Translator

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?

Remodeling Can Be Expensive

When I bought my first home, I was shocked at the cost of repairs and remodeling. When I was renting, I never considered the prices of a new air conditioner, light, or even a simple sink and when the economy was doing well, I didn’t really notice the prices until after the crash. After everything went to hell and I was trying to sell my place before it was worth as much as a seven year old cell phone, I was noticing the prices big time. Every single thing I repaired from paint, to sinks was killing my pocket book.

I wish I knew about Mr. Direct back then. I just glanced at their website and found stainless steel sinks for as low as 64 dollars. They also offer same day shipping and they are better business bureau accredited. It beats getting ripped off at Home Depot that is for sure. Check our Mr. Direct the next time you need to remodel.

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?