It’s Blog for Choice Day. And this year, a year many of us thought might actually be a good one for sexual and reproductive rights, has turned out to be a very lousy one indeed. We saw Democrats force the Stupak amendment into an otherwise fairly decent House health care reform bill, and do nearly the same thing in the Senate onto an already-pretty-crappy health care reform bill.
We saw the murder of Dr. George Tiller, abortion provider, in cold blood.
We like to talk about choice. We fight over terminology. But what have we really done, in the years since Roe v. Wade, other than hold the line and nervously try not to lose what we’ve won?
We criticize Democrats for not supporting us, we who put them in office. But what are we pushing for? When my Democrat Congresswoman from my quite Democratic district (BROOKLYN, people) sends me a form letter in response to my calls and emails about Stupak, reassuring ME that there won’t be any federal money spent on abortion, what does that mean for us? Even the Democrats are more worried about antichoice arguments than they are about people like me bailing on them. Where are we going to go, after all, right?
Well, I’m tired of it. It’s 2010. We need to be fighting for more gains, not hiding in a defensive crouch and praying we get to hold on to what we’ve got. Rights are not granted, they are taken.
Not enough. I want positives. I want to use this moment to affirm our right to a healthy, joyful sexuality and to talk about how we can achieve that. A messy, unruly sexuality—hell, part of the beauty of it is that it’s not clean and neat. It is like eating a peach, in the last lines of Prufrock, juices running down your chin, sweet and tangy. Those decisions that happen in a minute are sometimes wrong, and sometimes unplanned things come out of them, but we don’t need to be saved from it, we need to have resources and support to deal with it, from a relationship gone sour to unfortunate STIs or Plan B for a birth control failure—or, whether Congress likes it or not, safe, legal, insurance-covered abortion.
I want to come out of the closet and say yes, we like sex, and we have the right to have it. To say that if the government spends millions of dollars every year on technologies that are only good for killing people, it can include abortion in a health care plan.
We didn’t get to the point of Roe v. Wade by having nice polite arguments. We got there by being angry, and demanding, and pushing. We got there by staking out a firm position: that our bodies are our own and we have the right to do what we want with them. We got there by calling for free abortion on demand.
So this year I don’t want to hear any sugarcoating. I don’t want any dancing around the words. Abortion. Sex. Pregnancy. There it is. “Choice” means a lot of things, it’s true. But this year we should all remember at bottom what it is we fought for.
My latest piece is up at Global Comment. Some thoughts on healthcare, freelancing, racism at town halls, and equality.
For a country that relies on the bootstrap myth, the U.S.A. certainly has a health care system that punishes people who attempt to live that way. The self-employed, the small business owner, and most especially the scraping-by creative types—artists, designers, freelance journalists—have no easy way to get health insurance. We are stuck buying our own care on the “free” market, where a single person has very little bargaining power.
On Tuesday, September 1st, I became one of America’s 46 million uninsured. I have a graduate degree, a decent amount of published writing, and multiple regular freelance clients. There is a better-than-average possibility that I could pay my bills with my writing, except for that one problem. A survey by AHIP, the national organization of health insurance providers, reports that I can assume to pay an average premium of $4734 in New York state, where I reside.
Paul Krugman explains that employer-based health insurance is regulated by the government. Corporations can get tax advantages for providing health care for employees; benefits are not considered taxable income, so companies pay less in wages and make it up in health care. Krugman notes, “[T]o get that tax advantage employers have to follow a number of rules; roughly speaking, they can’t discriminate based on pre-existing medical conditions or restrict benefits to highly paid employees.”
Campus Progress reports that only 60% of the population is covered by employer-provided health care. 26 million small business owners or their employees remain uninsured despite having a steady source of income—because it simply costs too much.
At the risk of diving in here when I haven’t been posting much to self-promote, my first story is up at the Nation’s site. It’s about the Philadelphia Museum of Art security guards and their struggles to unionize, and how they’re a great example of the need for the Employee Free Choice Act.
There’s kind of a dearth of interest in labor issues among the “netroots,” as I noticed when Arlen Specter had to bring up EFCA himself while being questioned at Netroots Nation. While I’m nowhere near as knowledgeable as some when it comes to union history and organizing, I try to do my part. Anyway, here’s the beginning and please read the whole piece over there.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a recognizable icon even to those who have never set foot in the city. Immortalized in the movie Rocky, when a sweatsuit-clad Sylvester Stallone bounded up the stairs while training for his big fight, the museum became a symbol of the working-class tenacity that Philadelphians are known for.
On September 6, those steps will host a different kind of blue-collar battle: the museum security guards will be holding a rally in support of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and their right to form a union.
Back before the Pennsylvania primaries, I interviewed Bill Cahir, then running in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 5th District Congressional seat. He was a thoughtful, eloquent candidate, sharing his positions on media consolidation and making a case for single-payer health care as well as elaborating on the best way for the US to get out of Iraq.
Bill Cahir was killed in Afghanistan on Thursday, according to the Washington Post.
Cahir had to get an age deferment to join up with the Marines after September 11, 2001, but he felt that it was the right thing to do. When we spoke, he was still trying to do the best thing for America, and he died still serving his country. He would have made an excellent congressman, and I truly had hoped that he would run for office again.
Before signing up with the Marines, Cahir was a journalist, and he returned to reporting after his tour of duty in Iraq, before deciding to run for Congress. I stumbled across the news story by accident today while fact-checking a piece for the Nation and it brought me up short: I have several friends who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no one (thank whatever you believe in) has yet been killed. I only spoke to Cahir once, but it brought the war back home to me.
Every death in Afghanistan and Iraq is tragic and unnecessary, and Cahir’s is sadly not out of the ordinary. My interview with him is here, if you’re interested.
As in, did anyone watch Pacquiao v. De La Hoya on Saturday night? I am too broke for pay-per-view and didn’t feel like sports-barring it to watch this fight, but now I wish I had.
I watched Pacquiao fight a couple of years ago and he blew me away. The heavyweights get all the cred, but lemme tell you, the lighter guys are way more fun to watch. Fewer knockouts, sure, but the blinding speed is mindblowing.
Not too long ago, when I was living in South Carolina, my social life pretty much revolved around the gym. I took up kickboxing again to get over a messy breakup, met another guy who trained in muay Thai and boxing, and suddenly…yeah.
And there’s something about the purity of a fight. Of two people in a ring wearing as little clothing as possible, not leaving until one of them has admitted defeat. I love muay Thai and MMA probably more than straight boxing, but every now and then I’m intrigued by a fight, and this one had the elements that sucker a lot of people.
Yeah, De La Hoya’s one of the great ones, but damn if it isn’t cool that Pacquiao jumped up two weight classes and still made De La Hoya quit. (Granted, cutting weight was probably harder on De La Hoya than gaining it was on Pacquiao. But still.)
There’s something about making the other guy quit that really says something, too. A knockout can come in a flash, just one good punch. A decision always pisses off some people, who think it was bad. But when the fighter just doesn’t come out of his corner at the bell? Talk about conceding.
See, cutting weight is part of fighting. It’s one that I’m disgusted by, having lived with a fighter for two years and seen the battles that he–yes, he–went through with the process and the damage it did to his body image. Fighters weigh in a day or two before their fight, and the idea is to take a fight at a low weight, lose some of it off your body and sweat the rest of it out so that when you rehydrate, you weigh more–hopefully more than your opponent, and you get an advantage. So no one actually fights at their real body weight, except amateur boxers and wrestlers, who weigh in the day of the event, just hours before their bouts. And even they often sweat out a few pounds and hope to be able to hydrate and eat before their fight.
But thousands of men across the world do this regularly. Boxers, muay thai fighters, and MMA fighters, as well as even high school wrestlers “cut” weight. It’s been dramatized on shows such as The Ultimate Fighter and Fight Girls, which starred Carano.
None of them were called out by name as being in danger of injuring themselves by taking fights at weights too low to make, even though there are many who struggle with the weight-cutting process.
Instead, the writer here chose to make the female MMA star–and there is no argument that Gina Carano is the biggest female mixed martial arts star out there–the subject of his article.
Once again, the female body is there to be policed by men.
If this writer is so concerned with the health of fighters, he should have written an article exposing the entire weight-cutting process for what it is: physical damage done in the attempt to gain a somewhat unfair advantage. He could’ve written about high school coaches encouraging teenagers to go into the ring weakened and dehydrated in order to make a lower weight class.
In other words, he could’ve written this article without making it about a woman.
Instead, Carano needs to be protected from herself. She needs to be stopped from doing damage to her body. He throws in some images of naked Carano being weighed in between two towels, and jokes about internet fans hoping someone would drop the towel.
This is completely unnecessary. If he had a specific point to make about how women are more likely to be encouraged to lose weight, how the thin ideal is encouraged on women more than men, he could’ve done it. He could’ve proposed same-day or even right-before-bout weigh-ins (like jockeys on the racetrack, though they routinely go into races dehydrated and starved as well).
But he didn’t. He chose to sexualize and then scold the woman.
I warn everyone: this may be offensive. There was champagne, and much shouting at the TV. Click “more” at your own risk. Also, it goes in reverse order, with the most recent first.
I saw In Conflict tonight at Temple. Part of the Philly Fringe right now, it’s making its off-Broadway debut later this month (you NY people, check it out). A play based on actual interviews with Iraq war veterans, this was one incredibly powerful piece of theater.
The actors addressed the audience as though the audience was the journalist, and video clips of Yvonne Latty, the actual reporter who collected the interviews, were interspersed throughout. Each actor took on a character or two and with minimal props, became that person, that veteran, that Marine or Army Sergeant or National Guard medic or doctor or Medevac pilot. They switched accents and folded up limbs to become amputees. They adopted the nervous habits and the drunken slurs, the body language and most painfully, the tears of the veterans.
These were student actors, mostly undergrads, and they impressed the hell out of me.
One played a gay Marine, who spoke about wanting to reenlist but being afraid that he would be outed and he would lose everything. He was working at a TGI Friday’s rather than going back into the army, and the frustration was palpable.
Another was a Russian immigrant. He took on the accent and the politeness, offering the audience a tray of cookies and smiling, knocking on his prosthetic and bragging about having met President Bush. Then after the intermission, he was a National Guard volunteer who got sent to Iraq. You could feel the tension in his arms, through his back as he shouted his frustration at being sent to a war for no reason.
One of the more wrenching ones was a man drinking away his pain, with the best line in the play: “Some guys came back amputees. Well, I’m a mental amputee. Can’t give me no prosthetic mind, though.” A few people in the audience laughed at his slurred words at first, but his horrifying story had them regretting their laughter quickly.
This was the closest many people have come to talking to a real veteran, I think. The closest anyone has come to hearing those stories. We all may have our own feelings about the war and even about those who fight, those who sign up for the military, the very existence of the military itself. But I think whatever your feelings on the subject, you should be confronting the reality of what these people–these young people, ten years younger than I am and I certainly don’t feel old enough–go through. What they put themselves through, since we do still have an all-volunteer army. We should see the funerals on the news and hear the people’s stories who come back, and aside from the occasional This American Life story or feature article, we just don’t.
I have a few friends who have come back from Iraq. Thankfully, everyone I know has come back physically in one piece (there’s one who’s still over there, and I pray that he’s OK) but mentally, emotionally, the scars are there. Some people hide them better than others, but knowing that it’s all in there…it’s hard. It’s hard to know what to do, but listening is a good start. Not trying to ask stupid questions like “did you kill anyone” or “what was it like” but really letting them say whatever it is they have to say. Really listening. It can be hard to do, but it’s something I strive to be good at.
I came away from the play feeling silly, like the problems I’d been complaining about earlier in the day were just so much petty bullshit. I don’t want to be angry at friends or argue about things. Right now I just kind of want to tell everyone I love that I do love them, and that I will listen if they ever need to talk. I want to do something to help people who are coming back from this war scarred and hurting and unable to get help and feeling like no one cares enough to listen.
Sometimes the best thing I can think of to do is go volunteer for campaigns, to try to fix these problems. It drove me out to volunteer for Kerry–one of the stories told in the play was about a vet who actually got a phone call from Kerry, during his presidential run, and who felt that Kerry actually cared about him–it made me glad over again for my volunteer hours even if we did lose that time. It’s driven me out to volunteer for Obama, and will again despite many things I disagree with him on. I have to do something.
One of the things brought home by this play was how class-based the military system is. How the people fighting this war are immigrants, people of color, people who needed the money the military offered, people who didn’t have a lot of options and who have even fewer when they come back and get out with trauma. People whose apartments don’t accommodate their wheelchairs. People who don’t live near a VA hospital. People who don’t get treatment for PTSD. They’re forgotten about. They don’t appear on TV because they aren’t Jessica Lynch.
This wasn’t “fun” to watch. It hurt. It made me cry, and more often made me bite my lip until I realized I was doing it, and want to reach out and hug the people onstage, even though they’re just actors playing a part. They’re telling a story over and over again that it might be too hard for the people who lived those stories to repeat again. They’re making a new audience each night look into the eyes of the veterans and confront the reality of war, not in bloody violence like war movies, but in the aftermath, the trying to move on and live with what you’ve seen done and what you’ve done.
Reasons: Pipeline (in case that’s intercepted the alternative is Russian pipeline), NATO (’our former in our very soft South underbelly can’t be part of NATO’), and personal dislike of our President Saakashvili by Russian Prime Minister Putin.
Then there is Kosovo - “if they should get independence, why shouldn’t the Ossetians?” - the thinking goes.
Then there is Iraq - “if US can hang whomever they dislike, why can’t we?”
