Get a job!

Every day on my way to or from work on the F, there are people asking for money. Sometimes it's the startling middle-aged white woman talking about her three children and her lay-off, the note of desperation in her voice when she says "Please! Have a heart!", somehow leaving me unable to look at her, let alone reach for my wallet. Sometimes they are charming three-piece mariachi bands, who clearly aren't living on the street but just need a little extra cash. But mostly it's really poor people, visibly homeless, tired, mentally ill, addicted, or just plain ill. They have various approaches. At Christmas time, one man sang a carol that really left me heartbroken. Others change carriages at every stop and give the same speech to the whole car. "Ladies and gentlemen. Please. If you can find it in your hearts to lend a helping hand to a homeless person in need."

Sometimes, I give a dollar here or there. But usually I don't. Because I can't give every day, and I can't choose who is most worthy. They all are. And I know my dollar isn't going to change their lives anyway.

Today, there was a homeless man outside the subway station. He asked me for change, and I gave my usual lame smile and apology. A graying middle-aged man in a shabby suit approached the subway entrance at the same time, and muttered at the man "Get a job!" As he raced down the stairs next to me, he continued "Get a fucking job! Another lazy American!" This is what I wanted to say to him, but didn't. This is what I thought to myself all the way home, and then posted on some thread somewhere, where someone espoused the same simplistic viewpoint. (I found it when I googled "homeless get a job.")

Can you explain to me how a homeless person should go about getting a job? What kind of job? Where do they go? What if they have no work experience, no high school diploma? No home. No shower, no clothes to wear to an interview. No telephone or internet to do research. How are they supposed to begin? If you don’t know the answer, how do you expect someone living on the street to know?

This is not to say that they can’t change or don’t want to change, but these people need a helping hand to get there. It is not easy to change when your life has fallen apart. Many homeless people struggle with mental health problems and addictions. They need support to put their lives back together. Of course, it’s much easier to just put the blame on them, rather than feeling morally obliged to help people who haven’t had as much luck as you have.

Of course there are stories of people who have overcome amazing obstacles and managed to turn their lives around without help. But does that mean people who don’t feel strong enough, or don’t yet know that they are strong enough to do that, should be left behind? Everyone deserves a helping hand. Most homeless people don’t have the support of family and friends that the rest of us take for granted. How far would we have gotten without it?

I wanted to say this to that man. But he probably wouldn't have listened. And I didn't want to get involved in a conflict with some strange man in a subway station. There are a lot of crazy people in New York. But that's a whole 'nother post.

Our system sucks.

The New York Times "Health" section includes overviews of other nations with universal health care systems:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/29/health/health-care-conversations.html?ref=health#/13/

After the article about France, I found this comment from a reader:

"So much has been said about how good the French (and other countries) healthcare system is and how it is paid for/provide by the government. What has escaped almost every article and conversation on the subject is that most these countries have higher effcetive [sic] personal income tax rates than the USA. So what we in the US pay in healthcare insurance premiums people outside the US pay in higher income taxes.

— RichC"

And an equally uninformed, if more concise, response from another reader:

"Hmm…no mention of how high the tax rates are in France. Poor journalism but great rhetoric.

— NoBama"

This is my response:

"People often cite the higher taxes in countries with universal health coverage, and they seem to believe our lower taxes are an even trade-off, ie. we pay insurance instead. But the overall costs of taxes plus health care costs per individual is higher in the US than in countries with universal care. And they get better care.

Take France, for example. They pay 45.3% of their GDP in tax, in exchange for a great system of universal quality health care, education, sick pay, paid vacation, paid maternity leave, and subsidized child care FOR ALL.

In the USA, we pay 29.6% of our GDP in tax, and on average 15% of our GDP on health care costs. Total cost: 44.6%. And what do we get for that? Not much. That doesn’t even include parental leave and child care, which is another huge cost for Americans.

It’s time people abandon irrational fears about losing ‘choice’ or ‘freedom’, and realize that these things are already in danger, when we live without the basic rights which it is a government’s duty to provide for its citizens- universal health care, sick pay, parental leave, and quality education.

Statistic sources:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/tax_tot_tax_as_of_gdp-taxation-total-as-of-gdp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:International_Comparison_-_Healthcare_spending_as_%25_GDP.png

So, I wrote my comment in the New York Times. But it didn't make me feel much better. With the democrat's ability to prevent a filibuster now lost- (Massachusetts to the Republicans?! Can this be attributed to global warming?)- and the creeping sense that no matter what Obama wants to accomplish, our permanently log-jammed political system won't allow it, I think it's going to be at least another fifty years before the USA has anything like a functional universal system along the lines of France or Germany. Oh well. The food here really is very good. But it'll kill you. And you can't afford to get sick.

I'm confused

All this time in England, I've been telling people that America is the land of convenience. A land where anything private runs smoothly and where good service is paramount. A land where a public gym is like something out of Dante, yes, but a land where you can refill your prescriptions on the phone or online and pick them up an hour later at your 24 hour pharmacy. In England, I was dismayed at the NHS prescription refill process. I was not only dismayed, I was in disbelief. "I have to BRING a piece of PAPER to the doctor's office, wait TWO days, and then go back and GET the piece of PAPER?" After a while, I came up with the idea of mailing my refill request and enclosing a self addressed stamped envelope, but it still seemed terribly inefficient and backwards, and I never quite accepted it. I was always looking forward to being back in the US when I pondered these matters. In my mind, it remained the land of late-night shopping every night, of 24 hour supermarkets, of supreme customer service and of easy commercial transactions. Now I'm back and I'm confused.

You see, in England, I haven't used my checkbook in years. Everything's online. I've paid my rent by direct debit, which means my money goes straight out of my bank account into my landlord's account. No paper. Nothing in the mail. No fee. I've used the same system to pay all my bills. Even if the bill was different amounts each month. I've even used the same system to pay a friend back when I owed her money. My mother-in-law had used the same system to give me a birthday deposit. No checks. No fee. It's easy and it's efficient.

So my husband and I expected the system to be the same or better when we got here. He expected it because I have been telling him that this is the land of convenience. Me, I guess, because of some kind of romanticized nostalgia for my homeland coupled with a lack of real experience in such things, as I left when I was 20.

I bank with HSBC in the US now, a big international bank which I would expect to be modern, green (at least to pay lip service to the consciences of their customers) and efficient. Instead, I find that paying a bill online merely triggers the bank to mail the company I'm paying a check. I'm sorry, but this is totally stone age as far as I'm concerned. There is also no way to make an online payment to a friend or family member or anyone else. The only system is the above mentioned bill pay system. Which we found out when my husband tried to make an electronic payment to my account (different accounts, same bank). You see, he had the money to pay the rent in his account but no checkbook. I had a checkbook but not enough money. So the payment was made from his account to mine. I received nothing. My rent check bounced. Then I received a bank check in the mail, reading "Please accept payment from our mutual client." What a farce!

I expect public things to be shambolic here. I have experienced bureaucratic nightmares aplenty. But I am really confused as to why the world's most enthusiastic free-market economy is so backwards in its day-to-day financial systems. Or is it because I'm not rich? Maybe it's easier for them- in that either Gold accounts or Business accounts come with special privileges, or in that the fees mean little to them. Or maybe the British banks are too generous and have failed to extract every penny they can from their customers, while their American cousins are taking their customers for everything they've got. Heck, most commercial banks in England abolished their ATM machine fees years ago due to public outcry. Now I'm traipsing all over the place looking for an HSBC branch everytime I want to take out $20, and no one seems to think this is weird. I guess this is the hard lesson of advanced capital. Well maybe not THE hard lesson, I'll leave that to Naomi Klein. But perhaps the US banks figure why make things so easy when you can charge extra for them? Here, if you want to make a truly electronic payment, you have to pay a hefty wire transfer fee. So I guess I've figured it out. But I'm still pissed. Maybe I should re-title this post "The grass is always greener." Maybe getting my prescription refills so easily is more about the drug industry maximizing profit than providing a convenient customer experience... Oh.

One patriotic expat

I still can't get over Barack Obama's stunning victory on Tuesday. It seems to me that this victory is not only the result of the presidential race. This event represents a victory over bigotry and the legacy of slavery, over right-wing conservatism, over Bush and Cheney and the neo-cons, over the empty rhetoric of nationalism, and over the thoughtless consumerism, waste, irresponsibility, and anti-intellectualism which has characterized the dominant American culture for so long. I just can't believe it. I can't believe that we have a president-elect who I agree with. After years of shouting at the screen whenever Bush or his cronies came on, I'm now just sitting there saying- yes man yes! Our next president gave the speech of a generation, and he mentioned Native Americans and gays! Unthinkable in the last decade. At last. America has signalled a will to make a change, and move into the future, at last.

I haven't been this excited about politics in a while. I mean, I always follow it, but it generally fills me with depsair. I have tried to guard against this hope, to remain on the ground, armed with my cynicism, but I, like so many others, have been completely disarmed by Barack Obama's intelligence, charm, and apparent sincerity. In fact, the more I watch him and read him, the more I believe that he is, in fact, a great man. A man who will change history and who will leave a legacy of a better America and a better world.

It sounds like I'm towing the new line some how. It sounds patriotic and standard. But I feel in a way like all those American ideals which I grew up hearing about, which I have always admired, and whose betrayal has been so painful, may be about to be rescued. For we do, like many countries, have some beautiful ideals- the most obvious being freedom, individual expression, and the rewards of hard work. The reality has gone so far astray, but people still want to believe them, and they still want to get there. At last, it seems like we are waking up from a nightmare to build the American Dream again. Perhaps it all sounds like sentimental garbage. Perhaps it's just the residue of my cultural indoctrination. But Barack Obama has inspired a new sense of hope in so many of us, and why should we be ashamed of it? Why should we adopt some post-modern malaise because we're embarrassed about sincere feelings? I'm not. I'm going to study Romanticism after all, and I freely confess that I have utterly fallen for my new president.

Amid this excitement and hope, I still know it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be perfect. It might take a long time, many things might never happen. But the symbolic turn in a new direction, by a new generation, fills me with more hope and pride in my country than I've felt in a long time. So many people voted! So many Americans decided to take back their country. It would have been nice if they had done it after four years instead of eight, but hey- the important thing is that they have finally woken up. I really believe that Obama can make a change, or more aptly, that he can inspire the American people to make a change. In fact, his victory shows that he already has.

the p0rn post

Instead of a picture to begin this post, I will start with some headlines/web addresses which appear when one googles 'p0rn.' The first site which appears, from the first click shows pictures of women with come on their faces, a special "f*cked up facials" section (this is the porn jargon for coming on a woman's face or in her eyes), women with pained expressions while being f*cked, and a left hand menu which goes from amateur through fisting, BDSM (which shows women with clamps on their breasts, electrodes on their vaginas, tied up so that their breasts are swollen, bound and gagged, tied up on crosses and other apparatus, and one with clothespins on her vagina), through to the teens section which advertises "girls next door abused." dirtylittlewhore.com is the fourth address, bitchdump.com is number 10.

If this sounds extreme, it is no longer considered so. This is normal mainstream heterosexual p0rn. This is what teenage boys (and girls) or younger find the first time they decide to google the word 'p0rn.' This is what is colonizing our culture and our sexuality, men's and women's. This is what I'm so pissed off about.

What I'm even more pissed off about is that not many people seem to care. In fact, not only don't people seem to care, people seem to like it. Guys like it and, increasingly, girls like it too. To speak out against it is to be misunderstood as repressed, old fashioned, anti-sex, or anti-free speech. To feel that it is disgusting and damaging, not only for the individuals who act in it, but for everyone who consumes it, for everyone who is influenced by it, in relationships and in daily life- is to feel oneself in the minority.

Does it have to be this way? According to one man I recently spoke to about it "If it wasn't about domination and submission it would be boring." So does that go for real sex too? Does real sex have to be about aggression and submission? Have you never had loving spiritual sex? Poor you.

Another person said to me "There's always been porn." Yes there has, and there's nothing inherently wrong with depictions of sex to facilitate arousal. But the images we make make us. The images we produce show us who we are. And we are currently woman-punishers, woman-haters, woman-degraders. Whole generations are learning about sex from porn, internalizing these damaging roles, and losing their sexualities to the porn industry. And it is, we must remember, an industry. With a net worth of $14billion, according to Forbes magazine.

A lot of people do object. But most people I know seem to fall into one of two categories. Either they know about it and don't see a problem, or they don't know about it, and thus don't see the problem. Unfortunately it is mainly men who fall in the first category and women who fall in the second.

I defy anyone to tell me that p0rn in its current practice is not applied misogyny. Just take one look at the first site which comes up when you google 'p0rn' : http://www.yobt.com/main.html
and tell me what you see. There is no love here, no pretense at equality, no respect. It is all about the utter dehumanization and degradation of women. It is the backlash against the feminist movement of the 70's. It is the message to women - hey you want your sexual liberation? Here you go, you slut. You like sex? I'll make you wish you never asked for it.

There is no equivalent for men in our society for the language of hate and degredation used against women- whore, slut, bitch, skank, ho. There are no equivalents for men for the ways women are depicted- dehumanized animals who enjoy being forced and who enjoy pain.

So some agree with me. Yeah it’s wrong, they admit, but what are you gonna do? I don’t know. I think the first thing I’m gonna do is bring it to peoples’ attention that we have a f*cking problem here, and we need to start taking responsibility for it. And then we need to take our culture back from the people who are selling this shit. We need to tell them that we’re not buying.

Lost youths

I'm feeling depressed with the world lately. I'm working myself up day by day into one of those funks which are hard to shake off, because they are so easily fed with so many examples which demonstrate that the world is in many ways a terrible place. It wouldn't be so bad if the world were inherently terrible; I could accept that more easily. It's that the world is beautiful, and that I love life, and it feels like all of its potential goodness is being squandered- not only squandered but distorted into unrecognizable forms. There are so many wrongs that need to be righted and it's hard to hope that they ever will be. At times like this I question why I even want to have children. Life is hard, we don't know what it's for, we don't know what to do with it. The world is a fucked up place full of mostly fucked-up lives. Do I want to inflict existence on my progeny just because I don't know what else to do? I am afraid to imagine sometimes what kinds of lives my children and grandchildren will have, what kind of world they will live in. The signs are bad.

In recent weeks, I've seen a few things which have upset me. One, I saw a perhaps thirteen year old boy eat a chocolate bar first thing in the morning at the bus stop and then deliberately drop the wrapper on the ground. Meaning, this kid lacks even the most basic concepts of ecology, pride in one's home town, and cleaning up after oneself, not to mention of a healthy breakfast. Basically, I interpret the whole thing, the eating and the littering, as this kid screaming out "I feel like a garbage can, people treat me like garbage, I treat them like garbage. I therefore see no point in trying to avoid wading through a sea of garbage." Though, of course, as a Brit, he was probably using the word rubbish as opposed to garbage. My thoughts filled me with despair, as did the feeling that nothing I could say could get through his wall of ignorance. Not even if I quoted to him from "The World Without Us," a depressing and compelling book which details how the sea has literally become a sea of garbage, millions of tiny pieces of plastic to be precise.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting on the upper deck of the bus. Across the aisle, two teenage girls were talking and laughing, one of them playing music on her phone. At times it seemed so loud, I wasn't even sure if it was coming from her phone, or from something more powerful. I had my headphones on, and I could still hear the music plain as day. I took a headphone out of one ear, and said to the girl "Is that your music?" with a little smile. She looked at me, immediately quizzical and confrontational. "What?" "Is that your music?" I said. "But you got your earphones on, isn't it?" she asked. "Yeah," I said. "But I can still hear it." "How can you hear it if you got your earphones on?" she asked, pushing up her face. "Because it's really loud," I said. "Do you think you could turn it down a bit?" "It's not even loud!" she said aggressively. Then looked at her friend and laughed. "I asked you politely," I said. "You could respond politely." She didn't answer.

The last and most disturbing event was also on the bus. Three twelve or thirteen year old boys piled onto the back of the bus on the upper deck. They were laughing and joking and shouting, as kids do, but literally everything they were saying was an obscenity. High pitched voices, horseplay, and "you cunt! oh, you cunt!" "stop it you twat!" "Oy, your mom's a bitch!" "Fuck you! Your mom's a dog. She takes it doggy-style." Not yet full grown-men, already fully trained woman haters.

The thing that is the saddest is these kids, the litterer and the swearers, the rude girl, are not entirely to blame. They are, in a sense, victims. They are sponges who soak up the culture we immerse them in. A culture that values above all style, surface, sexiness, and possessions. A culture which places little value on being smart or spiritual or basically caring about other people. These youths are mirrors we look into and recoil from because we don't recognize what we see. There is sickness and corruption here, in our culture, in our world, and we ought to take responsibility for that. We ought to stop wondering what wrong with these kids and start wondering what's wrong with all of us.