In my first anthropology class, the professor gave us the radical opportunity to design our own course. We decided, individually, what we were going to write about, how many papers we were going to write and how long those papers were to be.

Half the class failed. With that kind of freedom they found themselves paralyzed and didn’t turn in a single paper.

We have this fucked up idea that capitalism equals individualism. If that were true then all the students in that class would have been able to individually come up with an easy A. But the sole purpose of our American flavor of individuality is to make us thing we have all these choices, when all we really choose is what we buy. Does your brand of toilet paper make you an individual? Your brand of jeans?

And then there is the internet. The giant wash of ideas and information meant to make us smarter than any generation before us. And 99% of it is people screaming at other people over things that don’t really matter. Even here, the most commented on posts are the one with the fewest ideas and the most bile.

What is wrong with us that we have no vision, no ideas? That’s been my biggest problem with the hopium smokers. They want us to believe in hope and change without telling us how they are going to change things or in what direction hope lies.

What are we so afraid of? What keeps us silent when we should burst with ideas? If I asked for an opinion on whether or not Starbucks is the modern version of corporate evil, the comments would be flooded. But if I just leave it open and ask for your big ideas (or small ideas) to make things better then all I hear is the crickets chirp.

We’ve had the thoughts and sparks of brilliancy cut out of us as effectively as if it had been done with a scalpel. And that is sad. That makes me sad. We can’t think beyond our purchases to create lives for ourselves with meaning.

So I started this post saying that I was writing about nothing. Nothing of importance. What you buy, what brand you choose, doesn’t make up who you are. Even when it comes to elections, which are marketed to us no differently than Coke and Pepsi.

How do we break the spell of complacency that has settled over us like a smothering blanket? How do we make that class full of students choose for themselves how they are to be judged when we can’t act for ourselves?

I’m so voting for Palin.

From my blog for choice day post (months ago)

Orphaned at 12 says: This comment will probably be blocked, because I find it hard to believe that every comment left on this page was positive towards you, but here goes. I call BS on what you said. My father died when I was 9 & my mother died when I was 12. I was in foster/group homes & residentials for 6 years. I have a history similiar to yours. I was raped, abandoned…etc. I got pregnant at the age of 16. Was living in lala land and thought I could play house at that age, so I kept my son. It was tough and I knew I was in over my head, but I made the best of it. AT 19 I got pregnant again. I knew I shouldn’t have another child yet so guess what? I put my daughter up for adoption. She is with a loving (infertile) couple and her adopted sister and is a part of a family who adores her. I learned my lesson and didn’t let my butt get pregnant again until now, at the age of 32 in a loving and warm and supportive relationship. I learned my lesson. I didn’t take the easy way out. I didn’t MURDER my own flesh and blood. The way you talk about what you did…is disgusting. Perhaps you wouldn’t be so down on your luck and struggling now that you are in your thirties if you weren’t such a piece of trash. I mean, who REALLY wants to know you? It would be nice if this world could abort you. Ho hum.

Wingnuts- spreading the love and reminding us that babies are a punishment for women having sex.

See Orphaned at 12- I do publish comments from people who disagree with me. I just also like to point out that they are screaming nutjobs while I do it. And yes Orphaned, you are the only person to have said something negative. I am judging by the amount of judgmental crap you like to spew at people that you are less happy with your current life than you let on. And because I am in real life exactly as I am here on this blog, I have lots of kind and generous friends who help me. Do you? Or have you driven them all off with your spite?

I’ve been immersed in the comic (?) A Softer world.

It makes the dark and twisted part of my heart sing.

I watched the planes fly into the towers on morning TV. At first I was stunned. WTF was that? Then when it became clear that it was a terrorist attack, I became angry. Boiling blood could rip out people’s throats with my bear hands angry.

But I am a grown up. And it took me about 24 hours to get past the red rage point and come to my senses. Blood for blood was not going to fix this or prevent another attack from happening.

And our bloody policy hasn’t prevented another attack from happening, it’s just changed the location of the attacks. In the mean time we have given up so many of our rights in order to be free. But as Benjamin Frankin said, “Those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither”. We grow more like our enemies using our current methods to defeat them.

The people of Afghanistan are begging us to stop bombing their children from the air. Even the Iraqis want us out. I think they finally realized that as long as we are in Iraq, there will be no peace for them.

The American people haven’t been made safer by these wars. The ideal that we were going to fight the Taliban and make Afghanistan a safe place for women is a laugh. Iraq was pretty secular already, with some of the most liberal laws for women in the region, and now women are murdered for being audacious enough to leave their homes.

We’ve become torturers on a grand scale (though torture has long been a part of our toolkit) and crushed the rights of humans under our black boots in fear.

So 7 years on and we are neither free nor safe.

There are a large number of proggy types who love to watch The Wire. Even the head unity Pony has said it’s his favorite show. I tried, but to be honest it wasn’t groundbreaking or interesting to me because I was living in that environment. I want shows that give me an escape from poverty and violence, not a reminder of what my daily life entails. 3 shootings with a football fields space from me and the Kid’s numerous muggings/near muggings in the last few years have kinda numbed me out to the thrill of urban street war.

But I do like that there is a show out there that depicts what life is like for the rest of us. And I sincerely appreciate David Simon’s work of trying to get the other America to open its eyes and ask the question. Why? Why is it so different for us?

Now it’s time for the confession that will officially end any hopes of a political career. 15+ ears ago- I sold drugs. I was never a big time dealer, just acid and pot and for a very very brief period of time, crystal meth. I never made much money, usually only enough so that I never had to pay for drugs myself. But I always thought I had other ways out of poverty, like work and education. Those hopes hadn’t been so thoroughly dashed at 17 and 18 as they have been at 33. I can understand how someone, say a young African American male, who is already looking at severely diminished prospects in even getting a job at McDonald’s, would turn to the one career option where his race won’t matter.

We are 30 years into this war on drugs. 30 years. And nothing is better for it. We rarely ask why people might turn to drugs to make them feel better. We assume it is a willpower failure. We don’t even imagine a state of such hopelessness in this country that one’s only escape comes from the masking effects drugs have. Oh if I had ever let myself use cocaine on a regular basis, I would be a goner. The few times I have used it, it hit the happy making part of my brain like a freight train and for a few brief hours shook off the paralyzing effect my near constant depression has on me. I could see how dangerous it was for me, and made a point of staying away from it.

And there is an entire underclass of people like me. People who are without hope of improving their lives in the ways we are told that work. So they do what they can. they find whatever ways they can of just getting through the next day, the next hour, the next few minutes. Whatever they can to keep the giant pit of despair from pulling them under. It is a lot of work to live on the edge. It takes a lot out of you. Drugs can seem like a tiny escape from that pit.

I have this not that far fetched idea that all addictions are just self-medicating for untreated mental illness. Anyone who spends most of their waking hours under the violent threat of poverty is surely shorting out the neurons that keep us going during times of stress. Humans weren’t made to live under this constant pressure.

Then I have this much farther fetched idea that the reason why drugs are illegal in this country is for the same reason that prostitution is illegal. Prostitution is one of the few jobs where women make consistently more money than men. Drug dealing is one of the few jobs where being a black man doesn’t hurt your chances of advancing.

In my ideal world, all drugs, even those ones that are this years current scary menace (when I was a kid it was crack, as a teenager heroin, and now crystal meth is the big scary boogey man) would be legal. We’d throw open the prison doors, and put the money from the unused beds into treatment of addicts and education (not anti-drug education, but get you a job education) of the poor. Cause right now with the War on Drugs all we are doing is paying the lower middle class (as police officers and prison guards) to keep the bottom locked up and/or scared. It’s costing us a lot in terms of time, money, and lives wasted and it’s not eliciting any benefit except for the owners of the private prisons.

The gods of irony are smiling on this little edit of the Republican convention.

Or socialism is a fine and dandy thing as long as the people who benefit are the people who can afford to get other people to pay for their bailouts.

Ouyangdan and I were having this conversation the other day. It seems to us like rich people really are socialists at heart when it comes to say bailing out the banking industry (cough*freddie mac fannie mae*) but when it comes to the small individuals who are losing their houses by the thousands, they can’t be assed to do a damn thing about it. Oh wait, yes they can. they complain about those greedy bottom feeders trying to get the American dream.

So in the never ending tale of woe that is my recent life, the water is out.

Kid and I are housesitting while Ruth is on vacation and when I sent the kid in to do the dishes, we realized that there is no water. None. Not a drop.

And I can’t seem to get a hold of anyone who might be able to tell me why there is no water here.

Fuckles.