Things That I Believe

* Warning-- I'm going to get a wee bit political-- but I'm going to try not to get partisan.  Obviously I have a leaning but I believe that crooks are everywhere, mostly where the good guys are supposed to be.  Please--if you disagree with me, odds are good that with some discussion, I could see your point of view, even if I'll never take that side.  If you wish to disagree with me in the comments-- or with anyone else-- please do it in a respectful manner.  I have seriously been flipped off, honked at, and threatened by post-it note because of the liberal bumper stickers on my car.  I beg of you-- don't be that person.  Be the person who says, "Respectfully, I disagree."

Okay-- there are some things that I've been DYING to get off my chest-- but I'm not a fan of Orwellian double speak, so I mostly kept them to myself.  But this is my blog, and hello, I'm going to sound off.  Forgive me.

*  I don't care which political party you're from, if you're soliciting money from me, you're on the side of Satan.  If I'm forking out my money, it had better be going to help the homeless or widows and orphans or American Red Cross or saving the whales or something--I'm not sending it to a bunch of people who claim to be public servants in order that they might "service me" one more goddamned time.

*  Every politician out there--both Dem and Rep--needs to read George Orwell's Politics and the English Language as well as 1984.  When that's over, if they find themselves saying things like, "Within foreseeable distance of a victory!" or "Poised on the precipice of a crushing defeat!" they should volunteer for a summary shooting.  Or an ass-reaming. Or a beheading.  Or something.  Because the way politicians use language today--and again, this is both sides-- is criminal and manipulative and indicates supreme indifference to the education and intelligence of their constituents.

*  Leave health care alone for right now.  5 million people are being served who weren't served before. I know some of those people.  They are tearfully fucking grateful.  Can the system be improved?  Yes.   Can we afford to improve it right now, with a shit list of sixty-eleven things that have been neglected while we fought tooth and nail for something that eleventy-six other countries have managed to do with a lot less blood?  No.  Let people have some fucking low-cost health care and move the hell on.

*  Nobody needs the right to get a gun at a moment's notice.  Do people have the right to protect their homes?  Sure-- as long as they don't go proactively gunning for people outside their four walls, (and Florida, I'm looking at you) I'll give you that.  But every person I know on doctor prescribed mood elevators is screaming, "TEN DAY WAITING PERIOD YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS!" and although I've never suffered from clinical depression?  I'll take their word for it.  The fact that the NRA is trying to keep a perfectly qualified man from being surgeon general because he doesn't like guns tells me that a whole faction of those people need to work the emergency ward of an inner city hospital and then come back and try this shit again.

*  Teachers make jack shit.  Jack. Shit.  If you are voting to make a teacher's salary dependent on a school's test scores, regardless of socio-economic circumstances of the school, I sentence you to a week substitute teaching in a crappy school district.  And then the opportunity to go drinking after paying your bills on your salary.  If you vote to make a teacher's salary dependent on the school's test scores and then okay the school cutting the school year in half in order to cut the teacher's salary even further, you need to teach in that school district for a year.  And you need to take your second job in that school district too.  And I get to laugh at your car and your Top Ramen diet, dumbass, because holy wow, do you suck.

*  Yes, there is 3 million dollars of welfare fraud in this country.  There is also 150 BILLION DOLLARS of legal tax evasion from giant corporations in this country.  Before we start cutting the food stamp ratios of single mothers and unemployed fathers and kids who are living from church clothes piles, maybe we can go after the motherfuckers burning hundred dollar bills to light their illegal cigars.  Jesus fucking Christ politicians, use your common sense.  I know someone who committed welfare fraud-- he served two weeks in minimum security prison, because in spite of the fact that he told the welfare office that he had a job, they continued to send him a check.  He used the money to fix his car and buy his daughter clothes for school.  They were the first new clothes I ever wore.  If we spent 1/10 of the time making the rich accountable that we spend persecuting the poor, we'd have a fuckton fewer poor people.

*  25 years ago, Mate and I worked our way through school.  We had jobs that gave us between 30 to 40 hours a week, and we attended a school that would give us our classes within a semester or two of us needing that particular class.  It was hard, and we worked hard, and by God we did it.  Our kids do not live in the same world.  They are competing with adults trying to feed their children with every job application they turn in.  They are competing with people who have attended school for ten years, one class at a time every time they fill out their course selection.  Minimum wage pays for a smaller percentage of their living expenses than it did when their father and I made it, and finding an apartment in anything short of a demilitarized zone for 1/3d of a minimum wage check is damned near impossible.  Education costs more and classes are less likely to be had.  The next time a politician, any politician, talks out his ass about how the poor "need incentive to improve their lives" they need to go back to school.  If school would take them.  Right now, school doesn't take slackers who can't read and don't do their fucking homework.

*  Every politician who thinks we need to cut school lunch programs should sit in a crappy desk with 35 2nd graders and try to pay attention when they're hungry.  And then get yelled at by dumb white men in expensive suits when they act out.

*  Any missionary who goes to another country to try to enact legislation that the United States has rendered illegal needs to spend a week in a refugee camp without protection.  Because seriously-- you have better things to do with your time than make homosexuality a crime in Uganda.

* If politicians are afraid of spending less on the military, why don't they spend more on military aftercare than they do on keeping soldiers engaged in war?  Seriously, it's like none of these idiots have seen Star Trek before-- you know the episode where the trained killers with the deep seated emotional problems go after the government that first created and then SHAFTED THEM?  Holy wow.  If the governing body can't take care of their discharged soldiers out of a sense of ethics and loyalty for a service rendered in good faith, they should at least take care of them out of their outstanding sense of self-preservation.

*pant pant pant*

Okay, I know I offended people, and I'm sorry.  I am.  Maybe not my people, but I'm pretty sure the last asshole who flipped me off because of my rainbow bumper sticker with the Obamacare sticker next to it (admittedly bought in a more optimistic time, but still) wants to deck me in a parking lot.  Personally I hope he breaks his finger while jamming it up his nose first, but then, I'm obviously headed to hell.

Just look at my politics.