Living in America

Sometimes living in America is something I could do without. I was riding BART home last night, when some old, white, half-toothless guy opened by telling me he voted for Obama. When I didn’t immediately scream “Me too!”, hug him, buy him dinner and fuck him doggy-style, he looked confused.

“Didn’t you vote?” Of course I did and I told him so. He still couldn’t grok that I hadn’t voted for GOBAMA.

My brother called me the other night to bait me by saying over and over again, “How come you didn’t work hard enough on getting out the Obama vote?” I’ve never thought “Let’s antagonize women for fun” was a terribly amusing game, and I still don’t.

The old BART passenger, who will hereafter be called Mr. Fundypants, continues his (inexpert and actual content-free) hagiography of the senator from IL. I told him at that point that I didn’t listen to people talking about God, nor was I interested in his evangelizing.

That shut him up for about two minutes. He then began the next onslaught with “I believe the abortions issue is the most important thing, and we need to get rid of it as a wedge issue by making it illegal so we can move on.”

I retorted that only a man could think he had “moved on”, and that if making things illegal worked to move us on, then alcohol would still be illegal.

Mr. Fundypants continued to exhibit incredibly poor rhetorical, not to mention logical skills, and I parried each one as is my wont. With each successful sally I made countering him, he became visibly more agitated.

I have had this same situation lately at a website I frequented. For some reason, men seem to think that if they lay out all their “arguments” and I’m still not convinced, well, then I’m stupid, venal, mean, or wrongheaded, not actually deserving of my own opinion.

I’m fairly tired of it. I’ve seen someone scream at me telling me my support of affirmative action is racist, sexist and bigoted, but when a white male says he supports the exact same program, well, it’s just his opinion so that’s okay.

Yet when this discrepancy is pointed out as being racist, sexist, and bigoted in its own right (b/c it implies that the only acceptable support for programs like AA must come from white males) there’s no further discussion, just an outbreak of OMGYOUDIDNTJUST CALLMEARACISTBLAAAGAAAARRRGHHHHH!!!

This is what passes for “discussion” among the young white males. Sort of disproves that whole “master race” theory, doesn’t it?

Basically, many young white males truly believe that because they aren’t called or calling someone else “nigger” on a regular basis, that there’s no racism. Because they can buy houses and get jobs, everyone who doesn’t look like them can, too.

Sort of like my family, who thought that my living in their house would make me “white enough” News flash: it didn’t.

These are the people who whine about Historically Black Colleges and Universities because they think they’re “black only”. They’re not, of course, and white students qualify for those AA (Affirmative Action) scholarships because in that context, they’re the “minorities”. But let’s not let sanity intrude, shall we? It’s just exemplary of the lengths people will go to justify their bigotry while claiming to be “colorblind”.

Back on BART, Mr. Fundypants has taken to looking at me like a puppy he expected to lick him that is contentedly chewing on his oozing neck-stump. He finally put up his hands and said, “Could you please just not talk about abortion anymore?”

Reminding him that he brought it up over my strenuous objections, I smiled sadly and said, “You first”.

Moments Worth Preserving

By Badphairy


I want to bronze this moment. My brother (the second eldest) is gloating about Hillary’s primary loss in “the whitest state in America” (Iowa). This is de rigeur in my family. However, I’m hearing “Go BarackO” in my ear. From my brother. The Marine. The lifelong Republican voter. He’s “voting for change” as I peel my jaw off the floor.

I’m not really sure how to take this. I’m not sure who I’m voting for, but I never thought I’d be discussing an election like this in my lifetime.

By the way, I am vaguely sickened by the way the media keeps portraying this as “the woman vs. the black” as if there is nothing to them but their labels. On this particular day, should we not be assessing candidates by the contents of their characters, not the color of their skin or the presence (or absence) of meat curtains?

Back to my brother, I’m just feeling weirded out by his support for Obama. It’s not as though I haven’t spent years attempting to convince the male members of my family that voting Republican didn’t necessarily float all boats equally. I got the standard WASP reply, i.e. ”I don’t actually care about other people’s boats. I care about my boat. Now STFU and scrub my floor”.

We did go on to scream at each other until we agreed that HillDawg can’t be BarackO’s Veep because it would lose him the support of cross-voting conservatives. He assured me there are some. I’d like pictures, names, and addresses, please.

I was interested primarily because I’ve rarely been able to have conversations like this in my family. Most of my family can’t or won’t “discuss.” They just scream loudest about how great the Republicans are and then retreat into pissy butthurtitude. In fact, I told one of them the housing bubble wouldn’t last and to prepare for the coming downturn, three years ago.

Not only didn’t he listen, I’m sure that now he would conveniently have no memory of said conversation. After all, what do Democrat commies understand about economics? I never thought my brother would be any different. Yet, here I am honestly inquiring what it is about BarackO that fires him up so.

I never really got an answer in that conversation. But he called me back. He said Americans are so complacent about their privileges that it sickened him. He’s seen fourteen year old girls in Asia selling themselves to his buddies to put rice on the family table, while we get all freaked out that our fourteen year olds aren’t doing enough extra credit to impress the Princeton Admissions Dept.

I may not agree with him about everything, but it’s damned hard to disagree with that. Maybe it’s time to put someone in power who understands that.