I wouldn't be fucking surprised.
God damn them. I grew up with these children. My late elementary school years were spent in a school way out in county land, attended mostly by the children of the immigrants at Linell Camp, who worked the fields day to night -- I was one of two white students in my grade. What the fuck did they do wrong? They came to school and they worked their hardest and I can say, having graduated with several of them, that they damn well made something of themselves by your standards. Their parents worked much harder than most of us ever will, and they lived in homes the size of my closet on a fenced-in campground, surviving on anemic wages. And they lived in fucking fear because of actions like this.
Immigration is not an economic issue. It is a human rights issue.
Are Immigration Authorities Going After School Children?
I remember the posters.
I grew up in central California, a heavily agricultural area, an area heavily populated by Latin@s. It has been a bit of a shock for me, as I moved on to other areas, that cities and towns would run into one another with nothing in between: in the central San Joaquin Valley, there was county land, with dense residential areas called towns, and it was usually a 10-15 minute drive through county land -- corn fields, grape fields, all varied sorts of orchards -- to reach the next town.
I did always wonder: where was your address, if your home was in that county land? And if something happened to you while you were there, who would come to your aid?
I remember the posters. I would see them posted on bulletin boards in grocery stores, fast food restaurants, secondary schools, county buildings. They were low quality copies, asking for my help, asking: have I seen this girl?
Almost always a girl. And there were other common features -- the eyes, the thick dark hair -- the shaded skin. And the name. Veronica. Consuelo. Yolanda. Maricela.
Nobody ever seemed to pay attention to these posters.
And I remember the signs on the highway, when we would drive down to Los Angeles to visit my doctor, or when Mom was being shunted around various hospitals for reasons I was too young to remember. They were the electronic types, set up over the road, the sort that would warn you of gusty winds on the Grapevine. They flashed messages of missing children. And I seem to remember different names in those messages.
And I remember the rationalizations. These low-class girls, in low-class families. Must be runaways. Won't be missed. What's another one? Turn your eyes, and in another few seconds all will be forgotten.
This is a systemic problem, with dirty roots reaching deep. From the casual observer to the detective whose job it is to do these searches, nobody seems to care. Nobody who matters, anyway.
May Twelfth
One year ago today, holding hands at the far end of a covered deck over the roaring Kaweah River, my husband and I were married.
This has been my freedom. This has been my life.
He and I became fast friends when I was sixteen and he, eighteen. A year and change later, we admitted what was inescapable: we were stuck with each other. Love will do that to you.
He grew up south of Pittsburgh, in a family home in Castle Shannon, playing in the woods with his two younger brothers. I was raised between Tulare and Visalia, my mother's youngest child -- my siblings were old enough to have begun having children before I was so much as conceived -- bouncing between rental homes until a settlement allowed my mother to buy a run-down home as I was entering high school.
We met online well before it became acceptable to meet online. The internet allowed me a social outlet as a young teen with yet-to-be-understood disabilities, allowed me to grow an identity under the roof of a controlling single parent. And, to the contrary of the current conventional wisdom, interacting with the invisible people in my computer pushed me to develop social skills, which allowed me to fall into an awesome group of friends as I hit adolescence.
It came to a point where we talked every spare moment of every day. And it hasn't changed since.
To this day I'm not sure what drew him to me. Looking back, I see a confused child living with severe depression and toxic levels of self-loathing. But when I look forward and see a young woman fighting to break out from under the influence of fear and abuse, I see this quiet, steady young man standing next to her, coaxing her to come out into the light, step by small step. And I see that same young man realizing a greater confidence with the knowledge of his partner's trust and love.
The both of us have changed so, so much in this time. But as we have grown, we have grown together. We are not compatible in a simple sense of shared interests; we are compatible in our mutual adaptivity: teaching, learning, understanding, growing, and deepening our sense of self only helps our love, trust, affection, and understanding of one another do the same.
This has been my freedom -- this has been my life.
We have come so far together, and I hope we will go so much farther.
I love you, Matthew. I hope this year is only our first of many.
What was that again?
So, what do the three presidential candidates have to say about disability?
Oh yeah. That. Doesn't ever seem to be much of a topic, does it?
Michael Bérubé explains, in his somehow simultaneously meandering-but-crisply-clear manner.
What I found interesting is that this:
The nine-page .pdf, “Barack Obama’s Plan to Empower Americans with Disabilities”, says many of the same things Hillary does – about [...] hiring 100,000 people with disabilities in the federal government (except that someone needs to tell the Obama camp that it’s Executive Order 13163 Obama needs to reinstate, not 13173, which created an Interagency Task Force on the Economic Development of the Central San Joaquin Valley; reinstating 13173, whatever its merits, probably won’t do much for disability policy in the United States).
would benefit me either way! ¡Vive la valle central! God, I miss home.
Hah
I gotta say, I respect my new geographical neighbors. The national media was working itself up into a lather about Obama's remarks about working-class Pennsylvanians, and then it turned out that, here in actual non-Philly PA (those same voters about whom Obama was talking), nobody gives a shit. I hope all of these pundits who pride themselves on being "in touch" with the average Joe down here on the ground (who is lucky to count unpaid vacation days among his benefits, much less owning his own vacation home) feel the sweet, sweet sting of pwnage.
And just now, my husband emails me this:
Politics stops at the water's edge -- even if that water's frozen, apparently.
About 57,000 more households in the Pittsburgh region tuned in to watch the Penguins beat up on the Ottawa Senators than tuned in to see two senators (Obama and Clinton) beat up on each other in the Democratic presidential debate, according to Nielsen Media Research.
The hockey game played in 175,000 -- or 23 percent -- of all households in the Pittsburgh metro market, while the blame game played in 118,000 households -- or 14 percent of the market, according to Nielsen.
Pittsburghers know better than to think that debates moderated by TV "journalists" are worth anybody's time. They neither inform nor edify; they aren't entertaining; they have nothing to do with our actual lives. We'd rather you broadcast ol' Sax Guy playing the Addams Family tune on a two-hour looop than watch a couple of blowhards play the same old tired gotcha game with two politicians who'd be better served catching a few hours of much-needed sleep.
We're too smart for you, o MSM. Neener neener.
Interlude
Surely Pittsburgh sports fans will recognize Sax Guy.
(my own photo, thankyouverymuch)Hi, Sax Guy!
I look forward to a Pirates season full of Pink Panther melodies walking the bridge over the Allegheny River.
I just don't understand
Our neighbors to the left kept their air conditioner in their window all winter. For the last two days, they've had it running nonstop.
When I walked outside today, I noticed the neighbors downstairs have their a/c installed and running as well.
It's been a beautiful upper 60s/lower 70s for the last week or so. It's gorgeous outside. It's refreshingly comfortable inside with the windows open and the ceiling fans on low.
Why drag out the a/c now? Summer will be long and humid enough -- I'd rather not live like it's summer for any longer than I have to.
Hey, that feels pretty damn familiar.
What is it? Oh, it's just the foot of Schwarzenegger & co. on our backs.
Dammit, this will never cease to make me angry. For the most part, the disabled already live in poverty, and they have no way of changing that. You usually can't magically become un-disabled. And disability is, by definition, the inability to just "work harder" to make ends meet. It's the inability to work enough to live.
And here we go cutting their benefits left and right (including, apparently, again, COLA for the blind and disabled). With an inflation rate of 4.3%. So that we can ease the burden on those poor yacht consumers.
Deep breaths.
So apparently
my humble new home may make an actual difference in who wins the Democratic nomination.
I've dreamed for a while now of casting my vote in the primaries, and in fact finally crossed to the dark side—registered Democratic when I moved here—specifically to enable such an action. But I had figured the whole time that my vote wouldn't make much of a difference, anyhow (especially being a tentative Edwards supporter and all).
So, um.... woobama?
Sunday Birthday Blogging
After our wedding last May, husband's parents showered gifts upon us. They are quite comfortable financially and can certainly afford to do so, and we were deeply appreciative. There was one problem, though. When we opened the wrapping around what was quite obviously a bedding set, it wasn't what we had registered for. In fact, his mother and brother described walking through the store, seeing what we had chosen, and deciding that what they had chosen instead "matched your carpet better." (Our carpet is blood red. What ever "matches" blood red and yet remains tasteful?)
This is what they picked:
I call it "vomitatious."
Now, his family was doing something incredibly nice for us, bless their hearts, and make no mistake: I adore these people. But this just clashed so painfully with my own decorative taste that it was rather obvious I wasn't really happy with it. There was a little bit of tension for a short while, but I settled down, and we continued cuddling under the orange stripes every night.
Until Friday. I had known it was coming, which is a long story and not at all the typical one (wife drops hints relentlessly, husband finally buys gift, wife snoops and finds it ahead of time), but he presented it with me that morning, and I was very happy when he did. It fits so perfectly with my tastes, and it so very well toned down the bright red carpet, instead of highlighting the pukiest strains of it -- and it's something that can be ours.
That last note is particularly important for me: I made a point when I moved in with him just over a year ago that he needed to stop calling it "my apartment" -- it was ours. I had just abandoned my entire family and network of friends, the place I grew up and the place I made home, every earthly belonging that didn't fit in a box suitable to ship Fedex, and flew 2500 miles across the continent to settle down in a place I had visited once, to live with a man in whose physical presence I had been a total of five weeks previously -- I already felt excluded by default; I didn't need him to reinforce that feeling.
(He, being the understanding person he is, then stopped.)
Anyway, it just makes me happy. Most everything in this apartment came from his parents, but most all of it is also stuff that we are happy with. It's not like he was excited about the orange stripes. We were just both happy to have actual bedding (before that, we had been sleeping on a $15 Target sheet set and a couple old blankets). Now, we have something that makes the place look like ours -- instead of looking like we were renting a room from the in-laws.
Happy sigh.
