7:41- I’m going to be late catching my bus.
7:48- I literally make a flying leap onto the platform at the downtown transit center as my bus is pulling away from the curb. Grumbles ensue from the packed No. 5 as I dig through my backpack for a bus pass and plop breathlessly into the one empty seat.
8:02- The bus driver actually pulls the bus over and yells at the teenagers in the back, “Ladies! Watch your freakin’ language!”
I’ve got a problem with the way the MSM is caterwauling about the racism of white working class voters. Yes, racism among the white working class exists, hell yes it exists–having grown up in a blue-collar household in a county flush with poverty and crystal meth, I can speak to that.
But I have a major problem with the way “working class” or even “small town” are being used as euphemisms for racist, uneducated, backward, ignorant. Focusing on the supposed small-mindedness of the working class lets the white educated middle/owning classes off the hook, as if they have moved beyond such trivial matters of race and can pat themselves on their polo shirt-clad backs for their progressive, post-(fill-in-the-blink) attitudes. Insert fart noise.
This past week, the School of Social Work has been all abuzz following the crass statements made regarding community organizing at the Republican National Convention. I can always tell when something’s hit a nerve by the amount of email I receive from random people who feel it necessary to shower the entire student body, faculty, and selected law students with forwarded and re-forwarded links to Sarah Palin’s speech surrounded by indignant OMGs.
Now, I generally don’t get too riled up about the mud slung by talking heads in the two major corporate-sponsored political parties, especially during their big corporate-sponsored homages to the perpetuation of our national mythology*. Nor do I tend to get too bent out of shape about what the uninformed “journalists” from our nation’s finest corporate-sponsored media outlets have to say when they chip in with their “analysis” of the “news”**. (I will now stop using quotation marks.) I am really trying to strike a balance between keeping abreast of national/global events while abstaining from the type of news programs that will just feed my bitterness about the state of things–I didn’t name this blog “shambles” for nothing, you know? However, I really don’t need to be wasting my energy listening to sound bytes from the Republamocrat conventions, tuning into that twat waffle Lou Dobbs or really even bothering with the TV much at all except to catch up on Tyra and the occasional Daily Show/Colbert Report double-header. It does nothing but raise my (genetically, very low) blood pressure to a rate so alarming, I need a cold shower afterward.
Yet I must admit–the digs about community organizing, and the subsequent ass hattery erupting in the MSM–has ruffled my normally cynical and apathetic feathers. A bee is in my bonnet. My underwear is officially in a twist!
I’ve said it here before, but I am SICK SICK SICK of the artificial division the School of Social Work insists on making between policy and practice, community organizers and interpersonal concentrators, and dear god, can we get some men at this school*, I’m starting to feel like it’s 1954 and we’re in Home Economics class learning to churn butter or some such foolishness.
*Male students, not male professors/administrators…we’ve got plenty of those.
Today was my first day back at work following an absence of approximately three weeks, during which I did nothing more productive than manage to get the cat litter out every day, read three fantastic books, and keep up with my toenail-painting. Larry seemed happy to see me and spent the better part of the afternoon updating me on his recent kayaking trips (he owns seven kayaks), the money he’s made from selling homemade yard sprinklers on Craigslist (about $300 per week), and waxing nostalgic about the time he went hang gliding (”I almost shat myself when we lifted off, but after that it was the most pleasant feeling”).
Naturally, the conversation turned to drugs.