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Politics

My Response to Obama’s Email about the Gulf.

Sent on Sat, June 5, 2010 5:56:09 PM to my Email was a message entitled “The Gulf Coast”  sent by President Barack Obama. The Email is paid for by Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee and I love how it says at the bottom of the Email, “Thank You, President Barack Obama” and then has a disclaimer in small print that says, “This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”  I get these Emails because I volunteered for Obama’s presidential campaign and donated money.  Every time something good of bad happens involving the president, all of us donors get these Emails. I’ve often thought about blogging about them, because some of these Emails have been inspiring, but the one that I’m responding to here is not inspiring in the slightest. My moral compass requires me to respond to what I consider to be bullshit, even if it comes from someone I have campaigned for.

The following is the email I received;

“Yesterday, I visited Caminada Bay in Grand Isle, Louisiana — one of the first places to feel the devastation wrought by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While I was here, at Camerdelle’s Live Bait shop, I met with a group of local residents and small business owners.

Folks like Floyd Lasseigne, a fourth-generation oyster fisherman. This is the time of year when he ordinarily earns a lot of his income. But his oyster bed has likely been destroyed by the spill.

Terry Vegas had a similar story. He quit the 8th grade to become a shrimper with his grandfather. Ever since, he’s earned his living during shrimping season — working long, grueling days so that he could earn enough money to support himself year-round. But today, the waters where he has worked are closed. And every day, as the spill worsens, he loses hope that he will be able to return to the life he built.

Here, this spill has not just damaged livelihoods. It has upended whole communities. And the fury people feel is not just about the money they have lost. It is about the wrenching recognition that this time their lives may never be the same.

These people work hard. They meet their responsibilities. But now because of a manmade catastrophe — one that is not their fault and beyond their control — their lives have been thrown into turmoil. It is brutally unfair. And what I told these men and women is that I will stand with the people of the Gulf Coast until they are again made whole.

That is why, from the beginning, we have worked to deploy every tool at our disposal to respond to this crisis. Today, there are more than 20,000 people working around the clock to contain and clean up this spill. I have authorized 17,500 National Guard troops to participate in the response. More than 1,900 vessels are aiding in the containment and cleanup effort. We have convened hundreds of top scientists and engineers from around the world. This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country.

We have also ordered BP to pay economic injury claims, and this week, the federal government sent BP a preliminary bill for $69 million to pay back American taxpayers for some of the costs of the response so far. In addition, after an emergency safety review, we are putting in place aggressive new operating standards for offshore drilling. And I have appointed a bipartisan commission to look into the causes of this spill. If laws are inadequate, they will be changed. If oversight was lacking, it will be strengthened. And if laws were broken, those responsible will be brought to justice.

These are hard times in Louisiana and across the Gulf Coast, an area that has already seen more than its fair share of troubles. The people of this region have met this terrible catastrophe with seemingly boundless strength and character in defense of their way of life. What we owe them is a commitment by our nation to match the resilience they have shown. That is our mission. And it is one we will fulfill.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama”

Something inside me says that I should let the bullshit contained in this email slide, but then I watch footage of birds immobilized by oil, my heart breaks, and then I get angry.  Here is the kind of video I’m talking about:

The reason I get angry is because unlike what this email says they have not, “…worked to deploy every tool at our disposal to respond to this crisis.” By now, we could have dumped enough gravel over that pipe to have built a small Island.

Please, no one tell me that we couldn’t have, or that is not possible, or that I’m not understanding the scope of the problem. If we can send millions of tons of metal all over the world in World War II, we can throw some gravel, rocks, sand over a broken pipe.

The only thing that the government and British Petroleum have tried to do, is spend millions of dollars on saving the pipe, not the wildlife or the life ways. Everything they try is an attempt to bring the oil to the surface rather than just abandon or destroy that pipe.

Mr. President,

The Super Dome is filled with people. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to pursue fines, criminal charges, or investigate, or are you going to stop the oil from spilling into the Gulf?

Fining an Oil Company is like giving a parking ticket to Bill Gates.

What do you think? Is the White House doing everything it can?

Book Review: The Feminine Mystique

On the front cover of my beat up, library checked, original copy is a quote, written by Ashley Montauge, that says it all;

“The book we have been waiting for… the wisest, sanest, soundest, most understanding and compassionate treatment of contemporary American woman’s greatest problem.”

The Feminine Mystique, published February 25, 1963, is a book written by Betty Friedan and it started the modern feminist movement. Friedan who“Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while,” writes that there was something wrong with the way American women lived today or a better way to say it is, then and now.

Friedan was a mother of three and she was educated at Smith College. She felt that something was wrong with the way American women lived and she sent an intensive questionnaire to her female college classmates, where she discovered that she was not alone. Her theory based on the questionnaire was that;

“The problems and satisfaction of of their lives, and mine, and the way our education has contributed to them, simply did not fit with the image of modern American woman as she was written about in women’s magazines, studied and analyzed in classrooms and clinics, praised and damned in ceaseless barrage of words ever since the end of World War II.”

Her book quickly became a best seller and considered a very controversial book at the time.

The reason the book was so controversial is because its purpose was to change society.  Anything that questions our current society will be controversial for better or worse. Freidan’s purpose, as she puts it, was to tell other women or even just declare, “… that, in the end, a woman, as a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell.” She wished to empower women not to be controlled by an unfair social system that was making her/them unhappy. She criticized women’s magazines because advertising “manipulates” women. She criticized Sigmund Freud’s theories on women and functionalism, because of the idea that women have a preordained job as mother and wife that they must obey to be happy. She also talks a lot about sex and promiscuity, quoting many of the findings of the Kinsey Reports. She talks about war and dehumanizing people and finally she advocates more education for women.

Her thesis is, that the current society has basically captured, brainwashed, or enslaved women; that women are following teachings and ideals that are not truly attainable and that this brings unhappiness. Her methods for coming up with her thesis have been criticized because of her methods of data collection and because she was only speaking from her perspective, instead of a perspective of poor women for instance or women of other races. These critics have a point. It is hard to argue that someone is being influenced and controlled by advertising when they are truly being controlled by economic necessity. It is also hard to say that all races have the same opportunities, due to racism, especially at the time the book was published. The problems of an uneducated poor women of color, were not the same problems of a well off educated female Caucasian, or at least not all of the problems would be shared.

In conclusion. Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, paints a picture and opens up the eyes of both men and women. Even with her ethnocentric point of view and her faulty research methods, she illustrates perfectly that there is something wrong with advertising and its uses of stereotyping, that there is something wrong with a society that puts anything into a box of social rolls and does not allow liberty, and that there is something missing from our society and that is equality. Everyone would benefit from reading something that questions things that we consider to be a norm, and she does this perfectly. The only truly sad thing is that, now a days her book is still very relevant

What do you think? Does this book and/or feminism still hold water, or has it or feminism become dated and no longer applies?

My Journey

All of us man or woman, are on an ambiguously  termed “journey” through life. Perhaps the term itself being ambiguous, is fitting when considering that is how the journey starts, in the ambiguity of dealing with the inside and outside self. As children we are dealing with and learning about our own selfishness versus the impact of our outside world. We learn that others don’t like us to be selfish so we adapt and become selfless and forget our own needs. At some point in life, we learn how to balance this out or we either stay selfish and we don’t get along with the outside world or we stay selfless and never nurture our own inside needs. I’ve personally jumped back and forth between selfish and selfless and would like to think that I have found the balance, but you never really know until you have the benefit of hindsight.

As I have made my “journey” I’ve put less stock in ideals or religion and I have put more worth in the immanence of the little things in life. While I’m an anti-religious person, I have found moments in my life that I felt were sacred. The best example I could think of happened while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. When I first arrived in country, I was having a tough time reconciling my personal dissatisfaction with where my “journey” had taken me, but while flying in a Black Hawk Helicopter, I had a sacred moment while flying above the sand between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. I saw a the most beautiful sunset on the dusty mountains hitting the green around the rivers. The view’s beauty can’t really be put into words but the experience somehow made this part of my “journey” all worth while. Simplistic? Yeah. It was like I was shown a painting created by nature and most people will never see it. That was my painting. Since then I feel that I share an interconnectedness with the things around me, even if I find all things religious generally inglorious.

While others say that part of our “journey” should be to claim our pain, I disagree. I find that claiming pain is actually dwelling. To claim pain is to acknowledge it, and acknowledging pain gives it power, power to influence you to not get hurt again or to avoid pain, just like a child that touches a hot stove won’t do it again or the women who never starts another relationship because the previous one was painful. I don’t avoid pain because it is inevitable and I attempt to not let it influence me in any unhealthy manner. Sometimes I even hold my hand above a flame to see how long I can overcome my physical pain, I find that the emotional kind is just as trying.

Along my “journey” I have found my voice. It took a lot. Now a days, we are constantly bombarded with how we should think and speak. The age of the television has made it increasingly difficult to think for ones self. The ironic this is, I found my voice by allowing others to do my thinking for me. I did everything I supposed to do, I even followed what the idiot box in the living room told me to do. Those voices sent me on a quest around the world and allowed me to experience different cultures and see how different people are. It sent me to college and opened my eyes to why or how things are the way they are. These were the things that shaped my unique prospective and have developed what some would call a warped view. My voice loves to scream hypocrisy and question the status quo, but only by following the status quo was I able to achieve it.

I’ve have always taken action and have never been a content person. I used to think something was wrong with my inability to become content, but I have since realized that I shouldn’t be. I used to take action by doing what I was “supposed: to do. Part of my “journey” was taken action by serving in the military, but I did that because I was supposed to do it. I don’t regret my service, but I find more meaning now in taken action in the changing of society. This is one of the reasons I now go to college, to give me the tool I need to facilitate change and perhaps contribute to a better society. Maybe even one that doesn’t need people to go to war someday.

For the first time in my live, I feel that I live in communion, not with society but with myself. I now know who I am, where I would like to go, and I have acknowledge my limits. I am a strong brave individual, who wants to influence the world, and I the only limit I have are the ones I put on myself. This is where I’m currently at in my “journey.” That really doesn’t mean anything when you consider that next week and the week after that, I will redefine my reality and change my path once again, but in the mean time, it is a fun ride.