Where Have I Been....

Some of you reading this title will think it a statement, some a question. And you'd be right on both accounts.

Where...have...I...been. The simple answer is of course, right here. My writer's voice though, has not been translated through this medium for several months. It's been dormant, elusive...hiding, depressed, ill and exhausted. Many times I called up this site and sat staring at a blank page, a blinking cursor a tiny island in a sea of white.

I beg your indulgence, this may meander a bit. After so many dry months, my thoughts are bursting through my typing fingers like a deluge during an August Florida thunderstorm where raindrops strike the scorched asphalt so hard and with such fury, steam rises up like a wraith.

I can claim many excuses for my absence. In the last of weeks of August, a very dear aunt lost her battle with cancer and I've been absolutely heartsick and depressed. It came as quite a shock, until the very last, my mind refused to accept the chance of defeat and I truly believed she would recover. The greatest compliment I could pay her is the fact that she had such a sweetness and gentleness of character that she put me in mind several times of my own grandmother. As the pattern often goes, grief turned to depression and depression turned to a stony and unrelenting anger. The childhood anger of, 'it isn't fair'.

I guess, 'it isn't fair' would be the recurring theme of my thought patterns of late...

I have hesitated so many times over what to write in these blogs, how deeply I would share, fearing that my true nature or inclinations would 'turn off' my readership. And then this morning, as is my wont, I had an epiphany...'do I really even have a readership'? So why the hell am I so afraid of offending 'them', if there is even a 'them'. So here goes...

I was very invested in this election. I am a 38 year old single, childless woman and an ardent conservative. I guess those words in of themselves are a contradiction. Despite all this, I've never supported a candidate to the extent I backed Mitt Romney. In my case, it's personal. If you've ever read this blog, you know about my nearly 4 year employment odyssey. Just the other day, I agreed to another 6 month contract extension of a nearly 2 1/2 year  (if you count my former assignment there in a different department) assignment at my company. So I can honestly say that the four years Barack Hussein Obama, aka Barry Sotero or whatever the hell his name is, has been the leader of this country have been the four worst of my entire life.

Yes, I know that I am amongst the fortunate who have a job at all. However, I had the audacity to hope that maybe just maybe if we elected different leadership in this country, that I might have the chance of securing a more permanent situation where my salary might be closer to the +25% higher pay rate I earned just 6 years ago! I am frequently told that I 'just have to accept that things are different now' 'companies just aren't going to hire anymore when they can contract out labor and save themselves tax and insurance costs'.

What I have been the most devastated about, is the loss of my hope, my inherent belief in the American Dream.  To get even more personal and uncomfortable, because of my salary losses, and lack of insurance, I've been living with my 65 year old father. And my father, because of the fact that he cannot exist on the small amount social security pays him, is still running after business and trying to work the hours that most 20 year olds would balk at! In the years where I should be looking after him, I can barely afford to keep myself.

I really thought Mitt Romney was the solution to this countries' woes. This is not about party, or sour grapes in anyway. It is about my inherent fears about the defecit we have incurred, the raiding of my father and mother's medicare and social security to fund Obamacare. It is the fact that as a country, we don't seem to mind when our leadership sits back and watches the assasination, and subsequent torture and sodomization of our Libyan Ambassador and the brave men of our armed forces who defied orders to try and come to his aid. When we just stay quiet and accept the status quo.

It is having to sit by and watch as these things happen while most of my fellow countrymen put more time and thought into drafting their fantasy football team and worry more about who is getting kicked off what reality show, than to think the fact that our country is drifting into economic penury, that our children are going to inherit an unsustainable crushing debt, that is if there is even an America left once the Islamic groups in this country one by one become radicalized and overcome our increasingly reduced military.

So many times, everything inside of me, is crying out, 'Why...Why don't you Care? People will say, 'I'm busy', or 'I am just one person, what can I do?' or worse, 'Oh, it's not really that bad...we've survived worse things'.  Then they marginalize you and make you feel that if you really express all of these 'gloomy' thoughts that you are some kind of a weirdo, an alarmist. Just another opininated wacko....now go away, 'the Steelers are about to meet the Patriots' and I've got $50.00 riding on this game.'

I hope that will still be a comfort when your employer pays you in rice noodles and a few paltry yuan, and you get on your bicycle and peddle to your government apartment to watch state sponsored football which by the way...is what you call soccer...

Where I've been...the buses are afraid to run.

An Epidemic of Meaness

A recent hit single by the country artist Taylor Swift asks the ultimate $10,000 question in a breathtakingly simple way as she wryly queries, "Why you gotta be so mean?"  I freely admit the song hit me in visceral way. It's quite a catchy tune as well, say what you like about Taylor Swift, but it cannot be denied that she is a gifted singer/songwriter with her finger squarely on the pulse of tween America and in this case, an emotional 30-something. Seemingly Ms. Swift had some kind of forehand knowledge of the daily frustration that I encounter when confronted by the continual breakdown of polite society.

For instance, the other day when entering Hwy 417 via SR 434, I had to quickly merge into oncoming traffic causing me to inadvertantly 'cut off' a fellow driver. Mind you, it's a two lane road so he could have just as effortlessly come up adjacent to me in the 'slow lane'. In my situation, from the way I was approaching, it was the left/'fast lane' or risk missing my exit entirely. It wasn't actually 'cutting him off' but just forcing him to take the slower lane initally. Apparently, this wasn't to this 'gentleman's' (and I use that term loosely) liking for he immediately pulled in the left lane behind me and proceeded to aggressively tailgate me all the way down the highway. And I do mean tailgate, as close as he tailed me, I could make out his eye color and whether or not he was wearing contact lenses! Then as I signalled to exit left he suddenly sped out behind me and then pulled right over in front of me, missing my vehicle by inches, squealing his tires and giving me the international one finger salute while shouting epithets out the window. All because I pulled into a lane a fraction of a few sections earlier than him.

Some of the first stirrings that I was dealing with something more societal than just being inconvenienced by people talking on cell phones blocking the aisles in grocery stores came as a result of the behavior of spectators here in Orlando during and in the days after the Casey Anthony Trial and the antics of the media and trial attorneys themselves. There were the fist fights breaking out in lines as people queued up trying to stake out their seats in the 'Media Trial Event of the Decade', the sarcastic posturing of prosecutorial attorney, Jeff Ashton during Defense Attorney Baez's closing remarks, the removal of one female spectator ranting at Ms. Anthony during the Voir Dire proceedings, and the further removal of a male spectator 'giving the finger' to Mr. Ashton during the actual trial. At one particularly shameful point in the proceedings, Judge Perry had to threaten to hold both Mr. Ashton and Mr. Baez in contempt after Mr. Ashton laughed at him during closing arguments and Mr. Baez called him out. After the trial, it got much worse with people ranting on line in the most bloodthirsty and vitrolic postings I have ever seen.  So acrimonious were the invectives that people hurled on Ms. Anthony's jurors that Judge Belvin Perry was forced to seal their names (the jurors) for 4 months in an effort to let the public anger die down and keep them safe after several death threats were reported. It was in hearing media pundits like Nancy Grace excoriating the jury for failing to come through with the verdict she felt was just and correct.

To this day, one need only to glance through the 'Rants and Raves' (R-N-R) section of Craigslist to read the comments of people libeling and slandering Ms. Anthony, Mr. Baez, Mr. Ashton, Ms. Drane-Burdick and Judge Perry depending on what side of the argument they are encamped on.  For that matter Craigslist's R-N-R section is, in of itself, an epic piece of mean-ness where the angry hordes (posters) gather to pick on the weak, disenfranchised, racist, gay, or physically challenged like vultures swarming over a particularly choice piece of carrion.  To read it, is to despair that we've regressed from a polite society so alarmingly that nothing short of a counter-revolution would restore us back to our former selves.

Then there is of course, the debt debate earlier this summer which offered up the more seamier side of Washington party politics but served as another reminder of the angry partisanship on both sides.
While he had his faults and certainly his critics, (mostly angry liberal revisionist history types) one of the great things about President Ronald Reagan was his ability to 'cross the aisle' in an effort to meet the needs of the American people. He gave a little and they gave a little and they were able to find common ground and places the needs of the citizens above party politics. But now all you have is finger pointing and scapegoating on both sides and nothing gets accomplished. It's all about which PAC is coming across with how much money for the next political campaign. And the ends justify the means. If it means slandering another congressman's (Paul Ryan) plan and questioning their very intelligence, so be it. If it means distorting the facts, calling him/her names, alleging he/she is a radical, if I have to crawl over their very bones to reach the office, then that's what I'll do and no amount of mean-ness of behavior is an obstacle provided I reach my ultimate goal.

All of this got me to wondering if I am alone in my thinking? Is it merely a side effect of the depression I've been dealing with? A symptom of the feelings of isolation and disconnect from society which results from not being 'out there' every day through the medium of employment? So, as is my want I set out to research this topic. When I queried my good 'friend' Google, the question "Are we becoming meaner as a society?", it responded with no less than 792,000 hits. Clearly others like me are also pondering this question in our numbers. Some of the stories I read in my research were heartbreaking, incidences of bullying like the story from a Fox News affiliate last month detailing how Nadin Khoury who was brought to the US 10 years ago to escape the Liberian Civil War, was left suspended by his coat from a seven foot high fence after being punched, kicked, beaten and dragged to the fence in a Philadelphia suburb. The ultimate irony in this is that his mother brought him here to the US to escape the violence being wrought in his own country.

What have we come to in this country? And my unanswered question, my greatest fear is...where will it end?