Our Mid-life Crisis.

At what point in your consumer driven, work oriented, chronically exhausted, and severely dysfunctional life do you start to wake up about the unfulfilling nature of the American existence?

At what point do you realize that no matter how hard you work, there is no freedom waiting at the end of the rainbow to relieve you of your debt, cure you of your depression, restore your health, or, bring you anything other than momentary happiness?

Does this crisis await us all?

When did things change from "I know what I want to be when I grow up" to "this is what, if I'm lucky, I plan to accomplish before I'm dead"?

I turn 25 in one week. While I can say that I wish I were excited, I've always had a weird phobia/fascination with dying. To me, birthday's are a reminder of my mortality. Sort of like waiting for a mammogram to tell you when your time is up.

One year older for me is one year closer to death.

Children are so happy with so little. Some say it is the naivety of children--innocence maybe and the freedom to escape the misery that plagues adulthood. One day they will realize that adulthood is a series of depressing crossroads. "What am I doing in my life"? (logic), and then "I am working to achieve something great" (American Programming) create constant states of turmoil we will call "Capitalist Borderline Personality" for the moment being. And the need (more like addiction) that can only be relieved by more products; which we believe is power. Like a junkie that craves a heroin needle only to return to a state of depression and open sores where the needle penetrated their tender flesh.


Americans are house slaves, I've said this before. As controversial as it may sound, it is more realistic than what we care to admit. We are "better fed" (have more shitty processed food to choose from), and more "options" aka things to buy (IPOD touch or flat screen anyone?) All of which cover up a dull aching pain that can only be described as an unfulfilling urge to be something better --but without the ambition or wherewithal to plan an escape route to that destiny. I will say that we are the "better fed" and "better clothed" house slaves that are closer to master, and therefore have the "illusion of freedom" that stops us from fighting for our freedom.

Perhaps this is the reality we face right before we are shipped off to a retirement home or poverty for being "old" and therefore, too obsolete to work for our master.

when does it suddenly hit you like a ton of bricks that America has crushed your hopes and dreams. With the promise of freedom that will never come?

This is your fellow radical bitter old hag signing off.



A-i0n

Minimum Rage

"Kiss ass while you bitch so you can get rich while your boss gets richer off you. You'll work harder with a gun in your back, for a bowl of rice a day. Slave for soldiers till you starve and your head is skewered on a stake." Dead Kennedys lyrics

My spouse's new job is as a wage slave for a retail inventory service. Thanks to their tendency to work him to death, it pays better than working in a daycare. Just a word on daycares: their employees attend three years of college to work for subsistence wages and do housekeeping work in addition to the difficult job they actually trained for. Sexism isn't dead.

Back to spouse's job: since they still only pay minimum wage, they can easily work him to death- it's the only way to make enough money to make working for minimum wage worthwhile.

And ontario's minimum wage isn't really that low at $9.75/hr (of course, you should factor in the exchange rate, the higher price of everything and our 13% sales tax). It's just low enough to keep the slaves busy while giving the companies they work for an excuse to raise the cost of living. minimum wage is bullshit without price caps, because it creates an endless cycle of raising wages ever so slightly and raising prices to make sure that minimum wage workers are willing to work whatever hours and whatever conditions they're told to. Yesterday, spouse arrived home 7 hours before he had to be back at work. Who needs sleep?
The other day, at his job, one of the wage slaves got tired of being told he can't sit down while working his 10-15 hour shifts, told the boss-man to go fuck himself, and got fired. He waited outside the store, and cracked the first coworker to come out in the face with a baseball bat. The guy obviously has a problem besides the crappy job, but he made a decent point: poverty is violence. Workers deprived of food, sleep, breaks and even the slightest comfort at work are already abused. And it's not like this is the only corporation that does it, because this is not the only corporation with workers desperate enough for $ that they'll do whatever it takes to ensure their own survival and the company's soaring profits. Of course they're willing. Boss-man has the tacit ability to take away food, shelter and basic needs from his employees, just by hiring someone poorer and more desperate to work your hours.

Again, i say, minimum wage is bullshit. It's not about the wage, it's about making damn sure that everything you earn is paid right back to boss-man and his cronies for your basic needs.

Sometimes people will encourage me to quit my job (these people don't consider my labour "work" or my income mine, though) and go work for a boss-man for minimum wage (cause who else wants to hire a ho?). They call what I do "violent" and "degrading." But i've never been hit with a bat, or anything else, or forced to work on no sleep, without breaks or in physically damaging positions. Well, not since i stopped working for a boss-man, anyway.

Since women are more likely than men to work in low-paying positions, we bear the brunt of the abuse that poverty allows. Add our vulnerability to sexual harrassment and rape at work, and the increased likelihood of being assaulted at home or in our communities if we live in poverty, and we have ourselves a problem. Then consider the low-wage slaves in latin america, asia and africa, immigrant and poc domestic workers and literal slaves- people trafficked for farm and factory labour (sorry folks, but the "sex trade" does not have a monopoly on this, and is quite the minority if you stop calling consenting migrant sex workers "trafficked" to excuse their kidnap and deportation)- and we have ourselves a genocide. Women and people of colour are being forced, in order to eat and shelter themselves, to participate in a market that has every advantage over them. Yeah, there's exceptions- female CEOs and a black president etc.- but the rule stands, and firmly.

But talk about price caps, regulations, profit caps, livng wages and- heaven forbid- wealth redistribution and the boss-man and his cronies scream "socialism! fascism! OUR RIGHTS ARE BEING VIOLATED!" We watch the news and we're supposed to believe this, too. But the news lies, and our rights have already been to the firing squad.

The time will come when people get fed up with their own rights being contingent on their willingness to break their backs and devalue their lives, and find a way to guarantee their own food and shelter, absent of market participation. When no one is willing to be boss-man's meat. I hope it's soon.
#END

Shop Till You DropOut

what men need:
food, shelter, clothes/suits, shoes, soap, razors, deodorant/aftershave/cologne, bowflex+muscles, fancy car, presents to bribe women for sex

what women need:
food, shelter, clothes, shoes, soap, pink razors, pink deodorant/perfume/bodyspray, accessories, jewelery, more shoes, more clothes, makeup, hair products, decorations, lingerie, "help" fixing stuff/building stuff, low-fat food/diet food , diet pills/books/drinks, new clothes to fit after the diet, maternity clothes, children's clothes, children's toys, children's food, magazines to tell us what we need, fancy car, fancy wedding, "feminine" "hygiene" products

everyone, and especially women, faces a barrage of advertising telling her what she "needs." for women, looking "ugly" or "masculine" equates to looking "unprofessional" and "unlikable." so our list of "needs" just gets longer. my face isn't going to fall off if i don't put makeup on it, but i won't have a job for long- few men spend this kind of time or money on face paint. if you need "specialty products," say for the average female body size, or the vast majority of human faces that aren't white, the expense grows.
thing is, women already make less money than men. in canada, we earn 76 cents, working full time, for every dollar earned by men. in hamilton, where i live, it's 62 cents. since women are more likely to work in low-paying service positions, they're less likely to have benefits. i can't imagine trying to live with a disability or a child without public health care. so why are we giving the little wealth we do have right back to the men we slave away to earn it from? hmm.. or maybe that was the plan all along. *if we can't have women working for free at home, why not have them work for free by taking all their money back at the mall?*

even for necessities, like food and clothes, north americans of this generation are an oddity. people in developing countries don't have the option of depending on grocery stores for food, and (assuming their land isn't grabbed up by north american corporations) they use generations of wisdom to produce their own food. similarly, women, even in developed countries, used to teach each other to knit, crochet and sew.

we are the only idiots around willing to sell our security for the "luxury" of being useless and dependant.

and it's not like it's hard to get what you do need for free. buildings being torn down provide an array of free building materials for the willing woman. thanks to a few hours work and a helpful friend, my back yard boasts a reworked trellis, a brick and flagstone patio, garden walls, a rosebush and firewood: all free.
and have you actually looked in a grocery store's dumpster? There's a metro near my helpful friend's house with half a dozen bins of nothing but fresh vegetables. grocery stores have discovered that it's cheaper to raise the price of their food, knowing that no one's going to stop eating and few of us have the time to provide for ourselves (you know, cause we spend our time working, so we can depend on grocery stores instead), than to mark down older products when new ones arrive. cause then nobody would pay for the marked up new stuff. so they throw it out. fresh, crisp, green red and orange veggies. loaves upon loaves of bread. cheese galore. while people starve on the streets, they toss food out the back door.
i take men's money for a living- and i keep it. i don't buy wads of bleached cotton to cram up my vag. i eat free food from dumpsters. i can and do make clothes.
more importantly: i have the income i need to guarantee that i will never have to choose between being a victim of violence and being homeless. i can take care of myself and my family. i do not depend on the market for survival. and i have a lot of free time.

Wo/Man Enough

As the trial of Angie Zapata's murderer begins, about a year after she was killed by a date who "discovered," in the course of sexually assaulting her, that she had a penis, a google search of "transgender" produces this companion story: opposition to a bill banning discrimination based on gender orientation (to be frank, I find US law-making processes confusing.. 11 states have a similar law in place, and there's a federal and other state laws in the works, I think).
It's a precedent-setting case: the first murder of a transgendered woman to be tried as a hate crime. News reports stated that Zapata's killer began to suspect her gender identity, and, when she refused to "prove" that she was female, he put his hand on her crotch without her consent and felt her penis. This is mentioned in passing, as they describe how and why he "snapped" and "killed it," as he referred the the woman he beat to death and robbed. Though they did mention tha the two had "spent the night" and Zapata's mysterious not-putting-out behaviour, no commentary was provided about why, after suspecting that Zapata had formerly identified as a boy, he decided to sexually assault her rather than stop seeing her. Apparently, having a suspect gender is asking for it. But we already know that some sexual assaults just don't "count," right?
Opposition to the anti-discrimination bill, which is the basis of a hate crime prosecution, calls it a "bathroom bill," giving legal protection to perverts who want to use the "wrong" bathroom. I used a unisex bathoom in residence at school, and I can't say any harm came of it, aside from a few awkward conversations with a particularly chatty guy who sometimes occupied the stall next to mine. The rapes that took place in a university dorm the following year happened in bedrooms, not bathrooms (and were perpetrated, as is typical, by a male-identified, heterosexual man). But here's the rub: our cultural taboos about the toilet, and who should or shouldn't be allowed to see us using it, are being used as legitimate criticism of a bill that is aimed at preventing violence, employment, medical, legal, and educational discrimination. It's a measure that will protect transgendered people from poverty and illness, making them less vulnerable to violence in the first place, and which will provide necessary education to violent criminals who expect our courts to excuse their "gay panic" style attacks.
Why the opposition? There have never been any attacks on bathroom users by trans persons, ever, so that's clearly not the issue. Let's let gender/orientation lines get blurry for a moment, and think about why either/or/neither/both/other identifications (people who don't fit in to white-idealized versions of strong male man/submissive female woman gender dichotomies) are the target of so much violence. Zapata's killer stated that she performed oral sex on him. If he liked it, does that make him gay? In his mind, probably. Would it make him gay if he enjoyed oral sex with someone who identified as male? In my mind, no... but I tend not to fuss over gender.
What about a bunch of guys who attend a strip club together? Sure, they're looking at a naked woman, but the sexual relationship they're exploring is with each other. And if the stripper performs with a female partner, are they, or their audience, now lesbians? If the next show is a drag performace, and both gay- and straight-identified audience members think she's hot, what's their orientation? What gender do we call men who are raped in self-contained all-male societies, like prison? What gender do the hetero-identified rapists call the victims, or themselves? Who is more man: a white transgendered man/woman or a black transgendered man/woman (by Western standards, the black "look" is far more "masculine")? And what to make of all that muscley man-on-man action in professional wrestling, football, ufc? Where and how do any of these men fit into a system of sex-based heirarchies, once we recognize that manhood and heterosexuality are pretty fluid concepts? Much of men's objectification of women (I use this term against my better judgement, for lack of a better phrase, and without the implied disrespect to femme folk who work in sex industries) has nothing to do with women at all, and everything to do with male fraternity. Actually, even the word "fraternity" calls to mind homoerotic imagery of Bush and his "Skulls" pals dancing around in robes and spanking each other. Hawt. And male violence, whether against women or other men, tends to be about establishing male power: over women, over the earth, among competing men, over nations/races/cultures, and by collecting the most money or land. Anti-trans discrimination and violence are necessary components of a system that lets men engage in sex-based explorations and exchanges/seizures of power without having to sacrifice the ideal of the straight, masculine man.
My point is this: the non-existant victims of non-existant trans bathroom predators are a decoy, and Zapata, and every murdered woman like her, are what we're not supposed to see. Continuing anti-trans discrimination won't nail any sex predators because sex predators, by and large, are male-identified, heterosexual men. But it will protect the ideal of masculinity and the excuses it provides for "straight" men to create and maintain power through violence.
#END

Got Soul?

Erase all notions of positive stereotypes. They benefit the status quo. Because there are "positive" stereotypes in addition to the negative ones in every group, people "claim" the positive side because at least it's better than the negative. So people try viciously to prove the "positive" or accept it, and don't eliminate either. So quite clearly, both effectively stay in tact.

One of those we don't think about is the fact that black women can "sing" more strongly than white women. Seems "positive", so positive in fact that we get upset when white female soul singers come out. Actually, those white female soul singers are doing us justice. They show that black women are NOT genetically stronger in vocal range. Because, unfortunately, one cannot embrace the "positive strong black singer" stereotype and deject the "black women are loud" stereotype. They come from the same "stock".

I love Mary J, Jennifer Hudson, and a variety of other "strong" vocal singers. But when we contrast them against Mariah Carey, or other falsettos it is clear that stereotypes have created a DEMAND for a particular type of black female singer. Mariah, being lightskinned, and a "high pitched" singer plays into her femininity where as Mary J being a dark, "bold", and "strong" singer plays into the opposite.


Black women being "soulful" strong singers SUPPORTS the argument that our natural voices are louder, our bodies are stronger, and that "strength" is the justification for how we deserve to be treated. We can't escape that.

Agree, disagree?

What to do?

How awesome would it be to have a room with a bunch of these in different positions?

I'm just thinking about ideas to organize my 300+ books. My parents have given me an expiration date on the other 200 or so I have at home (they will keep them for me but not forever). As of now I found some vanity shelves outside, and have put most of them on those. But that shelf is incredible.



In further news, I have borrowed about 5 books from the library.

So far "Whatever Happened to Daddy's Little Girls?" is incredible. Everyone should pick it up.

School is for dummies.

What if monotonous biology/chemistry classes were replaced with understanding your bodies chemistry and the basics of health. What if we knew what the basics of what doctors know? What if you could determine whether or not you even need to go to the doctor when you see symptoms? What if in the event that you even need a doctor, your doctor and yourself could compare notes about your symptoms?

What if instead of reading dead and outdated authors such as Charles Dickens and books like "The Great Gatsby"-English classes taught you how to read legal documents, the law, how to analyze what others write, and how to develop the analytical skills necessary to effectively write and therefore communicate?

What if Math classes where numbers were a source of hell, boredom, and frustration were replaced with showing the student how to budget money, how to read financial documents, and how to file your taxes for example?

What if Gym classes, which are a source of hell for teenagers who are uncomfortable with their bodies (and how they fit into gender hierarchy), were replaced with nutrition courses? What if instead of Gym being about comparing meat with jocks, were about holistic nutrition, how to eat to live?

What if instead of dating history as "being in the past", "it didn't happen to us", or "thank god America is free", we learned that what we had in common with those of the past. What if we learned how similar our struggles are with those in our history as a whole, instead of totally disconnecting from it? What if instead of boring Social Studies courses about how great our dead white presidents were; we could create a better future outcome in societies, by simply looking at older societies?

If these things were accomplished, what would that mean for the American Economy? If we knew how not to be sick, what would happen to the pharmaceutical industry? What would happen to a lot of jobs, that actually, discourage the development of students?

We alllll know what the current American Education system has created.


AMERICA

HATES

THINKERS.

When will we learn?

i know i am

VOTE MCKINNEY! VOTE MCKINNEY! VOTE MCKINNEY! VOTE MCKINNEY! VOTE MCKINNEY!

Vegan

At the core of my heart is my commitment to the non-human people of this world. To work toward a goal of harm reduction and walking lightly, I live as a vegan. To me, being vegan includes not ingesting the bodies or secretions of non-human animals. I do not wear things that are made from the bodies of animals. It also means that I do not participate in the various events that feature non-consenting animals including zoos, rodeos and aquariums.

My deep commitment to our furred, feathered and fined sisters and brothers is rooted in many things.

For one, I am a Jew. In Ashkenazi culture, we are taught to think about WHO we are eating or wearing. For example, we are meant not to eat the body of an animal along with her secretions. For me, being vegan is what kosher principles are all about: just because something is available to me to eat does not justify uncritical consumption. And my privilege as a human in this world does not justify my using other animals’ bodies at my whim.

I am a feminist. I believe in looking critically at the way female people are treated in society. I want to tease out misogynistic saturation in my life. When I think about the consumption of bodily secretions I know that these are female bodies from which milk and eggs are sucked. I know how raw, bloody and full of pus my own nipples would be if I had metal suction cups forcing liquid from them for hours on end. My own menstrual cycles let me feel the pain of those whose bodies are starved so they will be shocked into an unnatural egg cycle. I am left horrified. I wonder if this abuse of female bodies would be appropriate in a feminist, non-patriarchal society.

I am human. I know that no person can kill animal after animal on an assembly line without suffering irreversible psychological damage.

Pure logic. If we were not stuffing non-human animals full of grain and corn, those foods could be fed to the millions of people who are hungry around the world. I refuse to exercise my first-world privilege by eating flesh because I know that a cow or chicken has a relatively small body compared with the amount of grain s/he must eat.

I have been criticized before that I am exerting my privilege as a first-worlder by being vegan. This weak argument often sounds like “Some people don’t GET to eat meat” or “it’s so white to be vegetarian, people with culture eat meat”. Just because endless consumption is available to me as an american DOES NOT mean that I must participate and more importantly, to participate creates a world of suffering from humans to non-human animals to the environment as a whole. There are cultures throughout history and across the world that encourage their people to think critically about what they use, take and eat. Jewish, Rasta, Buddist, Hindu and Muslim cultures all ask you to think about what you are eating.

Please do not censor your comments. I want to have a space where we can speak openly about each others’ thoughts and beliefs.

On race construction

found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/herzogbr/2228668286/

Please consider an earlier post on this blog "On Whiteness" for more

Other Blogs

Comrades-
I have added more links under "sites we dig" and I recommend that you check out:

http://jwablog.jwa.org/
http://www.angrybrownbutch.com/
http://vegansofcolor.wordpress.com/
http://www.shalomveg.com/

I think their names speak for themselves- I am loving this blog thing- please add more links to "sites we dig" or put them in the comments here and I'll put them up for you.

love,
Comrade AJ

Inspirational Revolutionaries

<---Kola Boof
poet, novelist, womanist, embracer of true matriarchal African relgion


Emma Goldman ---->
anarchist, healer, began revolutionary work in her LATE TEENS!!, inspiration, founded the ACLU **BISEXUAL JEW**




Look these womyn up, read their works and about them. They are our sisters and ancestors we shall continue and support their work!

love,
The Anarchist Jew ;)