Friday, November 11, 2011

Pardon Me If I Can't be Bothered To Give A Rats Ass

The Kid has another abscessed tooth. This is what 10 years of medicaid dental gets you. His face is swollen. He's throwing up. He's in mountains of pain. He's cranky (and let me tell you, Kid is normally the chillest person in the room, cranky doesn't happen with him unless things are extreme). I am a sympathetic puker, so in addition to the giant hot rock of guilt turning my stomach, I am nauseous to boot.

But we finally have dental. Real dental. Not the "only for extractions done by a one or two providers in a 500k population metro area" medicaid dental. Not the "sometimes kids die of toothaches because they are poor" medicaid dental. Real dental, with deductibles and co-insurance that doesn't cover as much as it should but covers more than the nothing of medicaid. If I get up really early and start calling around, I may get lucky and find a dentist in our plan that can take him. If I clean out my tiny savings account, I might be able to pay for it. I was hoping we could make it to January 1 before using the dental, so I could skip this year's deductible. Oops. And we won't talk about how I am gonna have to call into work tomorrow. I'm going to push the fact that there were people let go last week out of my mind. I am going to cross my fingers and hope that taking a day off for a sick kid isn't going to put me next on the list of expendable employees.

This is a kind of violence. Economic violence. A thing that causes actual, physical harm to an actual living being. Kids not being able to go to the dentist because they don't have the right parents. That's violent. Hell, anyone not being able to see a dentist because that shit is expensive is a kind of violence. Parents skipping meals to stretch out the food budget to maybe last to the end of the month is a kind of violence. Choosing between drugs that keep you alive or paying the heating bill in the dead of winter is a kind of violence. Slow, creeping, scarier than anything Hollywood could come up with violence.

So while you're all throwing hissy fits about property damage, I'm gonna go deal with the inevitable outcomes of economic violence done to the poorest of us. Yeah broken windows suck. But I'd rather lose every single thing I own than have my kid suffer one more second of pain. Graffiti my door, piss on my sofa, steal my last dollar. That's all just stuff. My door doesn't feel pain. My sofa doesn't feel pain. My wallet doesn't feel pain. That's property damage. And having literally lost every damn thing that I own in the not so distant past, I am familiar with what losing everything feels like. It sucks. But it didn't end us.

And I just can't be bothered to give a rat's ass about property damage. Not when a real, live human being is sitting next to me in agony because he had the misfortune to be born to a poor woman in a time when things matter more than people.

Monday, November 07, 2011

Sunday Funnies

I freely admit that spending family tv watching (well internet) time watching almost exclusively BBC stuff is probably warping the child's brain. Probably. Since we've run through the only American shows he'll watch with me (Eureka and Warehouse 13) and Doctor Who is over and we've watched Torchwood America: Now with more graphic but strangely less sexy gay sex. So we needed something.

That Mitchell and Webb Look seems to be filling the bill at the moment.

Sunday, November 06, 2011

One of these things is not like the other: Vandalism vs Violence

Let's get one thing straight, shall we.

Vandalism is not equal to, the same as, or even remotely like, violence. One is damage to property, inanimate objects that have no feelings what so ever. One is damage to people.

Graffiti, which may be the oldest form of political expression being that it is at least 2000 years old, is just that, political expression. Even when it's just some kid, who is probably not old enough to vote, leaving his or her tag on a wall somewhere. I love graffiti. Graffiti is not violence.

Window smashing, while scary and loud and full of breaky glass, is not violence. It is property damage.

Property is theft, and pardon me while I quote the Marquis de Sade: "Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft."

In order to get the elites to release their stranglehold on the rest of humanity, the elites must scared. Yes, scared. That's an ugly truth, but it is truth none the less. And to scare them without committing acts of violence means that they must be afraid of something else, loss of property. And they should be afraid of that. They should be shaking in their boots, unable to sleep at night, haunted by the ghost of Jacob Marley in the wee small hours telling them to repent.

We know what violence looks like at the Occupy sites. It looks like cops pepper spraying young women behind a barricade. It looks like war vets getting skulls crushed and spleens lacerated by "non-lethal" weapons. It looks like douchebags rapists who rape women in tents. Violence causes actual harm to the bodies of actual people and is generally performed by those with power over those with less.

Vandalism is acts of destruction done to pieces of property done by those with less to property owned by those with more.

These things are not the same, and should never, ever be uttered in the same breath as if they were.