Stuff 'N' Nonsense

Michelle Obama Will Be Fine, Thank You Very Much

This is 2008, not 1978, so why are reporters debating whether high-powered career woman Michelle Obama will be able to adjust to being First Lady, as if the title required her to suddenly become a Stepford wife who meekly hides in her husband's shadow? This clip from CNN really rankled me. Nicole Lapin and Susan Roesgen discuss whether Michelle Obama will be able to retain her identity without her job. Give me a flipping break! Just because the majority of First Ladies have put on that enigmatic, Marabel Morgan face, don't think they're sitting daintily at home, drinking tea with the other Washington wives. At the very least, our First Ladies have been representatives for the United States, traveling around the world on goodwill missions, supporting issues that are important to them, and if there are young children, doing their best to create normalcy for their kids in one of the most abnormal situations imaginable. At best, they're Eleanor Roosevelt.

But that only scratches the surface of what offends me about this video. What I find really disgusting is that it bows to the outdated notion that a woman who has a career has no heart, that since they have satisfying work, their family life and marriage must logically take a back seat. The majority of married-with-kids career women — and from all signs, Michelle Obama is in that majority — have the ability to balance work and family, and give priority to whichever needs the most attention at any given moment. And most women, even those whose careers are their lifeblood, will always put their children's needs first. Women with big careers aren't ball-busting freaks — well, some of them are, just like some men with big careers are misogynistic assholes. But most are human beings who care about their families more than the next big promotion. And guess what? Most men are too.

As I watched the Obamas campaign for the presidency, I was impressed by Michelle in many different ways, but what I liked the most about her was that she seemed real, she seemed sure of herself, and she had the ability to be a supportive wife and good mom without losing her identity as someone strong and powerful. She's not some outmoded cliché — either the career-lusting harpy or frail flower who lives only to sit home and bake cookies. She's someone who does what needs to be done, like find new schools for her daughters, lovingly give her husband reality checks, and who has the smarts to make the most of her new job as First Lady.

So I'm not worried that Michelle Obama will be frustrated by her new role in the White House. On the contrary, I think it's a challenge she'll embrace and she'll make the most of it.

Humans Take the Blame by Sparkle the Designer Cat

Today's entry is by guest blogger Sparkle.

A few months ago, I was reviewing a cat book (for that is the only kind of book I read) called Cats Rule, which is meant to be a list of rules by cats. Well, I figured out right away that most of this, ahem, wisdom came straight from the human imagination and not from cats. So I started making up my own, real cat rules, one of them being: "Rain, earthquake or wind? Blame your human for them." Because as we all know, anything that a cat has not caused must logically have happened because of something a human did. Well guess what? I've discovered that when we're suffering from awful weather, it really is the fault of humans! It's called global warming, and its effects include extreme weather. So yeah, hurricanes, heat waves (and I bet even those earthquakes we get here in California) are all human-made. I just hope this global warming doesn't kill off catnip bushes. That would be a real tragedy. Maybe even a cause for feline revolt.

Apparently humans can do a lot to reduce their impact on the environment, but I'm skeptical. If the humans I live with are any sort of example, they make a lot of promises and never carry through with them. "I'll feed you in five minutes!" more often means, "I'll feed you when you're so hungry, you knock something over to get my attention." If there are any cats out there who have some thoughts about how to get humans to take action, I'd really like to know!

If Disaster Strikes, I've Always Got Twitter

I'm one of those rare oddities of nature: an American without television reception. In fact, until Brian moved in with me in the late 1990s, I spent my whole adult life without a television at all. When we moved to our current home, we never bothered hooking up the cable, so our (actually his) television sits in the living room, blank except for when I'm playing an exercise DVD or vintage (silent or pre-code) film on vintage VHS.

So how do I get my news? Internet, of course! With all the resources on the web, I've found that I'm more plugged in and knowledgeable about current affairs than the majority of my TV-watching friends. And entertainment? For necessary shows like The Colbert Report, I've always got Hulu, which usually uploads the latest episode around midnight.

But my newsiness has been upgraded ever since I got a Twitter account. I got the first inkling of this one morning in July when I was working out to a Michelle Dozois DVD. The ground started shaking, so I did what any self-respecting computer geek would do: I put down my dumbbells, dashed to the computer and twittered about it.

It turned out that I wasn't the only one who reported their experience of the small earthquake on Twitter. A search through the site revealed earthquake tweets from all over the southern California area. Later I found out that we Twitter fiends report news before the major news outlets are able to write up their own items. So ever since that earthquake, whenever something exciting or disastrous happens, instead of logging onto my local news station website, I go to Twitter and start searching.

This works on an even better level when a disaster happens that's far from my Los Angeles home — and also when I'm far from my Los Angeles home myself. I was in Maryland when Hurricane Ike devastated Galveston. I've always had a fascination for the picturesque Gulf Coast island town, so I wanted to know what was happening down there. With Twitter, I got even more than I bargained for, because first I did a location search for Twitterers who lived in and around Galveston — then I followed their tweets all through the night that Ike hit and into the next day. So not only did I find out what was going on down there, I got an intensely up-close-and-personal view of how people's lives were being impacted. There was the cigar shopkeeper who knew his beloved store was ruined. The retired guy who was desperate to find out what happened to his treasured boat. The girl who lost all her belongings when her little apartment was wrecked, but was able to shrug it off by saying, "it's just stuff." The young woman reporter who was clearly distressed by what was happening to her town, but didn't let it get in the way of her ability to report. I saw photos of the high school hallways that housed evacuees, taken with someone's cell phone and posted on twitpics. Following all this on Twitter was like getting messages from friends I didn't know, who didn't even realize I existed. It was a strange kind of intimacy you don't get from watching the news, or reading about it on most internet sites.

As the people of Galveston began recovery and started to put their lives back together, I followed other events. Via Twitter, I found lots of facts and fictions about the candidates during the presidential elections, and I got to share in the excitement on election night, when Barack Obama won. Today, with fires raging throughout southern California, I can find out what's happening in Sylmar to the northwest of me and Corona and Yorba Linda to the southeast. And someday, if disaster should happen to strike in my own backyard, I'll be twittering about it, as long I have wifi or cell phone service.

Woefully Unprepared

As I crouched under my big-ass desk this morning, clutching my laptop and listening to the earthquake drill recording from the Great American Shakeout, I had about two and a half minutes to meditate on the fact that if Los Angeles were to have a major earthquake right now at this very second, I would be fucked.

Chances are I'd live through it if I happened to be sitting in my office once the shaking started - the desk is about the sturdiest piece of furniture in the house. And while I'd suffer some significant bruising from the rolling desk chair as it slammed against the desk, it would also protect me from all the junk that was flying around the room — because nothing, nothing is bolted down in here — or anywhere else in the house. My high-end photo scanner, all-in-one printer and heavy-duty shredder would be trashed. The several-hundred-pound Sony Trinitron in the living room would probably land on one of our three cats and a good portion of my exercise DVD collection while the overhead fixture would crash down on the wreckage. Every last dish I owned would break as the antique china cabinet toppled and all the drawers in the kitchen would fly open, scattering my dry goods all over the floor, which would be flooded by the fallen Arrowhead water bottle. My bathroom and Brian's would be full of broken glass, our dressers would have emptied their contents on our bed before toppling over on it themselves, crushing it and any cat that happened to seek shelter underneath it. The dog would freak out and run off to who-knows-where. So while I'd live through the earthquake, I probably wouldn't be all that happy to be alive.

If you've read into the subtext of the above paragraph, you've probably grasped that I'm actually more concerned about the creatures here than I am about my stuff. For that reason alone, I should do two things: 1) make the items in the house more secure and less likely to become projectiles and 2) invest in reinforcing the house foundation. When I was in escrow for this place a couple of years back, one of the inspectors my realtor hired was a foundation guy who gave me a pretty reasonable estimate to secure the foundation. Since I have a nice chunk of money in cash right now (I took a lot out of the stock market at the beginning of the year), it might be a good peace-of-mind investment, since experts believe there is a greater than 99% chance that California will have an earthquake in the next 30 years, and I plan to be in this house for the longterm.

Of course, there is more to earthquake preparedness than just foundations and securing furniture. The Dare to Prepare site has comprehensive information on getting ready for the Big One (or even a not-so-big-one). It's worth reviewing for anyone who lives in earthquake country.

Finally - Why I Don't Think Americans Can Unite... And How I Think We Might

When I first began paying attention to Barack Obama, shortly after the 2004 Democratic Convention, I thought, “Hey, this guy is liberal enough for a progressive like me, but at the same time I get the feeling that he may be moderate enough and willing enough to compromise to draw in some people who are more conservative.” So far, the president-elect is living up to my opinion of him. I woke up Monday to a news item that said he wants lapsed Democrat Joe Lieberman to stay in the Democratic caucus. Senator Lieberman angered a lot of Liberals when he sided with Republicans on issues like the Iraq war and made them even madder when he went independent to get re-elected to his senate seat. The last straw was when he campaigned for John McCain and even spoke out against Obama on the campaign trail. A lot of Democrats, especially progressives, are furious and out for blood. And maybe Obama has the right to be upset with Lieberman too. But instead he wants to put their differences behind him and get down to the important business: running the country.

But what about the country itself? Are we capable of putting our differences behind us for the greater good? Or are we going to keep on insulting each other, exaggerating truths, creating lies, and tearing each other apart? Sometimes I wonder if it's hopeless. A Republican friend of mine uploaded a photo to her Facebook profile. It was a flyer of the Republican voting recommendations for this past election. I opened up the election booklet I took with me to the polling booth. Out of the 12 state measures, I had voted the opposite on 9 of them. Ideologically, we Liberals and Conservatives are worlds apart.

Perhaps there are a couple of windows of opportunity, however. My boyfriend is a longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Even though I'm what they call a "normie" (someone who can drink socially without a second thought), I attend meetings with him now and again, mainly because so many of our friends are AA and it gives me a chance to visit with them. One thing I've learned through my AA exposure is that the people who succeed and stay sober for years have learned to bond with their fellow alcoholics by finding the common ground between them and playing down the differences. A lot of other things go into sobriety also, but it's always a clue that someone's on the verge of "going out" (i.e., drinking again) when they start complaining that they have nothing in common with the sober people around them. When they start focusing on the differences, it isolates them from their fellow alcoholics, and when that bond is broken, it's a lot easier to listen to that thing, whatever it is, that tells them that drinking is okay for them. So I've seen firsthand that looking for where you are similar brings people together; emphasizing the differences will only pull people apart — and it creates something ugly.

Back to my Republican friend, who voted the opposite of me on nearly everything on the ballot for the most recent election. Early on in our friendship, I opted out of discussing anything political, even before I knew how strongly she felt about her positions. We had enough in common — we're writers and bloggers in the same age group; we do a lot of the same things and go to some of the same events (we hung out for coffee one day at this year's Book Expo America, for example). And she's a nice person who only wants the best for people. That's all I need to know to have her as a friend. And there's my boyfriend's brother-in-law, who definitely sees things from the political right wing. We see things very differently politically — we've had some debates, but I just shrug them off because I know we aren't ever going to change each other's minds. Just because he's Drudge Report and I'm Huffington Post doesn't mean I'm not gonna enjoy his wicked sense of humor, or his great taste in film or music. Plus he makes a dangerous Mojito and an even more dangerous margarita (which makes me glad I'm not AA). My life would be a little drearier if he wasn't around.

Which brings me to my point: aren't we making our lives a little drearier by isolating ourselves from others because their political leanings are different from ours? The attitude of intolerance has always been around to some level, but after 9/11, it seemed to grow ever more virulent. I think that was the biggest tragedy of that day. Those events brought us together for a moment, but ultimately, it made us more hateful, vengeful and less willing to overlook the differences of other people.

I get the feeling — and I hope I'm right — that President-elect Obama would really like to see both Liberals and Conservatives start healing the wounds we've inflicted on each other. Well, so would I. Unfortunately, as a whole I don't think we're up to it. Fortunately, I think we might be up to it as individuals. If just some of us stop using cheap shots to attack people who think differently from us; if we stop spoiling for fights we can't win; if we start focusing instead on what the other person has to offer, and what we have to offer them; if we start looking for the good in people instead of dredging up ugliness, then someday, maybe — just maybe — we'll become the UNITED States of America once again.

Exhibit Two: What's Wrong With Us Liberals

Partway into my research for this blog entry, I realized I was going about it ass-backwards. I was browsing through conservative websites, looking for all the names we Liberals get called by those on the right. After reading a bunch of posts calling us hypocrites, socialists, anti-gun, pro-censorship, intolerant, weak, whiny and elitist, it finally struck me: I was looking for the wrong thing. So I went back to Google and started searching for Liberal and anti-right wing sites. That put me in the direction I needed.

We Liberals can't judge ourselves by the hate-speak that comes from angry Conservatives and right-wingers who are bent on attacking our every move. Those are only symptoms of the problem. We need to look at ourselves to see why these attacks are so vehement, so virulent in nature.

So let's see... according to some of the Liberal websites, blogs and videos I looked at, Liberals think Conservatives are:

• Self-righteous
• Racist
• Homophobic
• Sexist
• Hypocritical and intolerant (wait a minute... I thought that was us!)
• Obviously retarded
• Moronic
• Insular
• Isolationist
• Backwards-looking
• Mindlessly flag-waving
• Delusional
• Marginalized
• and my personal favorite, "batshit crazy"

My liberal friends who are reading this are nodding to themselves and saying, "But of course! Those idiot right-wingers are moronic, self-righteous, delusional fools. So what's your point?"

Hello! That is exactly my point! You want people to hate you, not listen to you, distance themselves from you, fight everything you stand for? Then keep insulting them! Calling someone stupid never made them smart and never encouraged them to learn. It only convinced them to stay away from you. Calling a person "delusional" only makes them think you are the deluded one. Fellow Liberals, your sneering, fun as it may seem while you're doing it, has won you no fans and often inspired those you attack to regard your opinions as even less worthy than they thought they were before. Do you know what your remarks make you sound like? Whiny, intolerant elitists. And that has been, and will be, held against you. Don't think that conservatives will forget Barack Obama's "guns and religion" quote, or John Murtha calling his own constituents racist rednecks anytime soon. The same as you won't forget Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann calling us anti-American.

Every time you slam someone from a place of ignorance — and that's what you do when you haven't walked in someone's shoes or made an honest effort to understand why they think the way they do — you are insulting them in a way that makes you look worse than what you assume them to be. And I don't want to hear any complaints about what the people on the right are saying. To whine, "He said it first!" makes you sound childish. You wouldn't accept this behavior from your kids, and I won't accept it from grown-up Liberals.

So suck it up, guys. Stop the low blows and cheap insults. Yeah, we disagree with the people on the right on a lot of things, but they have their reasons for their opinions that have nothing to do with being delusional, backwards or even batshit crazy. It's even possible that they gave a lot of thought to their conclusions, maybe more than you did to yours. If some of them want to revert to name calling, that doesn't mean you have to do the same. Give some thought to your rebuttals, and work on making them persuasive and easy to understand. Give the other side at least a chance to say, "I do see your point, although I don't agree with it" — in other words, to see you as a fellow human on life's journey instead of a bully or wingnut. And instead of being snarky amongst yourselves, use the time to sharpen your arguments. We are always going to clash with the people on the right, so we might as well do it smart instead of acting impulsive and dumb.

From today's post and Thursday's, you can see why we're a divided nation, and why it's going to be tough for our new president to reach out and to the dissenters, many of whom don't even want to listen to what he has to say. I think it can be done, but it's not up to him or our congresspeople. Like any effective movement — political, cultural or artistic — it must begin on a grassroots level. I hope we're up to it, but I have my doubts. More on that tomorrow.

Exhibit One: A Campaign of Division

One of the reasons I believe it will be hard for the divided American public to come together under President-elect Obama's administration is due to the negative smear campaign the Republicans led in their failed attempt to elect John McCain. That's not to say that Democrats and Liberals aren't guilty of smears and name calling (more on that in my next post), but as much as he could, Barack Obama tried to stick to the issues at hand while campaigning for America's highest office. His group took McCain's record in the Senate, digested it through the view of the left (which is what campaigns do), and took McCain to task for it in a way they felt would win voters to their side. If the Republicans had merely done the same, I would have nothing to complain about. But they didn't.

The Republicans campaigned in a way that encouraged division and hatred. Because of Obama's liberal voting record (he is, after all, a Democrat), they could very well have stuck to issues and Obama's inexperience, slanted them towards their audience, and shown very graphically why McCain would be the better choice for them. The fact that they didn't have a lot of success with this in the beginning suggests to me that there were problems in the McCain campaign from the start. When this honest (politically, at least) tactic didn't work, they proceeded to dig into Obama's past in an attempt to find things that they could twist into issues that would scare their base into sticking close to their side. An example is Obama's brief association with Bill Ayers, who 40 years ago had been a part of the Weather Underground. Somehow, this got built into Obama "pallin' around with terrorists," as Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was so fond of saying. Ayers was hammered into Republican heads unendingly, to the extent that nobody thought to mention that wealthy and highly respected members of their own party (the Annenbergs) also "palled around" with Ayers. This type of attempted character assassination was uncalled for. In addition, Palin stumped around the country with a very "us versus them" attitude, painting Democrats and Liberals as different from her fans and not real Americans. Heartily booing Obama and Liberals was encouraged.

Toss into the mix a few extreme right-wing wackos who spread ridiculous rumors such as the Christian, church-going Obama being Muslim, or that he wasn't born in the U.S. (this in spite of a confirmed Hawaiian birth certificate and the issue being thrown out of court), or that he was an extreme leftist (Obama is no Dennis Kucinich — he is a moderate liberal). Ultimately many conservatives started believing the worst. In their view, Barack Obama was a Muslim, socialist, white-hating terrorist who had bamboozled millions with his eloquence and would turn the United States Red — as in Communist Red — if elected. No wonder people on the right hate us — apparently, we're either gullible, or un-American, or terrorists ourselves!

I think the Republicans who were in charge of John McCain's campaign, along with Sarah Palin and her pitbull attacks, did America a disservice by letting these lies get out of hand and fueling the fire of hatred. They encouraged the divisiveness that already plagues the nation — and they created an atmosphere that is more dangerous for our President-elect than it already was.

While McCain himself allowed this to happen on his watch, I can't hold him wholly responsible. I think he was given bad advice, and watching some of the clips of him campaigning, he looks uncomfortable with the direction his campaign took. What was really awful to me was hearing him get booed when he tried to defend his opponent if the audience attacks were too harsh. It was like the mob was out of his hands. I think in his heart, McCain is a decent man who was often treated unfairly by the liberal press (read the Rolling Stone story on him, and then do some fact-checking to see what I mean). His concession speech showed me the honorable man who might have had a better chance had we seen more of him in the months leading up to the election. Instead, his campaign left us with the legacy of hatred and fear left over from the Bush Administration, and a large percentage of Americans who distrust a newly-elected president who seems to honestly want to bring us together.

Next time, I'll be looking at how the liberals have separated themselves from the rest of America, and why the right has some good reasons to hate us. Although trust me, none of those reasons have anything to do with us being gullible, un-American terrorists.

Yes, It's Time to Unite... But Can We?

The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States is an exhilarating slice of history for America. Well, at least for the 53% of Americans who voted for him. For the 46% who didn't... not so much. While we Liberals are celebrating our success after 8 long and devastating years of misery, it would do us good to remember that we are still a nation divided.

Even as we're glorying in the possibilities to come — a better environmental policy, new approaches to the economy and health care, getting a bead on those who were really responsible for 9/11 — there are a lot of people, some of them your relatives and neighbors, who think their world has just fallen apart. They're afraid that their America has come to an end, that the new administration will be a radically leftist force, which is out to destroy the things they hold dear. We may tell them that things are not only going to be okay, they'll be fantastic — but they won't believe us.

Those staunch Republicans and conservatives who voted for McCain are in the same shoes I was the cold November day in 2000 that Bush was declared president. And they're scared. I checked out some of the article comments at news sites like cnn.com and foxnews.com and hunted out some rightwing blogs. There are conservatives out there who really believe that Obama is a socialist; that he'll take away the right to own guns; that he will make serious tactical mistakes abroad that will invite terrorists to attack America again; that he is anti-white; that his answer to health care is even more ruinous than what we have now. And these are some of the less extreme assumptions I've read. "He is not my president," one blog commenter declared. In a way, I could relate. That's exactly how I felt about Bush. Eight years after Bush was given the presidency, I still feel that way.

President-elect Obama says he wants to unite us, but can he? When you look at the electoral map, you see that he turned a lot of red states blue, but do a close up of any of those states — any of the 50 states, for that matter — and you see big patches of precincts colored red and colored blue, territories separated by beliefs. Quite a few respected conservatives endorsed Obama, but does that speak of uniting? Or does that merely speak of a Republican party that has splintered and lost its focus, combined with a rare Democratic contender who was not so much a candidate as he was a force of nature?

We won this year for 4 reasons: 1) there are more Democrats registered this time around; 2) the two terms of the outgoing Republican administration have been ruinous, and many independents and some conservatives are fed up; 3) the Republicans couldn't figure out how to give their ticket the broad appeal that would cross party lines and grab them a majority; and 4) that's exactly what our guy did —he offered something different and hopeful, and he was able to present it via one of the best-run presidential campaigns in history. None of this means that all — or even most — Americans are going to come together in love and peace.

The battle within America still rages. Over the next few posts I plan to explore why this is, and see if there is some way we can reach out and give respect, even if we as a nation can't agree.

Why You Should Keep Politics and Marketing Apart

As a social liberal who's strongly invested in this year's presidential campaign, I've been pretty stressed out and jumpy the past few weeks. So I really didn't need the email I got this afternoon from someone whose marketing newsletter I've subscribed to in the past. According to the email, his "inner circle" liked his essay regarding his support of John McCain, so he took it upon himself to send it out to his general list. I was disgusted by the contents because 1) he says things that are poorly researched, aren't wholly accurate and state facts in a way that unfairly slant to favor McCain; 2) he belittles the beliefs and desires of social liberals such as me — and most importantly 3) he had some gall and not a lot of smarts sending out a political email to a general list of subscribers who are potential customers of his.

Folks, there is a place for politics and there are places for a politic-free zone. I will give you some examples from my own personal/ business life. I run several websites and am on a number of different social networks. I share my political beliefs on some of them and others I do not. It depends on whether I think my personal beliefs should be a part of that experience. If I think it will detract, I keep anything political out of it.

For example, I run an exercise DVD review site. I want everyone to embrace a fit lifestyle, no matter what they believe in. I'm sure some people who visit my site are liberal and others are conservative, and very strongly so. Why risk turning them away from an activity that will enhance their lives by spouting off opinions that may be the opposite of what they think? Then there's my cat's website (she is also on Twitter, has a MySpace profile, a YouTube account and a merchandise store on CafePress — she's a busy little thing). Cats are above politics to begin with, and their owners are all over the demographic map. Visitors come to Sparkle's site for fun, not for a manifesto, and they don't want to see a cat (or her owner) trash things they hold dear. Sites like these are politically neutral — to have them be otherwise would spoil them.

On the other hand, anyone who visits my own MySpace Profile or Facebook account will see right away what I'm about politically. That's because they're a blend of friendship and business, and since I happen to work in entertainment and media, most of my business associates tend to be at least a touch on the left side of the scale. I do have a few friends who veer more towards the right, but I would never, ever attack them for their beliefs. Make fun of their candidates on occasion, maybe, when the candidate does something dumb (and yeah, my faves have done their share of dumb things too). But I'd never post a political message on their profile, belittle their opinions publically or send a message blast that tells them what they think is wrong. And I expect the same in return (I must have chosen my friends well, because this actually has never been an issue).

Bottom line: always be respectful of other people's opinions, especially when they are prospects, customers or people who you deal with on a business level. That marketer who sent me the email? I unsubscribed from his list, told him why and never looked back.

A reminder for US Citizens: Vote November 4!

I really want to keep political leanings out of this particular post (although the news today of the hilarious and embarrassing prank call from a Canadian comedic duo to Sarah Palin makes it really, really difficult), because no matter who you support, the important thing is to get out there and vote. Even my cat agrees with me (sort of):