, with no apparent end in sight. Over 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died with countless numbers injured. Iraq is in turmoil, Afghanistan has fallen into the hands of drug lords, our allies are pulling out, American confidence in the government is failing, our economy is in the toilet, Bin Laden remains at large, Al Qaeda continues to plot and train without interruption--mission accomplished? And what mission was that? Have we achieved "peace with honor" or peace of any kind, for that matter, in Iraq?

There are a number of blogs that deal exclusively and comprehensively with the war, and do an excellent job with doing so, therefore I am not going to try to summarize their content because my focus is more on the historical background of the policy in Vietnam, but rather refer the reader to seek out some of the information that is widely available through independent media and the mainstream media alike. I would not presume to know all about the war in Iraq or presume to know where it is going, but as many have already pointed out, the parallels with Vietnam era war, politics, & economics and the current American condition are staggering.

Which leaves me, the child of an American veteran drafted into Vietnam wondering every night in front of the evening news:

What unforeseen challenges await our next president?

Will we ever learn from our mistakes?

Where do we go from here?

White Scarf

A white scarf
blew
through
the snow
as it stung my eyes
and froze my thighs
I want an omelet and I didn't
do my homework last night
It blew
into
the pond
and I thought to myself
how wrong
That the thing isn't frozen
Briarcliff Manor seems an eternity away
and day by day
another lifetime passes
And every color and lack thereof reminds me
of my foothills, gardens, friends, & classes
Someone must've been partying hard that Saturday
to be out in the cold so nude
I imagined they were drunk and extremely rude
and I smiled with the feeling
I knew them.

02.02.02

Reflections on Joe Rapaglia, Teacher.

Reflections on Joe Rapaglia, May 2, 2005

what is the substance of:
*a soul
*a sigh
*a stranger
*a dream?
The sound of 200 girls singing Christmas carols on a tape machine.

what is the nature of kindness
and
what.is.this.beast.called.man?
How does one explain this? I'm not sure one can.

What is the color of the sound that pierces silence?

Oh, Mr R--
could you see our uniform kilt plaid?
the glittering flash of metal of the skirt pins we had?
the rosy pink of our cheeks as we dashed up the steps?
the surly metallic purple of punky polished nails tapping on desks?
sensible brown square toed shoes?
the red brick front of that building we called Chez Nous?
the welcoming green doors?
the rainbow of textbooks spread on the hall floors?
did you dream of Sister Mary Daniel's white eyebrows
peeking out from under her habit?
her polished
antique
brass
bell?

For the last 9 years, were you in there?
Could you hear us?
Or were we merely clinging to a shell?

*
Maybe you departed long ago
when your heart
gasped
sputtered
stopped
Did you go up to watch over us from afar?
*

Could you see the way we clung to each other,
tangles of
arms and ponytails
a gaggle of compromised mascara and hot blinking tears
the sheer
drained pinched paling of youth around the wilting corners of our mouths
as they gave us the news of your tragedy
standing in the lab and I can still plainly see
our mouths proclaiming it, round and wide
Oh! Oh!
Oh...no....
and that heavy collective sigh.

*

You were the type of person who loved everybody.
You knew who you were and what you believed
a friend to all you'd ever seen
You knew with whom you walked.
You loved truly and completely in the Lord
and trusted to live in his ways through service, gratitude, humility,
and upliftment of your fellow human being.

I'm not much of a believer, but I have faith in change.
People squander so much possibility. Thank you for realizing yours, and inspiring me to look for mine.

*

Your time on this earth was too short, and no amount of prayer or reflection will ease my bruised sense of justice and order in the world. Maybe some day, I'll be old and hard enough that these things won't bother me.

I hope that day never comes.

T e m p orary insanity

According to my friend Moo, I don't want to work. Maybe she's right. Maybe I'm turning into a lazy couch lump in my 'old' age.

My obsession with 'The Golden Girls' now somehow comes into question.

The last few days that I've been home instead of at the office is because I have a summer cold...and I could tough it out and go in, but why bother when I can be home watching the Golden Girls, cuddling with my dog, and perhaps, looking for a BETTER job?

I'm a temp.

And I've become the Temp With A Bad Attitude.

I didn't start out this way--this monster was created!

This assignment obviously sucked from early on, but for a little while, I thought I'd be able to roll with it. After all, it's just a few months. But things began to add up, and I quickly lost any hope of salvaging this gig.

Transportation took there took an hour each way, every day. There was nowhere to eat lunch that didn't take half your lunch break to get to. Everyone wore a suit to work every day, and they were SUPER into their jobs, which included (for some) a degree of glee whenever some rent stabilized old lady passed away, so that they could luxurificate her apt and rent it at triple the price to 3 college students.

This same RE company put my best friend and her mother out of their apt in the complex after more than 30 years of tenancy there, alleging that it was not their primary residence, since it came up that they also had a house in Staten Island. That had JUST been built. Never lived in, didn't even have carpeting yet. But since Mom dukes was on the verge of retirement and had just built a house, she couldn't afford to continue paying a lawyer to battle their Eviction Dream Team. Proving that she had never had a break in her tenancy there was a lot more complicated than one would imagine, and takes time because the lawyers have better things to do...so they sit on your info while your bill climbs ever higher, and the clock continues to click.

And so, this tale ends with the new management deciding not to renew their lease, and Birdie & Mom had to scramble to pack up decades worth of their lives and hit the bricks. Birdie landed in Flatbush. ::shudder:: Mom, instead of renting her home in SI, now lives there. And hates it.

In short, it was a gig in corporate ass corporate environment, (worse than the one in finance I left) working for people that I equate with the Devil. I thought I could suck it up, but inside, I knew it wasn't going to work on any level.

After being subject to an active campaign to drive me out of my job at my last corporate gig, I decided that I wasn't down with that kind of mentality, and I could care less what the interests of the company are, because frankly, they could care less about mine. It also started to really really BUG me to be on the premises every day, watching the brown and yellow nannies of the new yuppie tenants strolling around those pale faced brats, sitting on the laws amidst hoards of college students tanning all day because mommy & daddy were paying their rent, popping around in their $200 jeans and nearly identical sunglasses, giggling.

YUCK!

Poo on these people, and piss on the company mission.

What is this business with calling it a mission, anyway? They're not on some quest to fulfill some higher calling according to some divine destiny, they exist to make money. That's great. But these poor worker bees aren't seeing any of that money. These people are so into their jobs, but none of them is a shareholder in the bottom line. They're just employees, who get paid to come in and get their hands dirty and grease the wheels of the machine...without realizing or caring they're nothing more than a tool to the company.

On the same level as a stapler. And perhaps more easily replaced.





People get attached to their staplers.

I didn't start out being the stink eye temp or being the angry worker bee. I used to not mind office jobs as much. In fact, till January, I worked in a corporate office of my own choosing. Endless political maneuvering drove me to my vehement rejection of this type of environment and model of employment, and it was pretty bad.

Let me put it to you this way: even my BOSS bemoaned the circumstances under which I left, telling her nephew whom I am friends with that "They" (HR) had finally did it, and driven me out.

::sigh:: As much as corporate jobs stink, this is NYC, and the rent comes due without fail. So about a month ago, I wound up at my recruiter's office, getting ready to ship out for this temp gig with this big corporate monster of a real estate company.

My one friend there was another creative type, the EA to the Managing Director. On one of those suffocatingly hot, humid days we had last month, she said to me--"Hey, just so you know, my boss isn't here often, but if he sees you in flip flops...he won't say anything, but he'll notice and make a mental note of it. So keep an eye out."

The look on my face must have been something special, because she continued.
"...Well, you know how it is."

Actually, I didn't. For a minute, the feeling of being the transfer student in a made for TV musical wearing a leather jacket amidst a sea of pristine blazers came over me, and I countered with my best 'Are you kidding me?!' look.

But she was not kidding. As a reasonable, independently functioning adult who wipes my own ass, I couldn't register how or why this would have any impact on me. Especially because technically, I don't really work there.

I never signed an employment agreement. I was never given a handbook stating the dress code, the vacation policy, the company holidays, or the fucking mission statement. I never attended an orientation. And my checks are issued and signed by the temp agency.

So why do I give a fuck if someone 'might notice' I'm wearing flip flops on my way into the office? IT'S 91º OUTSIDE! Should I break out the patent leather Nicole Millers on these dusty, broken pathways that are perpetually under construction for the 15 minutes walk from the nearest subway because someone might make a mental note of my flip flops? WHAT?!?!

The MD has no idea who I even AM. If he has nothing more pressing to do than agonize over a complete stranger's footwear, then he needs to take off his tie and go join the grounds crew and water some of those sad ass hydrangeas they planted 2 weeks ago that are already half dead.

This particular placement was NOT a success story for my agency. Hearing reports that I wasn't happy (oh, you care, how nice), the company mentioned it to the agency and asked if they should send a replacement.

When I took 2 days off this week to recoup from my summer cold, they decided a replacement was definitely in order. The agency let me know yesterday, and was kind enough to break it to me gently like I was worried; upon hearing the news I was practically turning cartwheels and farting rainbows.

I wouldn't have to go back, and I'd get a new assignment come Monday so that I'd have time to heal my scratchy throat and regain my energy (which I have been thus far expending blogging).

Ironically enough, when the topic of replacements came up on Monday, the company had initially suggested that they wanted me to stay and TRAIN the person who would be taking over for me.

You're kidding, right?

Cuz, uh....that sounds like a job for someone who works there. ;)

I'm just saying.

Leatherman Lessons: Perspective

The job hunt has been consuming me of late, and while I'm trying to keep a chin up, the dismal prospect of yet another dismal corporate job taken out of necessity looms ahead of me, and I took a break from the hunt to look through some old blogs and photos.

This one was written in 2005, and is always a favorite to go back to for perspective, and so I re-post it here from its original source.

*clearing*

...some days, i look for the answers.

...others, they find me.

A few lessons (re) learned on one of my weekend escapes.

*mellow yellow*

amazing how the smallest and simplest things hold such uncommon beauty when you just stop to look at them. do it more often before the days when the sun doesn't shine as brightly are upon you.

*focus*

a strangely comforting new friend. his lesson is that although we may walk many paths and although we may not always know which way our feet are taking us, there is a certain slow and meditative deliberation to traveling each path that is to be acknowledged, practiced, and honored. also, worrying about your shoes is a waste of time.

*broken heart*

this red trail blaze struck me as i walked past it, because its placement so looked like someone had shot this tree right through the heart...yet it stood strong and beautiful. don't allow past injuries or interferences in your plan to stop you from growing. wear your scars proudly, and keep reaching for the sky.

*rotary*

when you're looking to find out where you are, keep an eye peeled for signs...

*'Bama-rama*

sometimes, it's ok to wear a disguise, long as you can keep things in perspective and don't take it too seriously. going incognito can also be a lot of fun. useful for hiding from fans, stalkers, the paparazzi, telemarketers, and your job.

*vista past leatherman's cave*

the trail we hiked came past a place called Leatherman's Cave. the story was of a French trapper and furrier, who, hoping to win the approval of his beloved, took over her family's business when her father's health failed. he failed miserably, and drove the business into the ground. ashamed and unable to face her any longer, he made himself a 40 lb suit of leather and proceeded to wander. for over 20 years, he walked a loop around upper Westchester and Connecticut wearing this suit, accepting neither shelter nor conversation from well meaning strangers. he would accept food and the chance to sleep in their barns, but he rarely spoke, and became a bit of a regional legend. he retired to a cave in the woods of what is now Harriman State Park, where he was found dead, his body riddled with cancer, still wearing his 40 lb leather suit. just beyond this damp cavern, crawling with spiders and snakes and echoes, is a trail that leads to this beautiful vista with its miles and miles of sky and river and green.
Often we carry such heavy burdens, the weight of things that have long been forgotten or forgiven by others, that we fail to see that just past -this- are wonders waiting to make themselves known right before our eyes.

*wild ride*

always take your closest friends along with you for the ride. they are always the best source for endless support, laughter, shared sandwiches, and shared memories. hey, who else is gonna snap that photo for you!??! team tale telling is my favorite sport. keep company that will keep long car rides from feeling TOO long. if you can stand being in a car with someone for more than an hour, they're probably pretty damn cool.

*like, whoa*

but(t)--don't be afriad to set limits where you have to, even with your best friends...

*hot shit*

particularly in regard to how much time you allow to pass with your friend inside one of these before you begin to worry.

Lesson(s) learned.

Didn't you see Boyz In the Hood?

Both my best male friend and a co worker of mine recently smoking. I quit years ago, with no ill effects. They, however, are currently grumpy bastards. I think the idea of absorbing a drug thru your skin is weird and a tad disconcerting, but if that's the new thing, they should make a Prozac patch, or some other form of topical Happy Lotion to help keep John Q. Public going.

Besides K-Y, you nasty smart alec freaks.

Apparently the two are available together: nicotine and anti-depressants, I mean. (Not nicotine and K-Y. You can find that in any room at the St. Mark's hotel, along with an entire assortment of other fun things that are bad for you. Bring Your Own Needles, though, kids, please. This isn't the 80s.)

Isn't that fascinating? Addiction so strong that it requires treatment with anti-depressants--yet, this substance is still legal to sell to the general public. I almost admire people for whom a substance can counterbalance the effects of hunger, sadness, or stress. It takes work to be that lazy with regards to the world around you.

And do people get addicted to the patch? These are things I need to know to satisfy my curiosity.

*

The topic of patches reminds me of an evening in my old apt, when Sir Gonzo and I were reading my old Boy Scout manual. No, you didn't miss anything. I said Boy Scout. I am a book junkie, and I found this vintage print on the street many years ago when I was in about 6th grade; it hasn't left me since. I even took it to college.

Laugh if you will, but I was the only person laying out on that soccer field who knew what those stars we were looking at were.

Anyhow, we moved from the kitchen to the bathroom so I could resume scrubbing the tub, and Gonzo sat on the toilet lid and occasionally read aloud from the manual.

Not gonna lie to ya, that stuff can be pretty entertaining. There is an entire section on being "Morally Straight". It's cute and sensible in most ways; the manual encourage you to respect women and your elders, to be kind and helpful to others, and emphasizes self reliance . In short, it's full of things that I'd want my son to learn.

But then, like most things, what started out as a good idea just went straight downhill from there. When you take a closer look at the politics that have become involved with the organization of late (darn those politics!), you start to see how conservative values have been perverted by Conservatives to mean that espousing these values means condemnation of anything outside of the strict interpretation. These people go to COURT over this stuff--LAWSUITS, over the Boy Scouts because allowing homosexuals into Boy Scout leadership perverts the morals of youth!

This is ridiculous. With all of the REAL issues affecting the American family, like healthcare, loss of jobs, inflation, the mortgage crisis, gas prices, mounting debt accumulated while fighting a war we can't win, etc, you'd think the Bible Belt would find another dead horse to beat. But nope. All of these pressing issues facing our Congress take a back seat to the issue of gay marriage and how the gays are slowly ruining the American way of life for all of us.

It's bad enough that Conservatives use the Bible to justify everything from hating Jews to subjugating women and not recycling...because religion has always been a way for people to leverage power over the vulnerable to further their own agenda. But you already knew that, right? To let you in on a secret, the natives of South & Central America weren't always Catholic, and neither were the natives of anyplace else.

But I digress.

Scouting is/was meant to be an opportunity to teach boys how to be strong and how to lead, and prepare them to be able men.
The commitment to "God and Country" doesn't mean to Jesus Christ and the governor. It means to a higher power in general, to the one to whom we will all answer for our existence and our choices. It's meant to remind kids that they are a small player in a large universe, that there are things greater than they that require respect. Like nature. Like society. Like our interconnectedness.

But it doesn't make the organization an automatic extension of the local parish's Sunday brainwashing and hate mongering *(in instances where this goes on, not to say that all churches preach hate against homosexuals). It becomes that when people/parents allow organizations to make parenting decisions for them, perhaps as these organizations made decisions for their parents. But really, in this day and age, with such access to information and culture? This kind of refusal to grow up and accept that human beings can be different and still worthy of love and respect isn't "tradition", it's pigheaded, stubborn FEAR stunting our growth as a nation and as individuals.

The purpose of the Boy Scouting community and code is supposed to promote civic responsibility, respect for oneself and others, and leadership...not at the expense of tolerance, understanding, and respect for individual choices. Children have no bias and no politics except for what they are taught. It makes me sad that something generally so positive has become increasingly politicized over the years as Conservatives continue to promote the myth that homosexuals are threatening the American way of life, Christian morality, and the sanctity of marriage and the family.

It makes me giggle when the First Amendment issue comes up of counties and towns trying to impose local dress codes for certain colors and baggy pants, because of what these articles of clothing, in their minds, represent. Ever stop to think that the boys whose parents put them in Scouting are just really wearing conservative gang insignia?

They've even got a handshake, man. Come on. Didn't y'all see Boyz In the Hood!??! This is like a gang! THIS IS PROGRAMMING and GROUPTHINK!

Someone should start an action group. Make a bumpersticker. Something.

JUST SAY NO

Which one of these is a junkie? The answer is, they both are. The real question is, which of them would you be more likely to cross the street to avoid?

The answer is pretty obvious. But why?

To examine, let's go back a couple of weeks and examine the last weekend in June, when yours truly was in the Hamptons. Yes, the Hamptons. Aren't you jealous?


Well, don't be. It was full of annoying drug addicts, and being without a car, a train, a bus, or reliable access to a heliport (::sigh:: the life of a commoner), I was stuck there with them, being the only person not having the OMG BEST TIME, EVER!

It could have been worse, right? I could have been lost in the South Bronx or Brownsville after 10pm, with my Tiffany jewelry and impractical shoes on, trying to dodge all of the outstretched hands and avoiding the empty, dead eyes of all those strung out broke asses. But that is a forseeable circumstance that anyone with two brain cells to rub together could avoid.

I was not in the company of people like Junkie #1 and his brown brethren. In fact, there was not a brown person to be found anywhere. (I'm sure there was some housestaff of color somewhere, but we were slumming it with people without servants.)

The junkies I was stranded with are of a more insidious nature. They are:

• white
• female
• attractive (this includes having teeth)
  
• employed
• reasonably educated
• generally charming and amusing when not altered on substances
• unfortunately, my friends, whom I had no idea were such fucking coke whores.
  

So what's up with these silly bored little girls who go the Hamptons to be fabulous and "party"? Why do they not consider themselves drug addicts, even when most of their leisure activities are accompanied by hard drug use?


Simple.

Location IS everything. And so are appearances. Poor people do drugs in the inner city, in crack dens and flops, in filthy squats and in project staircases. Those brown ghetto people are addicts. But you? Your pretty little blonde self is just having a good time. What harm can it do?

The arrogance in the part time junkie mentality is grounded the assumption that they are somehow special because 'earn' their right to 'party' because they work and pay their bills like the rest of us.

Hold up.
When did working and paying your own way become merit-worthy? Like you're doing something extraordinary above and beyond what the fuck you're supposed to be doing as a grown up by feeding, clothing, and housing yourself?!

Seriously, who do cats think they are? I have never once considered myself special because I'm a functioning member of society--it's just what you're supposed to do. You ain't special cuz you got a job, bitch! You're supposed to have a job and pay rent and bills. That's called participating in society, which is a given if you enjoy vacations, manicures, and text messaging. Otherwise, you can skip the working and paying bills part and go live in a treehouse and eat coconuts and various grubs, and no one will give a shit what you do all day.

Hard drug use is not any less self destructive or disgusting when it takes place on weekends or in an upscale setting. If when you get off the Jitney and you go back to your doorman building apt, the thought of copping and doing those same drugs with, say, the gutter punks in Tompkins Square Park on a Tuesday horrifies you, then you are the brand of stupid cracker I'm talking about who thinks that having a job and some money to shop at Pookie & Sebastian or get your hair done at Mudhoney disqualifies you from being a junkie.

WRONG!!!!!

If you feel like you need drugs to have a good time...
If you can recall exactly how long it's been since you last had a drug and are eagerly awaiting the next time...
If you cannot pass up an opportunity to do a drug when it is offered to you...

Then you are addicted to that substance, and you MIGHT be a freaking junkie.
It's kind of that simple. And as someone who knows better, I have decidedly better things to do with my youth than hang out with your junkie ass.


Why do these weekend warriors call snorting cocaine "partying"? This clever little euphemism compounds my distaste for this scene, because of its playful insistence that everyone's just having a good time.

I think my closer friends and I party quite a bit, and often there upwards of a dozen people floating around in my apt and on my balcony. I maintain an open house most weekends--food, beer, movies, conversation for anyone who wants to drop by. Sometimes we stay up all night, talking, laughing, eating, dancing...but without any drugs.

Did my peeps and I miss something in the "partying" handbook? Do we need to brush up on our urban dictionary reading? Because last I checked, "partying" was having a gathering, a social function, and enjoying a good time with other people.

Not sneaking off, AWAY from said social activity, to snort cocaine in the parking lot while sober friends and family members (including children) wonder where you are.

Weekend junkies, and soon to be former friends of mine, here are a couple of tips for when you're high around people who do not share your insecurities and bullshit need for approval and pleasure seeking activities to fill a hole in your inner selves:

1. Don't try to talk to sober people. They are not in on the great joke and will not be amused.
2. If you are uncomfortable with being high around sober people, then maybe you should consider that there is a good reason for that. Get high @ home alone, or at least the hell away from sober people and children. That is not cool.
   
3. Don't offer poor damaged suckers like me who don't "party" platitudes about understanding how they grew up around drug dealers and drug addicts, and how you could see how that would affect their view on drugs. Especially if you grew up in a nice house in the suburbs and have never been slashed by a junkie wielding a razor blade. I don't care how brave you think I am, you don't know me and you don't know jack shit about what drugs are really about.
   
4. Do not relay any segment of your personal tragedies as a means to relate when the topic of my disapproval of casual drug use comes up. It does not work, and it does not make your drug use in the presence of sober people okay. You cannot relate to me because I don't have a need to alter myself with substances to be comfortable in a social setting. Please stop trying to relate in order to make yourself feel better; if there's nothing wrong with what you're doing, there is no need to justify it, is there?
   

What I don't get is how people leave the NY scene to go to the Hamptons scene. Are there insufficient 'cool' clubs to go to to get high here in NYC, or are you too lazy to go to them?

At any rate, I can't travel that far to be aggravated. The next time someone asks me to go to the Hamptons, I'm going to JUST SAY NO.

Crazy never goes out of style: Or, Scientology & You

Here come the Scientologists to prove that crazy is alive and well.

My parents' middle daughter (that's my sister, to say) married a Scientologist. She met Blondie at the flea market, where he was handing out fliers for the Church as part of his compulsory, unpaid service hours.

The Addict & The Alien...I sense a romantic comedy with a Courtney Love cameo in it coming on...

The lack of hoopla over their quickie marriage at City Hall got me curious--after all, I have a brother in law now, this is serious stuff! My parents didn't seem concerned that she had married yet another weirdo, and I figured it was because they sized this character up and reasoned that the marriage wouldn't last anyway...

My sister would either tire of him...

or he'd whip up some Kool Aid at the reception, and we wouldn't have to worry about either of them ever again anyhow. ::shrug::

Thus began my quest to find information on Scientology.

What I read was probably some of the most genuinely inventive fiction I have ever read.

This excerpt from http://www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuleaf.htm captures the essence of Scientology wonderfully (My comments in red. Their synapsis is too on-point to bother re-writing it.)

Once upon a time, 75 million years ago to be more precise, there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack (alien for "TEANECK"?).

Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people (nevermind that this can be utterly refuted by a 3rd grade science text book). He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.

Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyze them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).

These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralyzed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them all around, H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.

The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).

This part had me laughing the hardest. The average person can't begin to fathom what the world view of people stupid enough to believe this might resemble. I imagine the subconscious dreaming mind of one of these people looking something like this:

Typical Scientologist nightmare--little Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah's couch, and some bored looking audience member wearing a large, Elizabethan looking collar made of tin foil pulls out something that looks like an iphone. The device emits a charge similar to a laser beam that shoots out over the stunned audience members and traps Tom Cruise in the device. He bangs on the opposite side of the glass of the screen in protest, and the techs show it on the large screen behind Oprah...everyone laughs.

After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes (and here is my lazy sister, the poor gal can't even fold fitted sheets. Xenu is folding up SOULS, for crying out loud! Get it together!) and taken to a few huge cinemas. (Movies must have been much cheaper back then and theaters must've been about the size of football stadiums. With the world being so incredibly overpopulated, where did they get the real estate for such things?)

There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".

When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.

As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xenu is still alive today.

So today everyone is full of these clusters of souls called "body thetans". And if we are to be a free soul then we have to remove all these "body thetans" and pay lots of money to do so. And the only reason people believe in God and Christ was because it was in the film their body thetans saw 75 million years ago.

That's worse than telling people you decided to be a Wiccan because your parents forced your misbehaving ass to go to Catholic school in 6th grade. "I celebrate the Earth Goddess"...but you hate bugs and your idea of being out in nature is a picnic in Central Park. Right.

..>..>..>..>

	.
Part of the first page of the secret OT III document in L. Ron Hubbard's own handwriting

Proof positive yet again of the economic power the IDEA of organized religion and "truth" has over people. Otherwise "reasonable" members of the public will pay to have the souls of dead aliens exorcised from them so that they can lead more fulfilling lives full of steady relationships, wealth, and actualized goals and dreams because they think that buying it makes it more tangible, and truly theirs.

Pathetic, sad, and potentially another indication that there is something terribly wrong with the current public school system OR the water supply. How else do you explain a lack of reasoning ability on such a grand scale!?

The root of it all, I suppose, is that everyone is looking for answers. And what I want to know is are those body thetans what's keeping my sister's husband from seeking gainful employment? I mean, last I checked, he is American, able bodied, skilled, and literate. Those darn thetans are doing a helluva job retarding the dreams and goals of humanity... what with my brother in law sitting on the couch at home and my father having to pay their rent and all!

Verdict? Crazy never goes out of style. And apparently, neither does lazy.