This is the opening to her post:

I’ve never been raped.

Why?  Because I’m lucky.

Nothing more.  Nothing less.

Go read the rest of her piece right now because I’m going to be riffing on it in my own post.  Go on, read it.  I’ll wait.  Let me know when you’re done.

Back?  Good.

Unlike Emily, I am not a lucky one.  I have been in two situations in which I endured recurring rape.  Those of you who read my blog regularly know about it because I post about it from time to time.  The first time, it started when I was seven.  The second, I was 21 and in a foreign country.  Both seemed like they happened a life time ago, and yet, I still deal with the aftermaths and the ramifications to this day.

I started this post a few days ago, and I abandoned it.  Why?  Because I saw what happened in ee’s threads about rape, both at BJ and at ABL’s place.   I saw how the excuses started pouring in, the rationale, the apologia.  “Yeah, it’s terrible that she experienced that, but…”

No.  There is no fucking but at the end of that sentence.   No one deserves to be raped.  No one.  Not even if she* was in the wrong part of town late at night.  Not even if she accepted a drink from a guy and he slipped her a Roofie.  Not even if she was dressed in tight clothing.  Not even if she went home with a guy she didn’t know and then changed her mind.

No one deserves to be raped.  Ever.**

The second reason I abandoned this post is because I’m tired of talking about it even though both experiences have deeply affected me, and I still deal with the ramifications to this day.

When I sleep, I have to have a white noise machine on to block out the sounds.  I also wear earplugs, a mouth guard (because I grind my teeth), and an eye mask.  I sleep with a pillow over my eyes, and I pull the covers up to my nose.  When I am anywhere that is not my home or some place trusted, I have to be in a seat facing the door, and I cannot stand to have someone touch me without my permission or without me knowing the person is going to do it.  In a movie theatre, I have to be near the aisle.  I hate being hemmed in in any way.  I have a fucked-up sleep schedule in part because I prefer being awake in the night–when the bad shit happens.  When things get really bad, I sleep on the couch rather than my bed.  My cats love that because they aren’t allowed in my bedroom (I’m allergic).

If I see a rape scene in a movie and did not know it was coming, I immediately flash back to my own experiences.  It’s the same when I read about rape.  And, since I have an eidetic memory, I get all the sounds, sights, smells, feelings, bodily sensations, and tastes of what happened at the time.  When I read about the assault on Lara Logan, my body immediately tensed up, and I felt as if I were under attack.  My heart started racing, and my face flushed.  I can’t listen to rape jokes without flashing back on my experiences.  I may not experience the full memories each time, but with every joke, every account of rape, every depiction I see, my body immediately reacts as if I’m under attack.  Hell, when Representative Gifford was shot, I immediately went into a deep depression.  I could barely move for two days, and I couldn’t figure out why.  I felt stupid because I didn’t know her, and I didn’t want to appropriate her tragedy.  It was partly the PTSD, yes, but it was more.  When my therapist helped me realize why it affected me so, it was a relief, but it also made me realize just how much further I have to go in dealing with the ramifications of my rapes.   I have posted about it before, and you can look through my archives for more in-depth musings about how I have dealt (badly) with the rapes.

Rapes.  Plural.

Do you know what being raped does to you?  Or rather, did to me?  It smashed my soul.  I’m talking about the second experience as I still can’t really talk about the first very easily.  And, as I am cross-posting this at ABL’s place, I am even more careful in choosing my words.   In my case, it was a mixture of sex, cultural differences, and power.  This guy was a predator, and he knew that I was easy prey.  What I said didn’t matter.  What I wanted didn’t matter.  Who I was didn’t matter.  I was simply a receptacle for his sperm, and in that way, he mirrored my first abuser as well.

And, I believed him that I didn’t matter and that I was nothing more than a sperm-receptacle in part because of my first experience, so I stayed with him for as long as I was in the country.  I endured him threatening to kill himself if I left him, sex without condoms even though he visited prostitutes, and him telling me how many babies we would make together.  I was lucky in that I had gone to Thailand for a semester abroad, and I had a coming-home date.  Otherwise, who knows what would have become of me?  This was 19 years ago, and I can still remember it as if it happened yesterday.  No amount of stuffing it back stops the symptoms of PTSD from sprouting up all the goddamn fucking time.

The third reason I’ve put off finishing this post is because of something I touched upon earlier–all the blame and judging people do about victims of rape.  Within hours of reports of Lara Logan’s assault, people were opining that women weren’t fit to do the job, that she was pretty and blond in a savage country, so what could she expect, that she was a homewrecker who got what she deserved, and other ugly shit.  It’s a variant of,“She dresses like a slut. She deserves it.” “She’s in a man’s job. What does she expect?” “She said yes to him once, so it’s not really rape.” “Men can’t help it. They have needs.”

As a society, we are extremely unkind towards victims/survivors of rape.  We judge them in ways we wouldn’t dream of judging any other crime victims.  So, the woman is not only raped, she is taken apart yet again if she dares talk about being abused.  It’s no wonder that victims often times stay silent–who the hell wants to deal with being judged on top of dealing with the aftermaths of being assaulted/raped?

The biggest reason I haven’t finished the post before this, however, is because I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable.  It’s hard to hear about someone being raped.  It’s not nearly as hard as being raped, but it’s hard.  What do you say to someone who recounts a horrific experience of abuse at the hands of her uncle, father, boyfriend, date, friend, stranger?   I have seen how people shift and look away when I bring up the subject.  And, to be fair, it’s not easy to work it into every day conversation.

All of this has kept me silent during the past week or so while my co-bloggers have been kicking butt on the issue of rape and taking names.  I have other issues going on right now, so I let it go.  I felt guilty, though, because I know that part of the problem of rape is that people don’t talk about it.   I also had to grapple with an unwelcome realization I had about myself while reading about all the anti-women bills the GOP wanted to pass (and did, in some cases, in the House).   They wanted to curb abortion funding (which only goes to rape in the first place and incest) only to women who’ve been ‘forcibly raped’*** along with a whole bunch of other batshitcrazy things.   Forcibly, meaning visible bruises.  My immediate response?   I would kill any man who tried to rape me before he could penetrate.  Me.  Who once said I would let someone kill me before I killed someone else.  But, you see, I cannot go through that again, and if I were to be raped and get pregnant and forced to have the child, that would be a living death, anyway.   It was not a nice realization, but it helped me see that I DO think I matter and fuck the Republicans for trying to negate that with their misogynistic bullshit.

While I was musing all this over in my head, I read this post by TNC.  In it, he talked about how victims/survivors of rape need to give up their privilege of privacy in order to make rape less shameful and secretive.  Only, he said it much better than I just paraphrased.  He was not advocating mandatory reporting (which I would not support), but he was saying that if we want to erase the stigma that surrounds rape, those of us who have gone through it must speak out about it.

I can’t recommend TNC enough.  He strictly moderates his threads, so we’re able to have thoughtful discussions that get heated and passionate, but never nasty.  Or, if they do, he cleans them up.  It’s because of this that several TNC commenters, male and female, felt safe enough to share their own experiences of sexual abuse/rape.   It was painful to read, but it was also powerful and empowering to know that so many cool people survived and even thrived from such horrific experiences.   I was sorrowful that so many people had experience something similar to what I went through, though.  I don’t want anyone to be a part of that club.

One of the worst things about being raped is feeling like you’re alone, broken, and worthless.  I felt guilty and thought it was my fault, and I thought it permanently ruined me.   I did many crazy things after being raped the second time, and I didn’t care if I died.  Hell, my soul was already dead, so I might as well make my body match my soul.   I was too chickenshit to kill myself, so I left it up to the fates.  If I died in a fiery car crash (as long as no one else was hurt)–so be it.  If I got run over by a bus–so be it.

I was dead inside, anyway.  I can’t emphasize this enough.  I was the walking undead after experience two ongoing rapes.   I didn’t want to live.

In a way, I was lucky because I didn’t die, even though it didn’t feel like it at the time.  I was also lucky because I have always enjoyed (consensual) sex.  I love it, and I find it very life-affirming.  It’s joyful, playful, and just a whole lotta damn fun.  In addition, I know there are really damn good men out there.  I haven’t written off the whole gender just because of my two really horrible experiences and the other incidences that every woman endures (groping, cat-calling, insinuations, insults).  I have loved good men, and I have men as friends who are very dear to me.  I am grateful that my negative experiences have not caused me to lose faith in all mankind.

After reading TNC’s post, I summoned up the nerve to finish this post.  Yet, something was still holding me back.  Then, I read this post by Emily (my co-blogger at ABL’s place) recounting the story of a woman’s rape.   The woman had sent it to Emily and consented for it to be published.  It was hard to read, but it made my decision for me.  I had to write my post, come hell or high water (most likely the former).

Today, I am in the best place I’ve been in my life.   That’s damning with faint praise because I was in a really shitty place even two years ago.  However, I realize that I have to face the past, which means talking about it, and find new ways to cope with the old, old wounds.  Tai chi is helping me tremendously with that, as are my friends who are fierce in their loyalty to me.   My cats are of immeasurable comfort to me, and I have a brother upon whom I can count.  I have my health, my writing and performing abilities, and I have my warped sense of humor.  I will be relying on all these to help me continue to survive, hopefully, to thrive.

I write this post because I cannot stay silent–not now when the GOP is waging war against women (well, everyone who is not them, really, but especially women), trying to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood (donate! I did.  And, stand with them, too.  I did that as well), and being jackholes in general.   I have a platform, two actually–my own place and ABL’s place–and I intend to use them to the best of my abilities.  I am just one voice, but I know how to scream.

Cross-posted at ABL’s place.

*For the sake of simplicity, I will be using the heterosexual norm of man as perp, woman as victim/survivor for the rest of this post.  I am fully aware that men are victims and that women are perps as well.

**If we want to discuss things a woman might be better off not doing, that’s a different kettle of fish.  It’s also one I am not going to tackle in this post.

***And some minors.  The bill was poorly-written, so it was hard to tell exactly which minors they wanted to protect.

Actually, this started a little bit ago.  I have a party to attend this Saturday, and the dress is sexy/sophisticated.  I don’t wear makeup as a general rule for many reasons, but I suddenly had the desire to girl it up a bit.  I went to the MAC website (a colored girl’s best friend), and I did a little surfing.  I wear lipstick now and again, and I favor dark, bold colors.  I remember the last time I visited a MAC counter, they told me they were getting black-colored makeup in a few weeks.  I promptly forgot about it, but remembered it upon my visit to the website.  Now, in case you don’t know, black is my favorite color.  It’s like a second skin to me, and I wear it often.  So, I found a shade of lipstick called Cyber that is bluish-black, a lip pencil, and black nail polish for my toes.  I have no nails of which to speak on my hands, so I won’t bother with them.

Then, I got it into my head that I needed a cute pair of shoes.  I hate shopping.  I am extremely picky, and I have wide feet.  All I wanted were a pair of black platform heels in wide.  I scoured the intertubes, but I couldn’t find anything.  An offhand remark by a friend led me to looking at stripper shoes, and while I really liked the styles, I don’t DO four inch heels, let alone eight.  Plus, I don’t like patent leather–I prefer satin or suede.  So, while I love the look of this, this, this, and this (this is just hilarious), none of them matched up my specs.  I did find some cute black platforms with sensible heels (sensible stripper?)–for drag queens.

I gave up because I couldn’t find what I wanted–which is pretty much the norm for me.  I do have a pair of shoes that will work–and they are ‘in’ this year if my intensive research isn’t wrong.  That’s funny as I bought them many years ago, but fashion does like to cycle.  I also have a pair of go-to boots (you women know what I mean.  The pair you can always count on to match pretty much anything).  I have a sexy little black dress I’ve never worn, so I’m good to go.

“Minna, why the hell are you talking about clothes and makeup?” I can hear you say.  By the way, thank you for allowing me to put words into your collective mouths.  I really appreciate it, and it helps move things along.

I’m talking about them because I can, of course, but I’m also talking about them because for once, I feel like talking about them.

My history with being a woman is fraught with peril.  I have had very mixed emotions about being female, some that I wouldn’t even admit to myself.  When I was younger (in my early twenties), I got along better with men than with women for various reasons, and I was wary of other women–though I wasn’t really conscious of it at the time.  I eschewed all things typically considered feminine while at the same time declaring myself a feminist.

An aside:  Sarah Palin, I know feminists, and you, Madame, are no fucking feminist.

OK.  Had to get that out.  Back to feminine v. feminist.

I have a very byzantine mind in that I can twist anything into a pretzel.  I discovered feminism in college and became a strident feminist.  I stopped wearing makeup (which I only really started wearing in my last year of high school) and stopped shaving (not that I had much to shave, anyway).  If guys didn’t have to do all that shit, why should I?  Besides, I have very sensitive skin, and at that time, makeup was murder on the skin.  And, I decided getting forty-five more minutes of sleep was way more important than slapping on a face.

That was my stated stance and one I still believe to some extent.  However, it covered nuances such as how stupid I feel because I can’t put makeup on very well.  I’ve practiced, but most of the time, I end up looking like a clown.  When they handed out the girl gene, I was absent.  Lipstick is about the only thing I can put on without making myself look ridiculous, which is probably why I chose it as my signature piece of makeup.

In addition, and it took me years of therapy to figure this out, because of the abuse, I started identifying with my abuser, so to speak.  As much as I hated my father for what he did to me, I hated my mother more for not protecting me.  It’s not rational, and it’s not fair, but there you go.   I was saying something about this to my therapist years ago, and she said, “You’re equating feminine with weak.”  I was pissed, but she was right.  If I had to be honest, I did associate being feminine with being weak, and I wanted no part of it.  Now, you could argue that being a child, I wasn’t very feminine when the abuse happened.  True.  However, my experience in Thailand only reinforced that vaguely-held notion that being feminine was dangerous.  I was stalked by one guy in Thailand and date-raped by another.

The former was not my fault at all.  The latter though, was not my fault, but I had to take some responsibility.  Because of my own fucked-up view of sexuality and sex and all that shit, I put myself in a dangerous situation without truly thinking about the consequences.

It’s weird because I thought of being feminine as being helpless and weak, but I thought of feminine sexuality as too-powerful.  It drove men to do crazy things, and it destroyed people in the process.  I am not saying this was a rational way of looking at things, which I know, in retrospect, that it was not.  It was, however, the result of my messed up childhood and experience in Thailand.  My femininity was not to be trusted because it was powerful and because it made me weak.

A decade ago, Kiki and I had a friendly disagreement about being girly.  I had bought a couple barrettes with glitter on them, but I was hesitant to wear them.  She said it was OK to be girly now and then, but I didn’t trust that.  Recently, I had the same discussion with Choolie, and she said essentially the same thing as I revealed my hesitation about buying makeup and shoes.  Kiki told me she loved it that I was girling up.

One reason I have such a hard time with wearing makeup and intentionally dressing sexy is because it garners attention.  I know that there are people who find me attractive for some unfathomable reason (yes, I had to add that on), and it makes me uncomfortable to draw attention to my assets, as it were.  Now, one would think because I have such a laissez-faire attitude towards clothing that I wouldn’t have a problem with drawing attention to myself, but in my mind, there is something distinctly different about throwing on a tank top sans bra and a pair of boxers to run to the local store and actually dressing up with intent to be hawt.

It’s difficult for me to think that I can be consciously sexy and not have it used against me.  But, I am willing to take baby steps in trying to reclaim my femininity and to stop thinking of it as a bad word.

I am still working through this issue, obviously, so I am sure I will blog about it again.

Moving on to my therapist’s office.  One of her specialties is mothering so she has many parenting magazines in the waiting room.  One of them is Brain Child, which is an interesting read.  In the one I picked up, there was an review of three books about childfree women.  I thought, “Oh, interesting” and started to read.  The writer, I’ll call her Jill because I can’t remember her real name, and I can’t be bothered to look it up, starts out by saying she’s childfree, so hey, she’s a good woman to review the books.  Fair enough.  But then she talks at length as to why she’s childfree (genetic faults in the family) before reviewing the book.  Disclosure:  I haven’t read the books she was reviewing, so I am actually critiquing her review of the books and not the books themselves.

The first was divided in three parts.  The first part was by women who were firmly childfree.  The second was by women who were ‘on the fence’ (I think the section was even labeled that), and the third was by women who decided to have kids (if I remember correctly).  Jill talked very briefly about the first part, but dismissed it as not interesting.  She said the other sections were richer.  Huh, what?  It turns out what she meant was the other sections were more compelling to her because they featured similar stories of women who struggled with the decision before deciding not to have them for mostly genetic reasons.

Jill’s conclusion of this book was, “It’s OK for women who are childfree to say they regret not having kids and for women with kids to say how hard it is to be a parent.”

Now, while I don’t dispute that many of the women who haven’t had children may have regrets about their decision, I am not one of them.  And, I don’t think it’s verboten to say that you have regrets about not being a mother.  When I was in my early twenties, it was damn-near expected that I would express my deepest remorse for not wanting kids.

Jill decried the second book because it was written by a twenty-something who was trumpeting how great her life was as a childfree woman.  As for the third book, Jill emphasized how many of the women focused on nurturing children even though they were not moms.  Jill’s conclusion was that you, too, can be a nurturing woman without kids of your own–and it’s an inherent part of a woman’s being to be a nurturing person.

Again, I fully acknowledge that I read the review through my own biased filter, but she pissed me off.  The whole damn time she was apologizing for not having kids or rationalizing and focusing on the essays that reinforced her belief that being without is somehow lesser.  Again, I don’t doubt that many women who choose not to have kids have mixed feelings about their decision, but not all of us do.

By the way, the second book apparently uses the term unparenting to describe her childfree status.  No.  Just no.  That’s a stupid word.  I don’t even like childfree, but it’s better than childless.

Anyhow, as I have said before, deciding not to have kids was the easiest decision I ever made, and the best one I ever made.  I don’t regret it, and I don’t wonder what my life would be like if I had kids.  Do you want to know how often I think about the fact that I don’t have kids (when I’m not blogging about it)?  Never.  It’s a non-factor in my life, incidental at best.  And, I resent the implication that I have to think about nurturing kids in some way because I don’t have my own.  I don’t hear that being asked of men without children.

As for the richer reasons not to have children, sure, not having kids because I don’t want them isn’t sexy or a rich, complex reason, but it’s true.  I mean, I could add on the fact that I was abused, that I think I would be a horrible mother, blah blah blah, but that would just be embellishing to make other people feel more comfortable with my decision.

Something about the simple phrase, “I don’t want kids” made people uncomfortable when I first started saying it.  I don’t think it’s as true now, but if this article is any indication, it may not be entirely false, either.

Finally, Oliver Wang is guest-blogging at TNC’s place.  He posted an entry about the correlation between hours of housework being done and how much sex a married couple was having.  Predictably, the thread evolved into a ‘men want this, women want this’ discussion.  There was one man in particular who irritated me by stating that men need to be drained at least twice a week and who wants to sit next to a woman watching reality TV for hours just to get laid?  I am exaggerating, but only slightly.  You can read the thread if you like, and I am sure you can figure out who I am by my handle.

Anyway, I called him out in part because I am tired of the meme that men are horndogs and women are frigid bitches who only put out to please their men.  This guy was making it seem like a universal with a few guys backing him up.  My point was that this was his situation and I have consistently been in the opposition position, which, again, I will admit is probably not as usual as his situation, but I know other women who have very high sex drives, so it’s not as if I am completely alone in this.

The interesting part to me was that some of the mothers commented that after spending the whole day fending off their children, they don’t necessarily want to be touched by their husbands.  After spending appreciable time with my nephews, I could emphasize.  One woman said she wanted her body to be her own.

Anyway, the first guy got hammered by several women and a few women, not just me, but it left me wondering as to how much of an outlier I am.  Then again, he was talking post-children, so who knows?  His main point was that if the wife doesn’t put out, she shouldn’t be surprised when the man cheats.  He gave lip-service to both parties being satisfied, but it was clear that he only meant himself.  And, he said if a woman wants sex all the time, what man isn’t going to be OK with that?

Um, dude.  Seriously.  Back that truck up.  Not all men have high sex drives.  That’s a myth.  And, while men may think about sex a lot, they aren’t always so eager to actually have it.

But this is my point.  He was talking about his experiences and extrapolating them to other men.  Another guy said, “You just described my marriage!”  However, these guys married these women knowing full well what they were like.  And, the first guy married TWO women knowing full well what they were like.  So, to some extent, they must want those kind of women.  It’s like my ex telling me that men liked to complain about their women not liking sports because it’s a way of bonding.  They don’t want their women to like sports.  I agree.

As for sex, in my personal experience, guys are threatened by a woman who wants sex more than they do, so while they may complain about their girlfriends/wives not wanting sex, they would complain more if their wives were constantly after them for sex.

I will fully admit that my tendency in the past to choose people who talk more than they put out is partly because of my neuroses.  I have had exceptions, but for the most part, it’s true.  However, I have other female friends in the same boat who don’t share my neuroses, so it’s not completely just me, either.

It seems that the root of the gender divide is still there.  There are more men and women who have moved past it, but there are still plenty in the trenches fighting that tired war.  As I am struggling with my own issues re: femininity and sexuality, I really need to stop participating in what I consider non-issue subjects (that women can want to have sex as much if not more so than men).  I just need to stick to that resolve.

P.S.  Fourth vid is my official stripper song, even though the lead singer has a very tame idea of what a crazy bitch actually is.

So, the Healthcare Reform Bill passed the House tonight.  I have to be honest in that I had my doubts it would actually pass.  I had a friend who told me right after the Senate passed their version that it was all theatre and that the bill would pass in the end (ed. it was before the Senate passed the bill, which makes more sense), but I am a pessimist at heart, so I didn’t want to pay too much heed to his words.  In the last few weeks, I have been burnt out on HCR.  I mean, there are only so many times I can read about death panels and mandatory abortions and how the government wants to come between me and my doctor before I start honing my rusty pitchfork (seasoned in a time-honored, well-kept secret midnight ritual) and heading out to DC.

I even stopped going to BJ so much because HCR dominated the front page, and it seemed like every thread devolved into the same argument.   I didn’t want to deal with it, so I mostly stuck to threads about animals, snow, and the open threads.

Now, I want to say off the bat that I am not a policy wonk.  I know the gist of the bill and what it will accomplish, but I cannot quote it chapter and verse–nor do I really see the need for that.  I knew it contained a lot of shitty stuff (as all bills do in order to get passed), but I also knew it had some good stuff.  The thinking behind passing the bill was that we need to get reform into law first, and then we can strengthen the law once it passes.  It’s how the Civil Rights Act was passed, and it’s also how Medicare was enacted as well.

Anyway, I just wanted to get the disclaimer out of the way that this will be a policy-free blog entry.

I tuned into CNN during the waning hours of the debates.  What struck me was how fucking stupid the Republicans were.  Even the ones who’ve been dubbed their best and brightest–yes, I’m looking at you, Eric Cantor–couldn’t put together a sentence that did not contain a lie.   Now, full disclosure, I usually ended up muting the Republicans because I couldn’t deal with their bullshit.  However, I heard one Congresswoman talk about how the HCR bill was like a blanket that covers the whole country.  Really?  That’s the analogy you want to use?

In addition, the Republicans hooted and hollered and booed and hissed throughout the entire proceedings as if they were at a ballgame.  I am not one for stiff formalities, but the disrespect they showed the process and their colleagues was astounding.  In addition, they are still confusing losing with tyranny (h/t Jon Stewart).  As Stewart said, “You lost.  It’s supposed to taste like a shit taco.”   All this talk about ramming through the bill, blah-di-blah-blah would be so much more impressive if I didn’t remember the last eight years under W. and his posse.  Talk about ramming through legislation.  I remember anyone who questioned going to war was labeled a traitor.  Now, it’s treasonous to support the Islofascist Negro in charge, apparently.

The other thing that has bothered me during the process is how the word socialism was being tossed around.  I remember back in the day that being called a liberal was about the worst political epithet someone could hurl your way.  That lost its sting in the last few years, so now, socialist has arisen to take its place.  Or, even better, socialism combined with Hitler.  I don’t know how the two have gotten conflated, but apparently, Obama is both a socialist and a fascist.

I am an actual socialist.  A socialist capitalist, to be exact.  So, to hear the word socialist being tossed around like it’s something evil really rankles.  To me, the basic tenets of socialism as practiced in, oh, just about every other goddamn industrialized country in the world (France is number one in healthcare quality, just FYI, according to WHO, and they spend less money on healthcare than does the US.  Which is #37 on the same list, by the way) are sound, humane, and morally right.  No person should have to become homeless because she doesn’t have healthcare.  No person should have to put off going to the doctor because he cannot afford the visit.  In addition, preventative care is better than emergency care.  To me, these ideas are pretty much no-brainers.  Basic, affordable healthcare for all.  If you have money, you can buy the expensive treatments that have one chance in a zillion of working if you so choose, but it’s outrageous to me that the supposed best country in the world would begrudge basic healthcare insurance for all.

There are legitimate questions about healthcare reform–such as, how are we going to pay for it?  I would have welcomed debates on the issues, but that was not to be.  Instead, the Republicans (and libertarians) focused on scare tactics, rhetoric, and downright lies.  What’s more, when they got called out on their lies, they continued to repeat the same goddamn lies over and over again.

As I have said before, I did not get really involved into politics until the most recent election.   I mean, I have been a lifelong die-hard Democrat, but I never felt engaged in the process.  Now that I’ve immersed myself into it, I realize it’s not for the faint of heart.  I also realize that there are many dreadfully stupid people in our Congress.  In addition, I realize that we Dems are our own worst enemy.  Throughout this whole process, there has been a faction of the Dems who wanted to kill the bill because it wasn’t progressive enough (no public option, for example).  Now, while I sympathize with the frustration of the bill (it really is filled with lots of shit), I don’t understand the mentality of kill it now and try again later.  Every time HCR has been killed, it’s been untouched for many years.  I didn’t see how the lefties could blithely say kill the bill and try again in a year or two.

I have said before that I’ve had to come to grips with the fact that I am not as far left as I thought myself to be.  That’s actually not true.  I am pretty damn far left as far as what I would wish for our world (single-payer healthcare insurance, for example and coupons for free abortions in the ladies’ room), but the more I watch our Congress at work, the more I realize how fucking hard it is to get anything major accomplished.

When Obama was elected, I wept.  When the HCR bill passed the Senate an eon ago, I was ecstatic.  Tonight, as Nancy SMASH! (#33, Loneoak) declared the bill had passed, I felt relief.  I teared up a bit, but I didn’t have the overwhelming emotional response I had the night of the election.  Until I read the header at BJ.  Cole figured out how to rotate it, and as soon as the bill passed, he changed it to:  Yes we did.  I teared up, and I felt the same comity with the BJ folks that I felt for them the night the bill passed the senate and that I felt for the ‘flatters election night.  We brokeded BJ for awhile, but once I could get back on (I stayed on during the votes), I saw the outpouring of thanks given to the BJ community (and to Tim F., one of the front-pagers who was a beast in urging people to contact their congresspeople).  It really warmed my heart, especially since one person thanked me personally.

This bill is not perfect by far.  It is only the first step towards comprehensive healthcare reform.  However, it’s a HUGE first step.  For tonight, I lift my glass to all who did their bit in order to pass the damn bill.  Now, onto the Senate, and then Prez Obama will sign it, and we can move on to passing regulations on the banks and Wall Street!  Oh, and Madame Speaker Nancy Pelosi really raised her game for this fight.  I raise my glass to her as well.  Finally, America has joined the 20th century, lagging far behind the other industrialized countries.

This is the video I am watching right now.

I am substituting, “Yes we did” for “Yes we can”.

P.S.  To my prescient friend:  You were right.  I was…not right.

P.P.S.  I have been in a haiku mood today, and I realized that MLK Jr.’s quote fit perfectly!

I also found out I had hyperthyroidism at the time.  I had a shitty male doctor for that as well, which did not improve my outlook at all.  Fucker never told me not to take the pills with food.  I found that out from my current doctor–more than a decade after I started taking the thyroid meds daily.

Anyway, I had my appointment this morning.  I started out with a general comment on the Mass. election.  To my surprise, my therapist said, “Oh, Minna, I can’t talk about that yet.”  She was half-kidding, but I like it when she adds a personal comment from time to time.  I assured her I wasn’t going to talk about the election itself, but I needed to make a parallel to my life.

The Democrats have a majority in all branches of government right now.  Obama was elected by a healthy margin, which, except according to our ‘liberal’ media (nobody calls it that any more.  Funny, that) meant that he had a mandate to pass the core issues of the Democratic Party.  We had 60 Dems in the Senate.  60!  That was filibuster-proof.  Or, would have been if the Blue Dogs (conservative Dems) hadn’t decided they were going to oppose every goddamn core issue of the Democratic Party and side with the Republicans.

Now, there are many reasons for this, including how deeply into the pockets of Big Pharma/Big Business/Big Ag they are (to be fair, so are many other of our representatives), but the bottom line is, that Supermajority meme was a myth from the get-go.

However, the Democrats were clearly handed the reins and told to clean up the mess that W. and his posse had left behind.  W. had ruled as if he were King George with a lesser majority, so the Dems could get shit done, right?  Right and wrong, but I’m focusing on the wrong part here.

The Democrats have spent the past year bending over backwards to work with the Republicans.  President Obama had talked about bipartisanship way back in his campaign, and he apparently meant it.  He reached out to the Republicans, only to have them slap his hand away.   On HCR, the Dems stripped the bill of many things we considered important and even added the odious Stupak-other guy abortion amendment to the House version, which barely passed.   Other yucky stuff (technical term, that) was added to the Senate version–which also passed by the skin of its teeth.  During the whole process, the Republicans had not one suggestion of substance to offer.  No, they resorted to cries of socialism a la countries in Europe (because who would want universal healthcare that is ranked better than ours is and that costs less?), death panels, and other scary-sounding words that struck terror in the hearts of real Americans in the heart of red America.

And yet, the Democrats still ran around bleating about the need to appease because we’re a centrist country or something, despite having elected Obama by a healthy margin on his somewhat-progressive platform.  Go figure.

Although this may seem like a political rant, it isn’t.  It’s personal.  How so?  Like this.  I am the Democrat in the scenario, and my family are the Republicans.  I have bent over backwards trying to be the person they want.  The trip to Taiwan was such a mind-fuck to me in part because I desperately hid all the parts of me my parents would deem unseemly (except my fat body.  Couldn’t quite do that).   I bit my tongue and smiled when someone insulted me to my face.  I was cautious in talking politics.  Besides my epic blow-up the first night I was in Taiwan, I was as even-tempered as I could be through gritted teeth.

None of that mattered.  My parents didn’t see me, anyway, and they had no desire to know the real me or listen to her.  The few times I said, “No, I don’t want that”, they simply chose to ignore what I’d said.  Well, it’s not that easy.  They didn’t chose to ignore my words, exactly, as I don’t think they did it knowingly.  They simply could not hear them.

They know nothing about the real me, except, perhaps, that I like the color black, the computer, and I write.  I keep the real me completely separate from them because I know they’re not interested and because I know she’s not acceptable.

Well, that’s about to change.  No, I am not going to go full-out crazy and just let it all hang out around them, but I need to stop trying so hard to deny myself around them (and my brother’s family as well).  Every time I acquiesce, I am sending the signal that what I want, need, think, believe doesn’t matter.   Worse yet, I am telling myself the same thing.  I am reinforcing my negative self-belief every time I smile and nod in the face of an insult.  And, quite frankly, I can’t afford to do that any longer.

I made another realization in therapy today.  I am a pack rat.  No, that wasn’t the realization.  I’ve known that for quite some time.  I keep things in the belief that one day, I might find a use for them.  Plus, I have thousands of books that I just know I will want to read again one day.  Yeah.  Right.

Anyway, I was talking to my therapist about how my mom and I have one argument over and over again each time she comes to visit.  In my more fertile years, it was about me having kids.  One summer, it was about me moving to Taiwan to live (ha!).  The last time, it was about marriage.  Many times, it’s about God with a capital G.   Same fucking argument over and over until I could scream.  Why did I allow her to suck me back into it even after vowing I would stay calm and disengage?

Here’s the revelation:  I don’t argue about these things with my father because I don’t give a shit what he thinks about marriage and kids and religion.  I don’t believe any of it, anyway, so I can let what he says roll off my back like the proverbial water off a gray duck.  Therefore, somewhere in my subconscious, I equate disengaging with not giving a shit.  So, if I were to disengage from my mother, that would mean I didn’t give a shit about her.  Which isn’t true.  I do care about her; I just have to stop thinking it’s my job to caretake her emotions.  I can lovingly disengage from her, and that’s what I need to do in order to preserve my sanity, as it were.

So, in other words, I have to throw out the outmoded behaviors that haven’t worked that well in the past and will not work in my present.  I need my own space so that I can be my own person in order for me to live my own life.  I need a house of my own, damn it.  It’s time to separate, with as much love as possible.

Before the last election, I would have said that I was an idealist, a pretty far-left progressive.  Then, after Obama was elected, I realized that I am not as far-left as I thought.  However, I am not a centrist, either.  Which leaves me…exactly nowhere again.  Story of my fucking life that I can’t fit in anywhere.  All I know is that I’m not a batshitcrazy Republican rightwinger nor a Blue Dog Democrat.  Beyond that, I have no clue as to how to label myself.

It’s getting harder for me to follow politics because I feel that on a national level, my input really doesn’t matter.  Anyway, the two things politically that are fucking me up right now.  Number one, the special election in Mass.  Now, the Dems ran a horrible campaign, just horrible.  However, after reading up on both candidates, I don’t know how anyone who isn’t a rightwinger could vote for Brown.  I have a friend who lives in Mass (shout-out to Original Jim), and he said many of his female friends were voting for Brown because they didn’t like Coakley and because Brown was cute.  WTF?  I am sick and tired of strong-willed women dissing other strong-willed women, and voting for someone because he’s cute?  Ugh.

Mass. has a rep as a very blue state, but BJers from there have said this is not true at all.  It’s kinda like MN in that they vote Democratic on a national level most often, but local politics are more of a mixed bag.  In other words, there are many conservatives who live outside Boston (like those here who live outside the Twin Cities).

I am disheartened that after eight fucking years of the W. regime, people have so quickly decided that the Republican way is better after all.  Some far-left progressives believe that killing HCR right now is the way to get a single-payer system down the road, and to that end, they support getting in as many tea baggers as possible.  It pisses me the fuck off because most of the prominent lefties who are espousing this route have very good insurance of their own, thankyewverymuch.  It’s easy to be an ideologue when you don’t have to fear being denied treatment because of a pre-existing condition.

Let me be clear.  I don’t mind agitation from the left and holding Obama’s feet to the fire when it comes to important issue.  What I do mind is teaming up with Grover fucking Norquist and deciding to run a candidate against Bernie Sanders because he’s a corporate sell-out.  Bernie Sanders?  Really?  The one and only socialist member of the Senate, and he’s a sell-out?

This article is the second political reason I’m really sad about our society right now.  I can’t stand that this was done in my name.  What’s even worse is that the chances of anyone being prosecuted is slim to none.  I was one of the people who thought Obama should have done something about this stuff a year ago, but I could see the point of it being a political shitstorm.  However, in the last year, Republicans have been the party of no, anyway, and Cheney (both of them) and McCain are listened to more than any Democrat right now, anyway, so I say, bring it, Obama.  More to the point, we have no moral compass as a society as long as shit like this is allowed to go unchecked.

That’s all I am going to say about that because it just disgusts and disheartens me.

Now.  On to personal reasons for shutting down this blog.  They are somewhat related to the political ones.  What the fuck am I accomplishing by publishing my inner musings?  Sure, people like to read them (thanks for the hits, guys), but in the end, it doesn’t make a spit of difference if my voice is heard or not.

My demons are particularly loud right now (no Doughboy, please, Gregory), and I am running out of ways to wait them out.  What have I contributed to society?  Jack shit, that’s what.  When I die, what will be my legacy?  Not much of anything.  I don’t have progeny; I haven’t created something useful to the world; I am shouting in the wind.  I have so many things I want to change, and I cannot find the wherewithal to take the goddamn baby steps necessary to make those changes.  I am overwhelmed by how much I have to do in order to have a meaningful life.

I have been told all my life how much potential I have.  I could be president.  I could change the world.  I could do something great.  Now, here I sit just shy of my thirty-ninth birthday, and what do I have to show for my thirty-eight years?  Not a damn fucking thing.  I get in my own fucking way and stop myself from doing what I want to, need to, have to do.

I can talk about all the things I need to do and sound oh-so-reasonable about it.  I can talk the talk very well.  If there’s one thing I can do, it’s fucking talk.  I have all this self-awareness and talent and potential, and it means jackshit because I am still locked behind a wall–a wall that is now of my own making.

I can joke and laugh and be charming and amusing and all that shit, and I’m dying inside.  I know all the arguments.  Would I talk to a friend the way I talk to myself?  No.  Would I be as mean to anyone else, even someone I loathe such as Rush Limbaugh?  No.  Would I expect someone else to be able to fix her issues in one-fell swoop?  No.  Am I a hypocrite because I expect so much from myself?  Yes.

I know all that, which, ironically, makes me even madder at myself.

I want to get off the hamster wheel.  I really do.  I even have moments when I feel as if I can step off the bicycle of abuse and just breathe.  I have days of relative calm, days in which I accept that I have a long road ahead of me and that I can’t do it all in one day.

Then, just as I am about to take that one step, the fucking demons appear again, and I am smack dab back in the middle of hating myself.  As I am now.

It doesn’t help that my sleep is fucked up, but good.  I am really going to have to go on a sleep schedule because this is not working for me at all.   I have been up since 10:30 p.m., I have my therapist appointment at 10 a.m., and I can’t fucking sleep.  What’s worse, I know if I do go to sleep, I’ll feel even worse when I wake up.

Goddamn it.  I knew I shouldn’t have gone back to Taiwan.  I thought I could handle it, and by the time I realized that I wouldn’t handle it well, I thought it was too late to back out.  Now, I am dealing with the ramifications of being there and with my family for nearly two weeks.

I think about Haiti and all the people who died, who never had a chance in the first place.  I think of all the privilege I have (and yes, I know I have lots of privilege), and I am squandering my fucking life away.   I am sitting on my fat (flat, but fat) ass, pissing and moaning my life away.  I hate myself for that.  I really do.

The chatter in my head won’t stop.  I look at how fucked up the world is, and I wonder why the fuck I even bother?  I don’t know why I’m alive.  I gave up a long time ago on finding the Meaning of Life, but now I can’t seem to find any meaning to life (without the capitals).   I have friends and my kittehs, true.  But, I am missing something inside.

I feel stripped to the bone (and, no, not in a good way).  I am engaging in self-harming behavior, and what’s worse, I don’t really want to stop.  I can’t help but feel it’s what I deserve.  Intellectually, I know I don’t deserve the abuse, but emotionally, I feel I do.

I want to get off the hamster wheel, but I fear there is only one way to stop the noise in my head.  I can’t outshout or quiet the demons.  In my low points, they only grow in strength.  I don’t have the weapons necessary to fight them off.

Back to my blog.  I hate writing entries like this because I feel as if I’m asking something to which there are no answers.  Thus, it’s very self-indulgent of me to blog about my depression and such when I am unable at this point to accept the excellent advice that y’all give me.   It also seems churlish of me.

So.  I will let you know, of course, if I decide to shut down my blog, either temporarily or permanently.

It’s partly political.  I have been avoiding the story about the woman who worked for Halliburton/KBR and was gang-raped by her coworkers while they were in the Middle East.  I mean, I know the basics.  They locked her in a container for twenty-four hours afterwards, and the military lost her rape kit somehow.  There is a clause that only allows these kinds of ‘disputes’ to be settled by arbitration.  My kick-ass senator, Al Franken, introduced an amendment that would allow cases like this to go to court (which seems like a no-brainer).  It easily passed in the Senate, with thirty No votes.  Care to guess to which party all those No votes belonged?  No points for guessing Republican.  In addition, all the female Republican senators broke rank and voted Yes for the amendment.  Here is a look at the roll call for the vote.

It passed.  Good.  But, today, I read this post over at Balloon Juice.  Apparently, several sources say that Senator Daniel Inouye, (HI-D) is preparing to water down the amendment or remove it completely after being vigorously lobbied by defense contractors who are adamant it be removed.

I shouldn’t have read the post at all.  I shouldn’t have read the comments.  I have difficulty dealing with news about rape in general, and this was a particularly horrifying and egregious story that, I fear, was all-too-emblematic of the attitude towards sexual assault by the mercenaries–er, contractors–we hired to work for us in the Middle East.   We got one of the usual trolls bleating about the injustice of going around arbitration.  We got another well-meaning soul saying that arbitration isn’t necessarily biased.

Doesn’t fucking matter.  Because of some stupid law, the woman cannot press criminal charges.  Or rather, the feds won’t touch the case.  The woman was gang-raped and locked in a container for twenty-four hours afterwards, and she has no legal recourse?

I felt like puking.  I still do when I think of it.  This is not sexual harassment.  This is not a pinch on the ass or a suggestive comment.  This isn’t even, “Sleep with me or lose your job.”  This is a felony, and it can’t be prosecuted.  And yet, congress can go after ACORN?

I despair.  I really do.  No matter how far we come on gender issues, we still have so much further to go.

Thinking about this reinforced how worthless I felt as I was growing up.  No, I didn’t remember the abuse, but I remember very clearly how poorly my father treated my mother.  He would stay out until all hours, never bothering to call home to tell her when he’d be home.  She would cater to his every whim when he was home, and he just accepted it as his due.  He never told her he appreciated her for–well, anything.

In addition, she worked full-time and raised my brother and me while he worked full-time and got his Ph.D. in economics at the U.  Once he got his degree, he considered himself above her, even though she had her MA in psychology and put her own career on hold to raise the kids and allow him to get his Ph.D.

It was well-known my father had affairs.  It was never talked about in my family, but we all knew.  He beat my brother until my mom made him stop, and then he (my dad) ceded all discipline to my mother.  Yes, if he couldn’t hit my brother, then he wouldn’t do anything.   As I have said before, he was the only one allowed to show anger in the house.  He was the only one who could yell.

When I was a teenager, I was an outsider.  No boys were interested in me except as a friend.  This was before Asian women became exotic and sexy.  Back then, if you didn’t fit in the cultural norm, then you were invisible.  So, my dad gave me this helpful bit of advice, “If you want a boyfriend, you have to raise your voice in pitch, never beat a guy at any sports, and let him help you with something.”  I looked at him and told him that if that’s what it took to have a boyfriend, I didn’t want one.

He taught me to play ping-pong when I was six.  When I hit my late twenties, I started beating him on a constant basis.  Once I beat him two out of three games, he quit playing with me.   He offered to buy my brother a sports car if he (my bro) married a Taiwanese woman.  At a cousin’s wedding, my dad turned to me and said, “I don’t think I could give you away.”  I replied, “You won’t.”  One, because I wasn’t getting married, and two, because I wouldn’t have that in my wedding if I ever did get married (which I wasn’t), anyway.

He travels all over the world for his job, and one of his stops was in Banff, Canada.  He visited a hotel there that was actually a castle converted into a hotel.  He showed me a brochure.  ”They do weddings there,” he said proudly.  ”I’ll pay for the whole thing if you want to have your wedding there.”  I looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.   Besides the fact that I had no interest in getting married, I was most certainly not the castle type.  I was no fucking fairy princess, and I certainly wasn’t looking for my Prince Charming.

Now, my parents live in Taiwan.  They live in the same house, but they still live completely separate lives.  My mom can’t call my dad at work or he’ll get mad.  If she buys him some short-sleeved shirts that are really nice after he says he doesn’t wear short-sleeved shirts, he yells at her.  When they both came to visit, he was in the bathroom taking an epic bath (all his baths are epic), and both my mom and I needed to use that bathroom.  She tapped on the door to ask when he’d be out.  He came out and started shouting about how inconsiderate it was to interrupt him when he was taking a bath.  He went on in that vein for at least fifteen minutes before lapsing into a sullen silence.

I got told I was fat by both my parents.  Still do.  Probably will when I’m in Taiwan.

I became my mom’s confidant when I was a teenager.  She would tell me her woes with my father (excluding the marital affairs), and she was deeply depressed.  I didn’t want to hear about it because I lived with the man, but I didn’t know how to tell her that what she was doing was inappropriate.  She still tells me things about him I would rather not know.  I still don’t know how to tell her I’m uncomfortable with her revelations.

My point is that when I was a kid, I observed how shitty it was to be female.  So, even though I grew up to be a feminist, I still bought into some of those ideas, subconsciously.  I began to make a mental list of things not to do.  No giggling.  No cooking or cleaning (ok, the last one is more a matter of laziness, but still).  No makeup, no high heels, no push up bras, nothing.

To be fair, some of that was truly because I didn’t believe in doing it–such as makeup and shaving my legs/armpits, but for the most part, I equated being a woman with being weak–and I was so fucking done with being weak.   I didn’t want to be a man because they came with their own set of problems, but I most definitely did not want to be a woman.

It was another way I desperately tried to make myself safe.  If I eradicated my femininity, then I wouldn’t be vulnerable.  I learned to stride instead of mincing.  I developed a hard stare and a rigid body posture that said, “Don’t fuck with me.”  For the most part, it worked.  People were properly intimidated, and I was able to fool them into thinking I would kick their ass if I need be.

Inside, though, it was a different story altogether.  I still didn’t have a core.  I still didn’t believe I had worth.  I still couldn’t say no.  The hardness was to stop people in their tracks so they couldn’t see how empty I was on the inside.

People have said they admire me because I’m assertive and speak my mind.  I don’t give a shit about what people think–or so it seems.  Quite to the contrary, I would worry about everything I said or wrote.  If someone expressed the mildest rebuke for something I’d said or done, I would castigate myself harshly, scolding myself for ever saying anything in the first place.  One of the reasons I stated my opinions so firmly was because deep down, I didn’t think I had the right to say anything at all.

It was exhausting, monitoring everything I said or did.  It also felt like such a sham.  I looked so confident, when inside, I hated myself.

So, now I’m struggling with letting all of that go.  The old belief system; the old thoughts and ideas; the old way of being.  What’s more, I’m struggling with not hating myself for being so weak all these past years, for wasting nearly my whole life up until now.

I endured.  I didn’t live or thrive or even survive.  I endured.  I hunkered down in my shell, tucked my head under my arms, and I froze.

Now, my heart is aching inside my chest.  It is filled, almost to the point of bursting, with tears of regret.  There is a sliver of anger under the pain–anger at how thoroughly I gave up and gave in, but mostly, there is sadness and pain.  I am crying once again as I type.  The sorrow is overwhelming.  This time, though, the sorrow is for the current me.  The one who is caught betwixt and between and is scared out of her mind as to how to proceed.  The one who feels parts of her crumbling at her touch and turning into dust.  The one who is lost and doesn’t know if she’ll ever find.  The one who still doesn’t have a core.

I am almost howling as I weep.  I grab my hair near the scalp with my hands, and I squeeze.  Hard.  Guttural moans escape my lips as I listen to Say Goodbye by Girlyman (see above video) and feel as if they are tearing out my soul.  The pain inhabits my body, taking over every inch from my head to my little toes.  It floods through me, nearly bringing me to my knees.  Please, make it stop.  I will do anything to make it stop.   The agony is more than I can bear.  I am not that fucking strong.  I know I have to say goodbye to the old me.  I know I have to let her go.  I know I have to grieve and move on.   It fucking hurts too much.

Where were you eight years ago (and one day) when the Towers fell?  For my generation, it has replaced, “Where were you when the Challenger exploded?” as the defining question of our lives (at least until we elected Barack Hussein Obama as president).

Where was I?  I was in California, the Bay Area to be precise.  I had a phone appointment with my therapist at 9 a.m., Pacific mumble mumble Time.  My roomies were gathered around the television, watching in rapt fascination.  I glanced at the TV, but it didn’t register what I was seeing.  When I finally reached my therapist, I found out what had happened.

The timing is fuzzy, but I was at the television and watching the second tower fall (live, I believe, but I might be remembering incorrectly).  I watched as the TV machine showed the plane plowing into the tower over and over and over again.  I lost count of how many times I watched the tower fall.  After the tenth or so time, it became surreal–I truly felt I was watching a Bruce Willis action movie.  That kind of thing didn’t happen in real life, right?

But it did.  I called all my friends and family, feeling frantic when I couldn’t get through.  I didn’t know anyone in NYC, not really, but I still had that panicky feeling.  See, my partner at the time, John, had flown home to PA and was scheduled to fly back to Oregon, through San Francisco the next day.  I was in a panic as I thought about how it could have been him on Flight 93.  I called him, and I was relieved to find out he was fine.  I mean, there was no reason he shouldn’t be, but yet, I couldn’t erase the feeling that he had been thisclose to dying.  We talked a bit on the phone, and it just wasn’t enough.  I needed to be with him, and I couldn’t.  I wasn’t where I wanted to be (physically or emotionally), and it was devastating.

That was where I was that day.  What happened next, to me, personally, is a little harder to relate.  In fact, I hesitate because it’s going to make me sound… callous?  Cruel?  Heartless?  I don’t know.  Probably.  It’s also true.  With that said, here goes.

After 9/11, we had the goodwill of the entire world.  Here is a beautiful website that documents the memorials created around the world, united in grieving for us.  In the days that followed the attack, the best of America rose to the top.  We all saw the images of people working tirelessly at Ground Zero to sift through the rubble in hopes to find a survivor, and, quite honestly, to bring the victims home.  We saw strangers giving aid to strangers.  We saw people doing whatever they could in order to ease our collective pain.

At the same time, I saw a disquieting trend in the media coverage of the event.  When people were interviewed about what had happened, I heard over and over how shocked they were that this had happened in the United States.  We are the bestest, most exceptional country in the world.  How could this happen?  If it could happen in the US, so the meme went, it could happen anywhere.  Except, and no one ever said this, it did happen everywhere else in the world.  It even happened in the US before (Oklahoma City, anyone?).

Looking back, I realize that this was when my sense of isolation crystallized and became my shield.  You see, while I felt the grief of 9/11, I never felt the shock.  I never felt my sense of security being ripped away because I never had that sense in the first place.  I could understand (not excuse, never excuse) why people in other countries would want to attack us.  People in other countries live with a sense of uncertainty on a daily basis.  We, as a country, had been extremely lucky up to that point of never experiencing the same kind of devastating attack from outside our borders.

This is the hardest part for me to write.  I didn’t feel personally affected by the falling of the Towers.  It didn’t make me view my country–or the world, really–any differently.  It didn’t make me love my country any more.  In fact, I went in the opposite direction as I saw the mounting anger and lust for revenge grow in the aftermath of 9/11.

We had a choice as a nation.  We could have taken the hit, grieved, taken practical measures to strengthen our safety, and worked with our allies to change the global situation in order to decrease the likelihood of an attack like this happening again.  We could have risen to our best selves, in other words.

Instead, we caved.  The thing that astounds me is how quickly we ceded our purported exceptionalism and dove straight into fear.  Even in liberal blogs, there are people excusing the immediate behavior following 9/11 by saying, “Do you remember how crazed with fear, anger, and revenge you were that you would have done anything to feel better?”  Well, no, I don’t.  Why?  Because I never felt any of that.  Like I said, the attack didn’t change my beliefs or my mindset because I was already there.

Instead, for me, the fear grew when I saw how my government reacted to the crisis and how we, the people, quickly fell in line with the mantra of revenge.  Do you know what I remember following the attack?  I remember not being able to question the president, no matter what he did.  I remember that if you did question the president, you were labeled a traitor and asked why you hated America.  Soon, the measure of your love for your country was how big your flag was and how loudly you could sing the Star-Spangled Banner at ballgames.

Anyone who deviated from this was considered suspect, and during that time, I really learned to keep my mouth shut.   I knew that I was working within an entirely different frame than most people (as is my wont), and in this particular case, I didn’t feel safe enough to voice my opinions out loud.

You see, I have no love for the flag.  I don’t hate it.  I don’t love it.  I am, or rather, I was, neutral to it.  It’s the same for America.  Liberals want to say that hey, we love our country as much as do the Republicans, yadda yadda yadda, but I don’t.  I don’t love America.  I don’t hate her.  Again, I am, or was, neutral.  You see, I don’t love America because I never felt she loved me.  As a permanent outsider who was constantly told to go home when I was a kid, I never thought of America as my country.  I still don’t, not really.

The flag:  I now have a distaste for it because of all the atrocities that have been committed in its name.  All the people who wrap themselves up in it as a badge of their patriotism or bleat about Obama not wearing a flag pin have wiped it of any meaning for me.  To me, when I see the flag, I don’t feel proud of democracy, freedom, and a pursuit of happiness.  When I see it, I flinch a little inside because I think of the last eight years and how we, as a society, gave in to our baser natures in response to 9/11.

We listened to our president lie and lie and lie, and we elected him to continue telling us his awful lies.  We cheered as he invaded Iraq, despite the ample evidence that he was just making shit up in order to have an excuse for said invasion.  We watched (or didn’t, as the case may be) as we killed off thousands of brown people who had the misfortune of becoming pawns in a treacherous political game.

Today, the loathsome Glenn Beck is having his little 9/12 projects all around the nation.  I am not linking to him because I just can’t.  The gist is that Beck spews his hatred and vileness about what it means to be an American and how they, the silent majority (so silent they lost the election, it seems) need to take back the America they know, by force if necessary.  We have the current president dragging his heels on prosecuting W. and his posse for the thugs they were–and are.

I look at the display of hatred, fear, intolerance, and racism from the ‘silent majority’, and my heart is heavy.  I look at all the shit that W. and his posse did to our country in guise of ‘keeping ‘Murika safe’, bringing us to the brink of ruins, and I despair that we will ever be a country of laws ever again.  I look at global goodwill we have willfully squandered, and I am angry because we had the world on our side, and we tossed them away.  I look at Ground Zero, see that nothing has been rebuilt, and I hurt.

Today, I am contemplative of all that we, as a country, have lost in the last eight years, and I have to wonder if we can ever recover.

Teddy Kennedy is the only Kennedy man I’ve ever really known.   Yes, he was the drunk driver in the car that killed Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969.  The fact that he was a Kennedy probably got him out of serving any jail time.   Still, he had a decision to make at that time.  He could continue to drink and do stupid, stupid, stupid things, banking on his family name to get him through scrapes, or he could man up and do something worthwhile, damn it.  He chose the latter and spent the rest of his life atoning for the grievous sins of his youth.

His last great passionate was universal healthcare.  He worked so hard to pass a bill that would ensure that every American would have health insurance.  He fought and he fought, damn it, until his body gave out.  There are some on the right (yes, I’m looking at you, Michelle Malkin) who warn the left that we better not use this moment to push through healthcare reform.  We better not make it political, damn it, but her saying that isn’t political in the least, is it?

I have stayed away from the political blogs for most of the day.  However, it’s not because I can’t stomach what the right is saying and doing on this day, but because I am disgusted by some on the left who are truly twisting this into a partisan game–specifically as a way to get in yet another poke at President Obama.

Look, I’m not an Obama apologist–far from it.  However, I am mighty sick and tired of people on the left looking for every opportunity to put him down, no matter what the circumstance.  One commenter said something to the effect that it was a shame ”Barry” had chosen to take a golf vacation with his corporate golfing buddies rather than spend time with Senator Kennedy in his dying days.   In general, I am tired of the ‘Obama’s the same/worse than Bush’ crowd, also on the far left.  Senator Kennedy had great faith that Obama would truly effect a change–why can’t you give Obama the slightest benefit of a doubt?

In a thread over at BJ, one of the commenters asked Senator Kennedy not to rest just yet because there was still work to be done.  I know it’s selfish of me, but I request the same thing.  Senator Kennedy, progressives need you more than ever right now.  Do what you can to get the healtcare reform passed (one with a public option), and then, you can have the rest you so richly deserve.

As you make your journey to the other side, I enfold you in a white light to make sure you make it safe and sound.  My deepest condolences to your family.

P.S.  Here is Boyz II Men’s It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday

And, here is Ted Kennedy’s beautiful, moving eulogy for his brother, Robert Kennedy.  Thank you, Senator Kennedy, for the countless years of service you’ve given to your country.  Soon, Senator Ted Kennedy, you WILL be able to rest in peace.

Beyond that, the crap that the GOP is spewing about how healthcare is socialism and fascism and omigod there’s a blackity-black man in the White House!, and we need to defeat Shaft! in his Obamacare.  You know what?  We are the last fucking first world nation that doesn’t have some sort of universal healthcare.   We can give a bajillion zillion dollars to Wall Street (and yes, it’s a technical term–look it up), kajillion bamillion dillion dollars to Halliburton and Blackwater, er, to fight our two endless wars, and yet, we can’t spend any money to help the poor people in our own fucking country?  Give me a fucking break.

Ok, fine.  Congress people, listen up.  Those of you who are against socialized medicine and the government running healthcare should have the moral intergrity to give up your own tax-funded healthcare plans.  Currently, there is only one Congressman who is refusing to accept health insurance with his job in order to make a point.  He is an M.D., and he is from Wisconsin.  Meet Steve Kagen, the only Congress person who is putting his money where his mouth is.  He will not accept a plan that has options not all his constituents can access.   He is, of course, a Democrat.  He is for universal healthcare.   See, he’s walking his talk.

So, Grampy McCain.  You’ve been on the government’s dole for most of your seventy-two years on this earth.  Plus, you married into a lot of money.  So, for you to complain about universal healthcare somehow being fascist is disgusting.  You fucking lost the election, and you have voted with your party every step of the way since you lost.  Why the fuck should anybody pay any attention to anything you say?

Joe Lieberman.  You especially need to shut the fuck up right now.  Reid, if he had any guts, would remind you that he has you by the balls and that if you wanted to keep your cushy chairmanships, you need to take teeny tiny steps back to sanity.  I was all for kicking you out after your egregious behavior during the last campaign season.  I am more for it now.

Michele Bachmann.  You really take the fucking cake.  You are gonna ‘pray and fast’ that the healthcare bill will fail.  Knock yourself out, babe.  No, really.  I mean that literally.  Knock yourself out.  Oh, and are you really so stupid as to say that the rabble-rousers at the town hall meetings need to keep agitating for the government to keep its hands off their bodies?  Michele Bachmann, batshitcrazyrightwingnutter extraordinaire and rabid anti-choice activist is advocating for choice.  She has got to be the most stupid Congress person, bar none.

All of this has been pissing me off, but I have managed to keep it under wraps for the most part.  Today, though, I simply jumped over the edge.  Read this entry over at Balloon Juice.  It nearly broke me today.  I’ll tell you why.

I have never loved this country in the way others do.  I don’t think we are exceptional or number one, and I don’t go around chanting U-S-A in order to trumpet my superiority.  I grew up on the outside looking in.  No matter what I did in order to fit in, it didn’t work.  I was too foreign, too awkward, too brainy, and just too fucking chinky to ever be a mainstream Midwest American.  I could say ‘duck duck gray duck’ as well as anybody, but they knew I would prefer to be saying, ‘duck duck motherfucking black duck’ given half the chance.   Hell, I would even settle for spelling gray ‘grey’ if I thought I could get away with it.  I have always preferred the British way of spelling over the American.

I went through a period of intense hatred for America and how fucked up I perceived our society to be.  I was in my early to late twenties, and I keenly felt my otherness.  Unlike when I was a kid, though, by that time, I knew that there was no America for me.  My country didn’t give a damn about me, so in turn, I didn’t really give a damn about it.  Michelle Obama got so much fucking flack for being quoted as saying, “For the first time in my life, I am proud to be American.”  No matter how it was spun, I knew exactly what she meant.

See, when Barack Obama was nominated as the DFL candidate for president, for the first time in my life, I felt there might be a place for me in America.  As some black guy said (and, yes, I know how very authoritative that sounds), Michelle Obama was not saying that she didn’t love America.  She was saying that for the first time, America loved her back.  Now, while I would quibble with the loving America part, I agree with the latter part of that statement.

For once, we were giving into our better natures.  We were reaching out for the ideals of our country and embracing what we spout on a daily basis.  Equality.  Freedom.  Liberty.  All that DFH shit that the right loves to mock.  I have never been more fucking proud of my country than when we voted Barack Hussein Obama president.  I wept tears of joy, relief, gratitude, and disbelief that I had lived to see the day.  I saw the angels inside of us, and I was humbled.

Now, the desire of many to bury the atrocities we (yes, we) committed over the past years is making me so fucking ashamed to be an American.  Not only do we have people like the dipshit Peggy Noonan saying, “Sometimes, we just need to walk on by”, we have President Obama displaying little interest in holding W. and his posse accountable for war crimes committed in the name of America.  Now, I’m willing to give President Obama some slack as this is a difficult, complex matter.  I am holding out hope that he is running a long-term game that will eventually end up with Dick Cheney being perp-rolled into jail as he’s wearing his prison oranges.

Here’s the thing.  While I never had more than a mild fondness for America, I never in my wildest nightmare dreamt we would reach the point where we are actually debating whether or not what happened under W.’s watch was torture.  Waterboarding, stress positions, psychological warfare, threatening to kill and/or rape family members, sleep deprivation, etc.  All of this was sanctioned by that sociopath, John Yoo and stamped with approval all the way up the line.  Hell, it most likely emanated from the VP office (or higher), and it became policy.  We fucking tortured people.  WE did.  America, the land of the rule of law and the Constitution–or so we’ve been led to believe.

In a just world, W., Cheney, Yoo, and all the other criminals who effected these policies would be thrown in jail for the rest of their miserable lives.  In a just world, there would be a nation-wide shunning for them and what they’ve done in our names.  In his regime, W. and his posse were able to do what al-Qaeda could not do on 9/11–destroy everything we Americans professs to hold dear.

Lastly, as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, there is an increasing outcry from the right because Obama has declared it a day of national service.  Nutters believe that all we should do on the anniversary is plot our revenge and remember how evil the terrorists were.  Any attempts to, oh, I don’t know, actually do some good is considered fascist.  By the way, nutters, that word does not mean what you think it means, so quit fucking using it already.

My heart grieves over how low America has fallen.  We cannot let what W. and his posse did be America’s legacy.  We have lost any moral authority we might have had with the rest of the world because of our wanton disregard of any basic human rights and respect for global laws, let alone our own.

Guanyin have mercy on all of us.

When we left your intrepid blogger, I was waxing poetic about sex.  What?  I was talking about god?  Little matter.  My blog, my spin.  Anyway, we were talking about words and how much I adore them.  They intoxicate me and fill me with a swooning glee.  I savor the taste of a new word as it rolls off my tongue–or trips, as the case may be.  Each word has a subtle flavor to it.  Well, some aren’t subtle.  Piquant is spicy, of course; dolce is sweet; chocolate is utter paradise.  These are all self-evident.  Some other words are a bit more enigmatic in their taste.  Lugubrious has a hint of black licorice to it.  Deliquesce is creamy alfredo sauce.  Melancholia is laced through with limes and raspberries.  Alan Rickman is chocolate, which is, if you remember, utter bliss.

So the next word I chose to describe myself was writer.  I hesitated to use it for a long time because I didn’t feel like a “real” writer (read, published).  I had had a few things published in the Asian American Renaissance Literary Journal, but not much else.  Oh, wait.  I should say I added performer to my repertoire before adding writer.  I was an Actor (with a captial A, thank you very much, and not an actress), but then I got frustrated with theatre, as it were, and I decided to do my own thing.  I wrote the performances, blocked them, staged them, provided the makeup and costumes, and I performed in them, so I guess autocrat would be a better description, but I’ll settle for performer.

Back to writing.  I have done it all my life.  I started out as a poet and then migrated to prose.  I never called myself a writer, though, because it sounded fucking pretentious for someone who’s never been published.  However, once I attended grad school in SF and attained my MA in Writing & Consciousness, I felt like a real writer.  Not because of the degree, but because I was forced to write copious amounts on a regular basis.

The experience itself was frustrating to me because my cohorts didn’t quite get my writing.  I have an odd style that is very stream-of-conscious, fucking dark, and sometimes lyrical.  I don’t particularly care about structuring the narrative or the proscribed paths of plot progression.  If I want to have the climax as the first thing, I will.  If I want to jump from first person to third person view point, I will, damn it!  I mix the past and the present in liberal amounts, and I make no qualms about it.  I did most of this stuff before it became trendy to do it, but I wasn’t secure enough in myself or my writing back then to actually stick to my guns over my distinctive style.

Now, though, I say without apology that I am a writer, and a pretty damn good one at that.  It has taken me these many years to honor the voice that is mine, but I finally do.  Yes, it is odd and unusual, but I see that as a good thing.  I don’t want to be the next Amy Tan or chick lit writer.  I don’t want to be the pale imitation of someone else when I can be the real Minna, full of boldness and sassiness.  With my writing, I can say things that I cannot utter so easily in spoken words.  I can be heard, damn it, and I won’t let anyone shut me up again.

The latest piece to the puzzle that is me:  my political identity.  Now, as I have said, I have always identified as liberal.  The bleedingest of bleeding hearts.  The dirtiest of Dirty Fucking Hippies.  I just assumed that I could call myself a liberal and be done with it.  Well, as is the case with many things in the liberal party, it’s not that simple.  Now adays, we have the Blue Dawgs who might as well call themselves conservatives and be done with it.  We have centrists who are a bit to the left of the Blue Dawgs, but who are still pretty much smack dab in the middle of the road.  Then we have pragmatic liberals like the prez who believes in many progressive causes, but believes the best way to effect change is to do it from inside the system.  Then, we have the progressives.  Before this election, I didn’t really know what it meant to be progressive.  I read an article by David Sirota, and it all made sense.  Shorter Sirota:  Liberals want to change things through the system; progressives want to change the system itself.   I have read many other definitions of progressive (in terms of liberal politics), but this is the most concise one I can find.

I thought it over, as is my wont, and I realized that I am, indeed, a progressive.  I think our two-party system is fucked up and that the endemic problems of such a system make it nigh impossible to effect any real change without dismantling said system.

So, if I were to string a bunch of words together to describe myself, they would be sensual sexual hedonist, progressive Taiwanese American agnostic female writer, with tats.  That would be pretty accurate for a thumbnail sketch of my persona.

However, I have come to realize that I would like to move away from such concrete descriptions in general.  I wrote my bio for Yellow-Menace today, and I realized that I didn’t want to write what I usually write.  ”I am a Taiwanese American bi woman with tattoos”.  I mentioned being Taiwanese because it’s pertinent to the site matter, but I didn’t mention the tats or the sexual identity because it didn’t really fit what I was trying to say.   As readers of the site got to know me through my writings, they would figure out those things about me, anyway.

In the end, I think it’s more about what I do than necessarily what I say. I don’t need to proclaim my identity as long as I live it.

P.S.  Again, the image above was created by www.wordle.net.   They fucking rock.