Wolf, Ram, and Hart: Playing Politics For Centuries

The group in the title is from the TV Series “Angel”, a show spawned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They are the legal team for The Big Bad — the shiny suits that work  evil at it’s most primal. They are, of course, fictional, being from a TV series and all, but sometimes I wonder…

Tonight, while I’m laying in bed with a fever, my wife says that Congress has voted to allow women into the draft. I just want to cry. Just when it feels like we’ve tried to put out the various political “fires” in the world, a new cause/problem comes along that I didn’t see coming. Really?

Let’s see:

Donald Trump is no doubt the front-runner for the Republican Party. The next closest candidate is called “Lucifer in the flesh” by one of his own party. He chooses a female VP to garner votes and people trash her website. That means that a personality-disordered man is a candidate to run my country.  He wants to deport Mexicans and others! He wants to ban Muslims!  He blames intelligent women for asking reasonable questions, and then implies that she did it because she was menstruating! He says that the former Secretary of State “only has the woman card”!  Worse than that, he’s tapping into something in America, so it’s not just him!

Meanwhile, reactionaries and liberals duke it out over who can use the bathroom, where. I hear that this is a response to the existence of Caitlyn Jenner, who is a Republican! Does any part of that sentence seem real to you?

Meanwhile, in local news, a gifted friend of mine is being told she should teach another way than she is — for less money and with less prep time.

In other local news, a principal of an elementary school nearby (in another town)  is on leave, because her brother (whom she lives with, who “volunteered” at her school) has a child porn collection that has been discovered.

In national news, Sandra Bland’s mother says we’re not paying enough attention to women who were killed in prison/died in prison. She’s right. Oh, and yesterday some Black kid with a B-B gun that looked real was shot by police, just days after the police in Chicago blamed Tamir Rice for his own death. And the governor of Maine vetoed a bill making it cheaper to save lives of people having heroin overdoses.

Now this… I wasn’t aware we had a draft anymore. This White house hasn’t made such a big fuss about it, but then we’re not looking to start a war right now. I thought it was stupid for gay people to fight to be in the armed services, as though killing is a political right that people shouldn’t be deprived of. I’m sure there’s some systemic reason that somebody thinks this is a good thing.

When my daughter was in utero and I saw her first sonogram, I marched around the doctor’s office saying “if anybody hurts that kid, I’ll kill them!”. Right now, I have a daughter who will be going to college in a year and her student loans will probably be attached to this. My other daughter, far more genius than I ever was, deserves a chance to save the world, and I think she wants to. One way or another, she probably will. Not if she’s dead, though.

I’m not gay, or trans, or Black, or Mexican, or a female, or a drug addict. Maybe if I didn’t know so many people who are, I wouldn’t care.The hate swirls around me daily in the news. The American people seem bent on self-destruction, and the craziness of that drives me nuts. That’s bad enough, and depressing enough. But this thing about girls and the draft, whatever it is, that’s just a knife in my heart.

Bernie Sanders the other day said that the wealthiest 20 families in America make as much money as half of the rest of us. Did the Waltons hire Wolf, Ram. and Hart? The Kochs? Donald Trump? If they weren’t fictional, I’d believe they were real.

Peace,

John