Here is an interesting and well done video. It takes the male dominated world and flips it on its head so women are dominant. It’s slightly NSFW for some quick but very necessary breasts.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UWxlVvT1A]Category Archives: Society
Mmm, Food Desserts…
Oh, wait, no, that’s food deserts. My bad.
A food desert is an area of residential housing that is underserved by traditional grocery store but often over-served by fast food stores. These tend to occur exactly where you’d think they’d occur; in poor neighborhoods. Being poor and living in a food desert makes it almost impossible to make healthy food choices. Now, you would think that a great solution would be to bring grocery stores to this area. A few studies have recently been released that show when a grocery store finally comes to a food desert, the dietary habits of the residents don’t really change much. What’s going on here?
Well, first off, it’s only a couple of studies so there may be certain things not controlled for, but the studies certainly pass the smell test. So why would poor people choose to still go to the fast food joint when there’s a much cheaper and healthier alternative right next door? If you took $10 worth of groceries and $10 worth of McDonald’s stacked side by side the choice seems absolutely preposterous. You can make many meals out of the groceries but only one from the McDonald’s. Look closer, though. See the problems? That McDonald’s value meal is ready to eat right now. No cutting vegetables or measuring out spices. No stirring of sauces or browning of meat. No washing of dishes or cleaning the kitchen. It takes five minutes to get fast food while cooking and cleaning can take an hour or more. And that’s just one out of three meals. We are so used to having time that we don’t realize how much of a luxury time actually is. And it’s a luxury that the working poor can not afford. There are second jobs to get to and precious sleep to catch up on. How are you going to throw fresh food into that mix?
So if grocery stores aren’t the answer, what is? I’ve always been a fan of something along the lines of a slow food co-op. The basic idea being that there is a kitchen somewhere that can cook very large portions of healthy meals and local residents can come in and pick up these meals for slightly less than what you’d pay at a fast food restaurant. The kitchen is local, the workers are local, the patrons are local. All that plus the locals can eat healthier and save slightly more than they had been with their fast food choices.
It’s a very simple idea. Of course, how to implement something like that is well beyond my pay grade. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Churches would probably be a good bet. It’s times like this when I wish I knew someone who actually knows something about these things.
Why The American Disdain For The Poor?
Have you ever been trying to merge on the highway and you’re doing everything right but there’s this person who very purposefully speeds up so you can’t merge between him and the car in front of him? It seems to happen quite often. It’s as if the offender is trying to prevent a stranger from taking advantage of them in some way. In the end, they gain nothing and they actually risk injury by driving recklessly. This is similar to how many Americans seem to view the poor.
This view was highlighted beautifully by the surreptitious recording of Mitt Romney telling a gathering of rich people that 47% of the population are moochers. This is an incredibly galling statement coming from someone who made his fortunes by trying to create as many of those “moochers” as possible by taking over companies and firing people and then selling the companies. It’s like when your big brother grabs your arm and punches you with your own arm and asks you, “Why do you keep hitting yourself?” But he’s just one unconscionably rich person who has spent his entire adult life devoid of any contact with poor people. There were millions of others in the United States who were nodding sagely at Romney’s comments, though. Most of them cannot use Romney’s excuse of studiously avoiding poor people.
The problem, I think, stems from a pathological belief that everybody you don’t know is out to take advantage of you in some way. They just know that there are tons of moochers on welfare living off of their hard earned tax dollars despite not personally knowing a single one who is actually doing so. This makes no statistical sense. If the people you know who are or have been on welfare are using the system as they should, where are the moochers? And if you do happen to know a moocher or two that are taking advantage of the system, why aren’t you turning them in? “But I just KNOW that they’re out there somewhere!”, you might intone and you’d be right. It’s not that there isn’t waste in the system because there assuredly is. No system, governmental or private, has zero waste. The problem is that there is no proof that the welfare system is more corrupt than any other system in existence. And yet we have demands for more oversight and spending more money on rooting out waste when that money would be much better served just being given to the vast majority of welfare recipients who very temporarily need the money.
The House (and by The House, I of course mean Republicans) recently voted to cut food stamps by $39 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this will cause 3.8 million people to be dropped from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) next year. Most people on this program have jobs. The jobs our economy can provide them do not even meet the lowest standard of living. Thus the Supplemental portion of SNAP. Our society is so afraid of poor people right now that we elected 217 people to represent us who think providing the minimal amount of food subsidies to those who actually need it is too much for government to do. Who are these people? How did we get to this point?
Welcome to the United States of America where the only thing we seem united against is the poor. And we are all the poorer for it.
If Studs Terkel Were Alive Today…
First off, I have to say, wow is Studs Terkel an American treasure. I don’t think I have ever read anyone that is so in touch with the American experience. Maybe Walt Whitman or John Steinbeck. Besides having the coolest name ever, Studs also has a way with prose that is both folksy and deep. His words flow off the page and my mind gobbles them up like candy.
I’m currently reading “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression”. It was written in 1970, but the edition I am reading was released in the late 1980’s. As with many new editions of old works, this one contains a foreword by Studs. In it, he documents the great divide between the realities of poor people and the headlines declaring stock market boom times during the late 1980’s. I was struck both by how little has changed and how much worse things are now. Back then, all the good manufacturing jobs were starting to leave Chicago for points Chinese. Occasionally, a few jobs would become available and hundreds of people, mostly blacks, would line up for a chance to get that job. Now, the manufacturing jobs are all gone. Nothing is being offered and no lines are formed. We have gone from a country of hope to a country of desperation.
For a good segment of our population, there is no such thing as a good job anymore. The choice is between starvation and eking out the barest of existences. There is still a ladder to climb, but the rungs that can get you from lower class to middle class are missing. If you started below the gap, you’re stuck there unless someone reaches a hand down to give you an opportunity you wouldn’t otherwise have. If you are middle class and you slip a rung, you find yourself suddenly far below where you once were, overqualified for any job that is available and shunned by the keepers of the jobs they are qualified for because of lapses in employment.
These are the people you are fighting against if you are against Obamacare and Medicaid and Welfare and Food Stamps. The people that use these programs are not moochers and thieves. They are human beings trying to get by. These are not socialist programs enacted by people trying to destroy the American way of life. They are missing rungs inserted back into the great ladder of progress that maybe, just maybe, can be used by people to reach up as high as they can to the next rung and pull themselves up to a modicum of safety and security without the need for help from the government.
Robert Reich was on “The Daily Show” this week talking about how he thinks we’re repeating history and are on the cusp of another Progressive Era like we saw in 1901. I hope he’s right because there are still more rungs to be replaced and we owe it to our society to replace them if we are at all to be the moral people we pretend to be.
Barack Obama Causes HUGE Drop In Teen Pregnancies
Black and Hispanic teens, alarmed by the fact that their children may one day become President of the United States, have either stopped having sex or started using birth control. Or maybe it’s because the U.S., under the Obama Administration, has started focusing on evidence-based sex education instead of abstinence-only education. If you read the article, it’s actually not entirely clear if better sex ed is responsible, but the drop is welcome regardless.
Between 2007 and 2011, the teen pregnancy rate has dropped 20% for Whites, 25% for Blacks, and 33% for Hispanics. Those are some impressive statistics. I wonder what will happen when Obamacare comes into full effect and teen girls will have access to birth control. An even sharper drop could be just around the corner.
You’ve Just Been Schooled, Son!
Want to know what’s going on in Egypt? Look no further.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeDm2PrNV1I&feature=youtube]I couldn’t find any real confirmation if this is real besides comments from someone who claims to speak the language, but wow is it awesome. The only thing that could have made it more awesome is if it were a girl saying it.
Personally, I don’t think Egypt has much of a chance of creating a country envisioned by this kid. There are way too many external forces at play for any semblance of democracy to take hold. The largest of which is our own U.S. How can democracy take root in a country when the greatest superpower the world has ever known controls the purse strings of their army? I’m fairly certain the answer to that question is it can’t. Here’s hoping I’m wrong.
Immigration, The Answer To All Of Our Problems!
Hyperbole! But seriously, immigration reform is critically important to our continued status as a world power. It is just as important as it always has been.
Unfortunately, one of our two political parties (Hint: It rhymes with Schmupublicans.) is dead set against any type of immigration reform bill that doesn’t make immigrants suffer. Take Senator Jeff Session (R-AL) for example. He is dead set against the reform that has been proffered by the most recent Gang Of Whatever. So what does he do? He gets the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to score the bill and see what the economic impact would be. I’m sure Senator Sessions fully expected the CBO to come back and say that all of those Brown people would cost the Real Amurican Taxpayers billions. But what does the CBO actually say? Only that the immigration reform bill will save our country $197B over ten years.
Facts, the enemy of Republicans for well nigh eternity. Hyperbole! But seriously, elected Republicans do seem to have great aversion to facts these days.
I’m Related To Charlemagne!
The blood of kings flows through my veins! I’m pretty sure that this means I get to have a completely superfulous sex scene with Melisandre before she sacrifices me to her red god. (Game of Thrones reference.)
Don’t worry, you get to have sex with Melisandre too. It turns out that we’re all related to Charlemagne. If you can claim European heritage at least. If you go back a little farther than Charlemagne to 1000 BC, we’re all family! Not just Europeans. Everyone. The Native American hunting the Great Plains in 1000 BC? He’s family. The African migrating across the Serengeti in 1000 BC? She’s family. Every person that was alive in 1000 BC and managed to sprout a family tree that is still growing today is related to you. Every. Single. One. That is amazing!
And before you start worrying about how much incest you’re having, fear not, you share none of the same genes from those ancestors. You have no more in common (genetically) with those ancestors than you do that random stranger you saw on the train. In fact, you only have to go 14 generations back to have a statistical zero percent chance of sharing any genes at all with an ancestor. So much for leaving behind a lasting legacy.
I could never come up with a better closing paragraph than the one in the above linked article so I’ll just quote it here:
But while genetics doesn’t reflect much of our imagined genealogical uniqueness, it’s shown that we’re more closely tied to our species as a whole than we might have realized. We’re all part of this enormous human fabric, full of fascinating tendencies and bizarre biochemistry. And research is revealing more and more about humanity as a whole and our incredibly beautiful, incredibly unlikely perch in the universe. That’s a tradition to be proud of.
Gender, WTF?
Growing up, we learn very quickly that there are two genders. Female and male. You either have an innie or an outie. Everything in life reinforces this; adults, institutions, bathrooms, commercials, statistics, language. Case closed. End of story. Goodnight, Irene.
Having grown up, we come to realize that things aren’t quite as clear cut as they seem. It turns out that gender isn’t bipolar. It isn’t determined by a flip of the coin at conception. Genitalia does not define gender. Gender is more like a roll of a pair of loaded dice with some outcomes much more likely than others. Something we’ve always thought of as black and white actually holds greys and yellows and oranges and purples. Many of us rebel against this idea. We try to put the yellows and oranges into the familiar and well understood black and white boxes. Many purples and greys try to conform to the black and white paradigm because society reinforces that what they truly are is wrong.
A fairly decent majority of the population does conform to the traditional female/male gender. In gender studies, these people are called cisgendered. They are the people with penises that feel like “males” and the people with vaginas that feel like “females” as defined by popular society.
Everyone else is thrown into the familiar “transgender” bucket. They are the people with penises that feel like “females” and the people with vaginas that feel like “males” and every possible permutation and gradation thereof. Our society as a whole still considers them to be abnormal. In reality, they’re just the green eyes in a world of blue and brown eyes. It is well past time that society start treating them as such.
There is a whole lot of privilege built in with being cisgendered. Like every societal privilege, a majority of the challenge is getting those with privilege to recognize that they even have it. This is a monumental task but not one that cannot be overcome. Education and exposure is the key.
But where to start? I would say the answer to that is at birth. There is already a whole lot of stigmatization that happens when we identify a newborn with a penis as male and a newborn with a vagina as female. Gender may have been decided well before birth but it certainly can not be determined by adults or by the baby at birth. Birth certificates should lose their male/female identifier and replace it with a simple equipment check: Penis/Vagina/Both.
Of course, this would also require society getting over calling the penis and vagina “naughty bits”. Which is another monumental task in and of itself. But it does lead me to the second idea. We need to get people to realize that gender identity and sexual identity are two completely different assignations. I see gender identity as how you “feel” about yourself and sexual identity as how you “feel” about other people. Society deeply intertwines the two and that makes each much more difficult to talk about. Yes, there is a lot of overlap between the two that falls exactly where you’d expect it to fall, but we’re once again getting into privilege issues.
This is incredibly complicated stuff. One can understand why a vast majority of the population doesn’t give it much thought. And that’s actually fine. That’s how it should be. That is our goal. Our problem now is that people only think about it when they are confronted with a standard deviation from their norm. It is new and completely outside their realm of experience and that makes it scary. The idea is to help them get past the fear. To make them see other gender identities just like they would someone with green eyes. It might be worth noting for it’s unusualness, but it’s certainly not worth treating a person differently over.
Depression Is Funny!
Ok, not really. Depression is a serious mental health issue that is horribly misunderstood and stigmatized in our society, but Hyperbole and a Half explains depression in a lighthearted way that both entertains and informs. I wish Allie Brosh, the creator of the web comic, would write more. Her work is truly inspiring.