Thoughts while bathing (the mayoral election in Los Angeles)

This morning as the water beat down on me in the shower, my mind ran to politics and conversations that I've had in the car with my sons. Just last night, as I maneuvered through godawful traffic with Oliver and Sophie, we heard the atrocious story of the black mayoral candidate in Mississippi who was brutally murdered in what sounded like the 2013 version of lynching, and when Oliver asked me what happened, I told him that perhaps someone extremely racist and/or homophobic didn't want him to run for mayor. Oliver asked me what homophobic meant, and I told him that it meant one is afraid of gay people. AFRAID? Oliver said, incredulous. Why? And I told him that some people thought gay people were bad or unnatural, even evil, and Oliver just didn't get it, so I told him that sometimes people are profoundly ignorant and might not even know a gay person and so were afraid of anything different, and he seemed to get that so we dropped it. As I shampooed my hair this morning, I thought about the mayoral race today in Los Angeles and whether or not I'll vote for a Republican for the second time (I believe I voted for Guiliani in New York City a thousand years ago) in my life. In doing only cursory research I find the mayoral candidate Kevin James sort of, kind of,  interesting but only so because I'm tired of politics as usual. The fact that he's a libertarian does not excite me (I know it's simplistic, but I can't help but equate libertarians with Ayn Rand and that dreadful novel I read in my late teens, The Fountainhead, which even then, when I knew nothing about anything, made me feel as if my blood was draining from my body), but because he's fiscally conservative and socially liberal, my interest is piqued. Still, I probably don't know nothing from anything, and James makes all kinds of claims as politicians do, and they sound pretty good, but then there's the gathering for him that was held on Sunday that I didn't go to because I knew it would be a bunch of rich people from the neighborhood adjacent to mine whose politics I find smug when I'm feeling charitable, and I won't tell you what I think when I'm feeling like myself. I'm not sure I can vote for someone that they all support. Honestly. As the water ran down my body, I thought how there's a part of me that just doesn't care who the next mayor is, but by the time the water rounded my hip and streamed down my leg, I had jettisoned the cynicism and decided that if I'm going to live in a democracy I should vote for the person who best represents me, and that person probably isn't going to be a former attorney and right-wing radio shock jock -- is that what they're called? I don't know about this libertarian thing -- it sounds all sensible and logical but there's something about it that leaves me cold, and that thing is money. Or maybe it's government as Other, devoid of community. I think. Have ya'll read George Saunders' brilliant satire of libertarians from the New Yorker last fall? Here's the link. When I stepped out of the shower, I remembered my favorite line from the essay, words that evoke -- exactly -- the opposite of what voting in the Los Angeles mayoral election feels like. He wrote it as satire, but I'm feeling it for real, today.

Some days we would stride about, feeling violently alive.

First day of school, "libtards," Ayn Rand, and Other ramblings

It's the first day of school for Sophie, but she's at home, sleeping off Diastat that I had to give her on Sunday night after a day of six gigantic seizures. I haven't the foggiest idea why she had so many seizures -- was it the heat? was it the moon? was her brain taking a riff off the flurry of small earthquakes we had? I'll never know, and neither will you. In any case, I left her at home with The Husband so that I could bring her paperwork to school, the boxes of educational stuff and her wheelchair and other accouterments. I was overjoyed that the aide assigned to her will be Millie, the same fantastic person who accompanied her to Communicamp the last two summers. It's almost too good to be true. It might even be a great year.

I walked the halls of the giant high school, tried not to wince at the boy with those giant earlobe stretcher thingamabobs who walked past me, or his friend who wore a black tee-shirt with giant white lettering that spelled out: LEGALIZED POT GANG or something like that. They had backpacks on and skate shoes and were laughing together, typical teenagers despite their off-kilter appearance. I am glad that I only wince when I see this and am not affronted, but I have no idea why this is so.

The other day, I stupidly engaged with a person who goes by the name Skunkfeathers when he comments on a conservative blog that I periodically check on to see what's up in that otherland. Skunkfeathers likes to refer to people of the liberal or left persuasion as libtards, of which I am one, and when I objected to the term, he kept at it. In the ensuing exchange, he claimed You may call the term 'libtard' an attack on a class of handicapped; you're free to do so. A person with a condition from birth, I don't consider 'retarded'. They have a disability. Many of which overcome it with hard work and guts. I promptly told him that his comment was not factual and, actually, ignorant, but the last sentence is the one that I've been perseverating on for nearly a week. Many of which overcome it with hard work and guts. I think it's the word overcome that stops me short and helps me to make the segue to the vast space, ever increasing, between those on the "left," and those on the "right," those that think the recent appointment of Paul Ryan as VP contender is depressing as hell and those that think his government-slashing, Ayn Randian group-think is the answer to the question of the legion of lazy, shiftless folks, including the disabled, who persist in exhausting government monies and leeching from what really matters: a powerful military and the promulgation of American exceptionalism, shoved down the throats of those who just don't know better. Sophie's seizures began for no apparent reason shortly after her initial vaccinations at two months of age. When the seizures didn't stop, her development sputtered along with periodic plateaus, and despite hard work and guts for over seventeen years, she can't talk, can only walk with assistance, wears diapers and must be fed. The other night, when I snapped off the plastic top of the syringe that holds the Valium, dipped it into the foil packet of lubricant, lay Sophie gently on her side and inserted the drug into her rectum, I wondered if she -- and I -- worked hard enough and had guts enough to keep going.

I won't pretend to understand the finer points of Ryan's famous budget proposal, but I do know that if enacted, it will decimate, completely, the already weak supports that people like Sophie and her family (The Husband, me, Henry, Oliver) and other libtards -- as well as conservatives -- depend upon to give our lives a modicum of sanity.  At best, I'm thinking this potential decimination is due to ignorance and fear of The Other, and I'm not sure what to do about it other than keep bleating when I can.

When I told Oliver about the Republican operative in Pennsylvania and his comments about the retarded, Oliver burst into tears. He then uttered the F word, which, I'm certain, some might call an example of the deteriorating values of our young people. I told Oliver that he shouldn't use that kind of language although it might, perhaps, be fitting in this particular circumstance. I then told him that people are ignorant and afraid of what they don't understand. Sometimes, I told him, they're just stupid.