What a weird day...I'm sorry that my upper respiratory infection passed to Wesley despite our best efforts to avoid it. Now we are both feeling "bleh".
While I sat in the phlebotomy waiting room, I overheard a mother and daughter reading from what sounded like a Christian text. The six-year-old was an excellent reader with super comprehension skills and I thought about how many doors that would open for her when she went to college. The girl started reading a passage about a strong woman who bragged that she could turn the world upside down, and how she was the equal to any man. This was followed by an account of how a man who observed her behavior and remarks was both impressed and repelled. At this point ,the girl asked her mom how any man could be attracted to such a woman. Her mother said that she had no idea, because such a woman is repulsive, right? The girl empathetically agreed and then elaborated about how women who wanted to be men were jealous of men and how God could not love such women. I literally bit my tongue so hard it bled.
After my mother's first husband divorced her, she was left with two small children and she was only semi-literate, with an education that ended in the sixth grade. She had also been abandoned by her family, the immediate members of which were dangerous precisely because they were ignorant and happy that way. The man who would later become my step-father and the only man my mom picked that came close to being a real dad was a German immigrant who was three months from having to return to Germany. He was a genius and could fly and repair aircraft, but he was given no better job than to be a gas station attendant. Mom and this gas station attendant invested in a leap of faith and changed each others lives in extraordinary ways.
Mom married this wonderful man and he pushed her to learn how to drive a car, fly a Cessna plane, shoot a rifle, balance a checkbook, and then he paid her way through a electronics degree. Mom earned an aerospace career, and she funded her husband's inventions and patents, every one of which were given awards, accolades, and which sold for big bucks. My step-father became a mechanical engineer, and mom would build and sign the guidance systems for the G.O.E.S. and N.O.A.A. satellite systems. In case you didn't recognise it for what it was...My parents actions personified everything that is the American Dream.
To all of you bitches who think it was anti-American to crown an Indian-American beauty queen, and who think a blonde woman who served in the military, has tattoos, and hunts is a better representative of America, you wouldn't know "American" ifn' it lept up and branded a zip code into your ass cheek.
I'm a former firefighter, and I've done neat stuff like rebuild entire ecosystems, and operate animal rescue ranches. Does that make me more American than a first-generation immigrant housewife? Nope. My full-blood Cherokee Native American momma was about as American as one can get, but it wasn't her American-born husband who helped her live the American Dream. That gift was given to her by a German immigrant.
What *is* the American Dream? Well, if you're anything but a full-blood AmerIndian, you're from immigrant stock. You are Jewish-American, German-American, Irish-American, African-American, Mexican-American, etc, etc. So, *which* of these immigrant peoples is more "American" than the other?
To that Mother teaching garbage to her daughter in the phlebotomy waiting room, your "history" fable doesn't take into account that men needed women who were physically stronger and mentally more enduring than they were to successfully survive colonization of the New World. Women had to maintain homes, fields, kids, livestock, droughts, illness, floods, dangerous childbirths, deaths of babies, ill/infirm/abusive/absentee-husbands, assisting or operating a business venture, processing raw goods for use or sale such as hides, wood, fabric, textiles, food stuffs and more. Many women added school teacher, doctor, firefighter, and home defense to those duties too. Most mens lives were exponentially safer and easier by any definition, then, *and* now. What about men who are gifted in the fine art of raising kids, and/or home economics, entertaining and being a perfect host to guests, or whose careers simply don't pay enough to support dependents? Are these guys not "men"? Does God look upon such men with revulsion? Really? I don't see that anywhere in the bible.
To any and all who think the American Dream is defined by self-made entrepreneurial men and women who serve proudly as that man's adjunct, child bearer, and homemaker, you need to wake up and smell *this* reality. My parents didn't succeed because they were superheroes. They succeeded because they invested a bit of faith and resources into enabling each other to be the best and most their respective abilities could allow them to be. My parents succeeded because they didn't define themselves by their genders, but rather by an honest and realistic understanding of their respective abilities and limitations as individuals. My parents met when they were at the very bottom of the food chain, and despite all the extraordinary drive, smarts, and ability they proved to have, if it were not for their equal-terms partnership, they would have *stayed* at the bottom of the food chain. Finally, what they had that is sorely missing in current events is a healthy and diversified domestic economy in which one could work for one employer until retirement, move up in pay and position in that one company, and one could actually change career tracks by simply going to school or taking internships or apprenticeships. These days, if you are a gas station clerk, you're lucky to have a paying job and you are blessed if it's a full-time one. Your chances of changing careers or being able to get the schooling or training to do so are pretty much...Nil. With that in mind, if you want to preach to me about putting more dependents in this economy by pushing for unedumacated-gun-toting-tattoo-covered-war-vet-full-time housewives who are not allowed to say no to babies, that's extinct-grade stupid.
Just a thought. It's been a weird day.
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