So I got this lovely piece of shit in my email box:

Dear Bitch (or do you prefer “Cunt”?),I am writing with regard to your challenge below about something interesting to say.  I am just wondering how such a shallow witch like yourself could ever be receptive to anything truly interesting (in case you’re not getting it this is my challenge to you).  Also wondering if you’re young and dumb or experienced and bitter.  
The last bitch I confronted came up with the brilliant, “So fucking what?”
Don’t worry I am not expecting much more from you,
Q

This is from a Mr. (I assume mister because let’s be honest, this kind of random hate doesn’t usually come from ladies) Quimby Smith, or quimbys@hotmail.com

Now after having done this blogging while female shtick for so many fucking years, I have zero patience for anonymous hate mail. I will, from now on, publish the names and email addresses of shitfaces. No getting to hide behind my common decency. You want to be an asshole, you’re an asshole whose words are now attached to your (probably made up) name and address.

I am, or was a little surprised to get hater mail. I haven’t written anything in months that could be thought of as even mildly controversial. Or even mildly interesting. (Thanks gainful employment!) Why the fuckity fuck now?

And then I remembered, it’s election season. And the Obama campaign kicks off in the next week or so. Paid troll harassing the progressive non-believers? Unpaid troll just using election season to spread the misogyny? Does it matter? Nope.

Now I am not even a twee bit religious, but you reap what you sow. And the 2008 Obama campaign reaped a whole lot of lady-hating dudebros. And you know they are all just rabidly waiting to be uleashed.

But if rape threats and stalkers and shitheads didn’t make me support Obama in the last election, why on earth would I support him now? Obama is exactly the politician I thought he was in 2008. He’s a corporate shill, a warmongering shitface, and a power-hungry asshat of citizen killing proportions. And while I had thought of just sitting this election out because who wants to spend the energy arguing with fanatics that 2 percent less evil is still evil, I think that viscous and stupid shitfaces who email hate will be the thing that brings me back in.

Get the fucking popcorn. This is gonna be good.

Money is fake, yo. But debt is not.

She’s right, btw. We do need to think about debt in a different way. She talks specifically about a debt to nature, but we need to change the way we think about our debt to each other. We owe it to ourselves, our friends and families and children and the children of our friends and families and hell, even people we don’t know or care about, to make society better.

I’m all tapped out this month, so I am doing the other thing I can do to help.

Help Sasha and her partner and animals stay housed. If you can’t give, spread the word. If you can give, do that and spread the word.

I have this memory of spending 4th of July watching fireworks with one of the most painfully beautiful gay boys in history. He grabbed my hand at one point an said “I like to think of it as Happy Inter-Dependence Day!” And since we all know the government has sold out everyone but banksters and fraudsters and kleptocrats, we have to do what we can for each other. People first. You all kept Kid and I from Tent City. I am hoping we can all do the same for Sasha. Every little bit helps.

Fucking new blogger fucking sucks, btw.

Me: (struggling to open a prescription bottle) Why the fuckity fuck do they give people with muscle problems bottles that are impossible to open?
 Kid: Because it’s child-proofed, duh. And I can open that if you want.
Me: (glowering) You know the ability to open bottles goes away on your 18th birthday, right?
Kid: (does actual face-palm) FACE!!!! PALM!!!! If there was a wall it would be FACE WALL!!!!!
Me: Oh what can I do to make that happen? I wanna see it!!!

 And now I am sad because in less than a year I will no longer be able to use and abuse the Inappropriate Conversations With Children tittle.

 In not unrelated news, I am officially gimpy enough to qualify for the cheap bus pass. If I drove, this would be the equivalent of getting to park in the handicap spot. I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s weird. It makes it official and permanent in a way that just having a diagnosis did not. Now as to actually obtaining the bus pass, disabled people actually have to go into the Metro offices downtown to get it. That’s just a boatload of gatekeeping shittery right there. Luckily, my work is right around the corner, but it will mean having a very very long day of both work and line standing in the Metro office. If I lived or worked more than a single bus away, trying to get into the damn office might be hard enough to just say fuck it and pay for the full price fare. I keep having that problem with Kid actually. He doesn’t have his own bus pass, so he either borrows mine or we have to make sure we have the change/cash for him. Often we don’t have any cash because I don’t like paying cash machine fees and always forget to get cash back at the store. Kid and I have to go into a different Metro office to get him a youth fare card. He would get the cheaper fare if I did it, but because it is so full of hassle and I have been in mountains of pain since my old meds stopped working, I just pay adult price for him.

Gatekeeping! If you have the time, energy, and ability you can get the benefits. If you don’t, fuck you!

If you’ve got some bucks to share or a spare juicer contraption type thing, go throw it at the lovely Sasha.

This is what health insurance does to the people of this country. It puts the sick in desperate situations and stagnates the economy for everyone but the one percent.

It was lost before there was even a name for it. It was lost with the Hyde amendment, that meant poor women on Medicaid had to pay out of pocket for abortion services, unless you live on one of a handful of progressive states that use state money to pay for it.

It was lost with with the enactment of Welfare Reform, removing the guarantee of some small income to the poorest of women and children.

It was lost with weak child support enforcement and the refusal of Congress to allow federal collection of all child support through the IRS, instead leaving it to the patchwork of state agencies.

It was lost everytime another clinic in small town was shut down. It was lost when long waiting periods coupled with long drives meant that poor women with precarious employment had to choose between being fired or having a kid they weren’t able to care for.

It was lost when the Family Medical Leave Act made it so that small employers didn’t have to provide unpaid the same leave to care for a sick child or parent or to have a baby that large employers do.

It’s lost everytime feminism focuses on the glass ceiling with the rising tides lifts all boats theory while ignoring that women are more likely to live in poverty than men.

Feminism is a whole lot about what we do with our own wombs, but it’s also about making sure being female doesn’t come with a monetary penance. It’s about making sure that women don’t have to choose between feeding and housing their kids or keeping themselves and their children safe from violent partners.

Went to see the Hunger Games last night. It’s more than a week since it was released and we still had to deal with sold-out shows and long-ass lines. But it was good. It’s hard to translate a first-person narrative into a movie with no narration, so huge chunks of what Katniss is thinking and large swaths of backstory are missing. And those missing things are generally the details of the socio-economic-politcal issues. But the story is basic enough to still be very strong without it.

That’s not what this post is about. The author made choices throughout the book to give voice to the others of society. The poor. The not white. The people with disabilities. They are all represented. What I have found is that people’s reaction to what made it into the movie (poverty, race, gender) and what didn’t (disability, mental and physical) shows just where their privilege lies or doesn’t.

When you are other, when you are someone who rarely gets to see images of yourself reflected in media, you are attuned to look for examples and cling to them like a life raft. If you don’t have that particular flavor of oppression, and you aren’t making a conscious effort to overcome privileged thinking, then those details are skipped, ignored, tuned out in an effort to make the story conform to the narrative you have for yourself.

This explains all the screaming biggots on Twitter who suddenly didn’t have a tear to shed for Rue, a black girl. The movie glosses over the slavery reference regarding Distric 11 and completely eliminates the conversation about how much worse the (mostly Black) workers in 11 are treated for eating food they harvest, versus Katniss being allowed to sneak out of the fence and hunt for her family.

It explains why women and girls, who never bought into the Twilight love triangle dynamic (seriously, the Twilight trailer before the movie got major laughs. I may have said something like “Wrong audience” loudly to the screen) are so into this series. The love triangle isn’t something Katniss wants. It’s something forced on her. She’s a survivor. She doesn’t have time or energy to think about romance. And that’s obvious from the book, though without her narration it’s less obvious in the movie. It’s Maslov’s pyramid. You can’t think mushy thoughts when your belly is empty.

What was left out was the disability narrative. Haymich is a man who drinks to drown out the pain of having survived the games and then watched the Capitol kill off his family whenever he even thought of stepping out of line. If you were to put it in current lingo- he very likely suffers from PTSD. Peeta loses his leg. It’s not a terrible cut that magically heals. It’s removed. Cut off. He literally comes out of the games having paid with a limb. Neither of these things are in the movie. Haymich cleans up his act quickly when the kids need a real mentor. Peeta gets what amounts to a deep scratch.

But unless you live with a disability, it would be easy to write off these missing plot points as superfluous, or just to hard to fit into a movie that is already very long.

And while the movie does show the poverty of the districts versus the capitol, it missed the story about the class division and colorism within district 12. Peeta, Prim and Katniss’ mom are all blue-eyed, blonde-haired, delicate flowers of the merchant class. Katniss, Gale, Haymich and Katniss’ dad are the black-haired, olive-skinned members of the mining class.

Now I am interested to see if they include bisexuality and coerced sex in the next movie (spoilers!!!!!!) or if that is another thing that just doesn’t make it because of time constraints or a desire for a family friendly rating. I wonder how many people even picked up on that in the book.