Tag: #MeToo

  • It’s Been a Year

    Someone pointed out to me that a year ago yesterday, Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to jail. That was a big win, and a long time coming. This goes without saying, Weinstein feels like a million years ago.

    A year ago, I had just got a job, and my first day of work was to be on the 16th in person, but it got rescheduled to be a Zoom training, and I was off working with a group of people I would never meet in person. I am thankful for that job, as it came at the right time and kept our family afloat. But… Pandemic… Laid off…

    But back in March of 2020, I was having trouble sleeping as both me and my wife were out of work, money was getting tight, not that it’s stopped being tight, and it felt like nothing was going break our way. It was like being punched in the stomach every night, but we tried to put on a brave face in the morning as we walked the kid to school.

    And on the kid’s last day of in person school, 3/13/20 but we didn’t know it would be the last day, the school was about half full with kids. It was eerie how quite the building was. Walking back to the apartment, the wife and I wondered if we made a mistake sending the kid to school that day. We knew there was a contagion out there, but we still thought that it wasn’t that bad.

    A year has gone by. 500,000 Americans are dead. Sometimes, I still have trouble wrapping my head around all of this.

  • Oh, Brett

    I can’t help but wonder what is going through the head of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh?

    If he’s innocent, I do feel a little bad for him.

    If he did it, then he’s going to get what he deserves. (If you aren’t sure, this is what I am talking about.)

    This story so touches a nerve with me. Though I am a white male in America, outside of that, I do not see any similarity with Brett. If anything, he is emblematic to me of how screwed up America is right now.

    Though I was not born into a well-connected family or got to go to cool places for Summer vacation, or even could get away with behaving “badly” and have it chocked up as “boys being boys.”

    There is a part of me that believes Brett when he says he has no memory of the events he’s being accused of. It’s not that he was too drunk. It’s because why would he need to remember those moments?

    When you think you sit on top of the world, then you start to believe that everyone wants to be like you. Brett was having fun, and everyone around him was having fun, right? If we are all having fun, and fun is good, then nothing bad is happening. Thus, those moments were inconsequential, and thus forgettable.

    And I saw those actions in high school, and even in college. I saw the reactions, and the impossibility to convince that guy that his “joking around” was actually hurtful. To that guy, everything was taking from hi perspective, because we all want to be him, right?

  • That Judge Thing

    The Republicans have made a deal with the devil to get Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. This is the gross world we live in, but there is just about nothing that could have happened yesterday that would have stopped his approval. The goal has been five conservative votes on the court, and it didn’t matter how it happened, but the Republicans will do anything to get the five votes. And that’s the goal post in all of this. And they will get it. Public opinion be damned.

    And that is the calculation in all of this that I just don’t understand. That fifth vote will cost them in the midterms. And then it will cost them in 2020. This may even go on to 2022 and 2024 if major cases are over turned. It makes the Court an issue for years to come.

    But what I really don’t get is that the Republicans have shot themselves in the foot for the next generation of women, if not the one following. For most girls in high school, Dr. Ford looked like their mother, and they just watched as a political party say that her honesty and suffering mean nothing compared to the destiny of a man to be on the Supreme Court. This will last. I know this to be a fact because I was in high school during the Hill/Thomas hearings, and it was clear that a smart intelligent, successful woman amounted to nothing compared to a man. These are the women that are running for office now because they have seen this shit happen before, they have experienced this shit happening to them or their friends, and here we are, doing it all over again. Men will not solve this problem, only women can and will. And why is the Republican party deciding that it is worth alienating just about all women in this country?

    Women the age of Dr. Ford won’t vote Republican. Their daughters won’t. And what makes you think that they won’t teach their sons and daughter to not trust Republican’s in the future.