When I wrote a post on the night of the shootings about the fact that members my family grew up in Newtown and went to Sandy Hook Elementary School, I was touched by the comments of most of you.
One commenter I’d never heard from before, took the opportunity to make my comments section into her platform for how very safe she feels because she packs a gun. I tolerated her for as long as I could, mostly trying not to vomit at the comments. She berated me for my opinions, telling me in bad grammar that I was ignorant.
I am not ignorant. I have done the research. I even put some of it into the comments that she found so ignorant. Here’s the post, although the comments, which were mostly answered in those damn Word Press bubbles, do not appear in the order they were received. And since some of them required me to breathe deeply into a paper bag filled with Xanax, they were answered fairly randomly.
*****
As a news junky I am constantly reading about the incredibly stupid things normal people do with guns. People who mean no harm, who only mean to keep themselves and their families safe.
There was the man I wrote about in my first piece on gun control, Gunsmoke. He shot himself in the femoral artery while unbuckling his seat belt in a grocery store parking lot. His wife was inside shopping, and their four kids watched their father die stupidly.
There was the guy who was hanging out with his friends and demonstrated the infallibility of his gun’s safety by putting the safety on, pointing the gun at his temple, and pulling the trigger. His friends were quite impressed, I’m quite sure. He will never know.
And then along comes this guy, who gives a face and a voice to everything stupid about the crazy gun crowd.
In case you are on the fence on whether or not assault weapons should be banned, take a listen to someone who thinks they should not.
And then see if you can believe badly enough of George W. Bush, that you will go along with Alex Jones’ depiction of what happened on September 11, 2001, and therefore, why, really, we all need assault weapons.
*****
I’ve begun to believe that it is not necessarily mental health that needs to be evaluated before a person can purchase a gun.
We need to test their intelligence. Because there are way too many stupid fuckers out there with weapons.
As you also may know if you’re a long time reader, I have a hard time with technology. Particularly if it talks. I wrote about it here: I can’t get no. You have no doubt heard me screaming from wherever it is you are, when I am asked the same question for the 128th time by the same incredibly patient voice on the other end of the phone. If I could get a hold of the person behind the voice, I would slap her silly. Because those auto-answering voices used by every single company I need to call — they make me crazy.
So naturally, I had to dig myself in deeper.
Yup, recently I got an iPhone4S, with Suri. And within days, I wanted to strangle her, too. Suri makes me crazy, and only partly because her voice is the same one as the voice prompt I named Sybil in I can’t get no. (They are obviously psychotic twins.) I gave Suri several chances to help me and to help herself in the process, but she always lets me down. Once, I was trying to demonstrate to my boss how she can find a phone number for you and dial it:
“Suri, call home,” I commanded.
“You have 16 homes.”
Shit. So much for my raise.
Another time, I tried all day to get her help with finding a nearby restaurant when we were on vacation. I gave up in frustration, and in complete exasperation I said to Siri:
“Oh Fuck Off!”
She finally gave me a reasonable answer:
“What did I do to deserve that?” she said.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh.”
But actually, it isn’t only voice-activated prompts that make me nuts. Real live people do, too. Especially if they have an accents. I cannot emphasize enough just how convenient this difficulty was when I lived in another country where they spoke a language that required the use of an accent.
Still, probably the most difficult accent for me is a Scottish one, which is quite frustrating. You see, they speak English. Sort of.
Actually, Scotland is near and dear to my heart. John went to University there, and we have many friends in and around Edinburgh from those days. Best of all, John asked me to marry him overlooking Edinburgh Castle at sunset after we hiked up the Salisbury Crags. (See why I married him?)
How could I say anything but yes?
(Both Google Images)
But in lots trips to Scotland over the years, umpteen phone calls and reciprocal visits to us, I continue to have trouble understanding our friends. It’s the accent.
I canna understand it.
At first, I thought it was just the heavy Scottish Brogue and that my ear would get attuned to it. Nope. Not all of our friends have a brogue as few are completely Scottish. Some actually hail from Northern Ireland, another was raised for 10 years in Czechoslovakia before moving to Scotland. Others are English. Some of our friends are even mutts and we don’t talk about them much. We really only have two friends who are authentically Scottish. It’s a motley crew. No matter. They are all wonderful, fun, and we have a blast when we visit or when they come here.
Or at least I think we do. You see, since I have such a hard time understanding them, I never know what anyone is talking about or what I’m agreeing to. Nevertheless, I agree to whatever I am asked. I swear, their accents are thick as mud. Thicker, even. And they’re all professional people, doctors, dentists, executives and school teachers. So my way is easier. What sort of trouble could they get me into? Besides, I’m pretty sure I’ve responded appropriately when spoken to over the years. If not, I am hoping that when they laugh at me, that they think kindly of poor John’s wife, that agreeable deaf woman.
In the spring and summer of 1986 random parts of my face started growing for no apparent reason. I would be at home, on the subway, or off working somewhere around DC.
First it was a swollen eyebrow. Then that would go away and a day or two later, my cheek would grow so that I couldn’t see well out of one eye.
Mostly it was my lips, though. They would grow, sometimes individually, sometimes together. I looked like a duck.
Did I mention I was also getting married in September? That September? And while John and I had a fairly small and simple wedding, I was unenthusiastic about going to the altar looking like a daisy. Especially this one.
Of course, John’s lips would have been normal. Mine? Not so much.
But work was so completely crazy that I ignored it. I was a lobbyist/flunky at the time, and was spending long days up on Capitol Hill working on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. (And it was the perfect assignment for me; I did my own taxes – on the U.S. Government 1040-EZ form. Tax Returns for Poor Dummies.) I was in over my head, didn’t have a clue what was going on, what was important, or which way was up. I was a wee bit stressed.
Plus that summer we decided to buy our first house just so we could send my stress level through the roof of my brand new adorable little house.
But back to my problem. My ever changing facial features.
People were looking at me strangely which I understood – I often and suddenly looked really odd. But even stranger, they stopped talking whenever I would approach. These were people I’d worked with for more than six years. Something weird was going on.
And I found out what that was early one morning as I stood talking in the front lobby to my boss, also (irritatingly) named John. He was giving me instructions on that day’s most important issues, when to pay especially close attention, when to call him immediately with an update.
At the beginning of the chat, my face was normal. But as we talked, my lips spontaneously grew larger and larger. More duck-like.
“Elyse,” my boss said, “what’s happening to your lips?”
“They’re growing. Spontaneously. I don’t know why. But you’ve seen me with a swollen face off and on for the last couple of months. Haven’t you noticed? And it keep on happening. Luckily, John has promised to marry me even if I look like Daisy Duck when I arrive at the church.”
The look of relief on his face was instantaneous – he joked with me about the fat lips, about stress, about what I might be allergic to. He’s a really nice guy, and he cared about me. But it wasn’t until much later when I realized just why he had looked so relieved.
He thought I was being abused by my husband-to-be. And he, a very powerful Washington DC lawyer, who knew/knows everybody in town, had no idea what to do. He didn’t ask me if anybody was hurting me. He didn’t threaten to report John, or try to find out discretely whether folks in John’s office thought John might be abusive. No, my boss talked to other folks who also cared about me and who also didn’t know what to do to save me from what, had it been true, would have been a huge mistake.
(In fairness, they didn’t know my John at all – it wasn’t a very social office.)
And once I made the connection, I remembered feeling similarly helpless once. I thought about a secretary named Kelly who had worked with us briefly a few years earlier. She and I had become a bit friendly, even though we worked on different floors and in totally different departments. We both loved to play softball. One day I saw Kelly with an enormous black eye.
“I was playing softball with my husband’s team,” she said, shaking her head. “I should have caught the damn ball.”
“I once caught one with my left thigh,” I responded to her, truthfully, but naively. “You could see the stitch marks on the bruise.”
The next day she was gone. Obviously to everyone else her husband had been beating her, and she got help and got away.
The image of her face has haunted me. What would I have done – would I have been able/willing to help her? Would I have ever figured out what was happening to her?
My story ended well. I hadn’t had time to eat properly and subsisted pretty much on a diet of Milky Ways for two months. Woman cannot live on Milky Ways alone. Maybe ducks can. I stopped eating chocolate and looked OK at my wedding. Or at least, I didn’t look like a duck.
I don’t know how Kelly’s story ended. I never will.
* * *
Yesterday, the GOP in the U.S. House of Representatives allowed the Violence Against Women Act, which had been law since 1994, to expire. And they let it happen because it would have expanded coverage of the law to more women including immigrants and Native Americans.
Perhaps you don’t know what the Violence Against Women law does.
My bible, Wikipedia, says that it provide programs and services, including:
Community violence prevention programs
Protections for female victims who are evicted from their homes because of events related to domestic violence or stalking
Funding for female victim assistance services, like rape crisis centers and hotlines
Programs to meet the needs of immigrant women and women of different races or ethnicities
Programs and services for female victims with disabilities
Legal aid for female survivors of violence
But what it really does is help abused women. To let them know that they can get help. That they are not alone. And it can also give their families, friends and co-workers vital, life saving information about how to help. How to act. What to do besides wonder amongst everyone else but the person most impacted. Literally.
Now tell me, what’s not to like about this law? It gives vital assistance to vulnerable women – those who most need it. A place to go where they can take their kids, get help.
It gives folks who don’t know what to do or what to say a clue as to how to help women in need.
Where they don’t have to give up that last little bit of their heart.
I have stated this more often than I can stand, but the men in the GOP are not on the side of women, or on the side of men who respect women.
GET THEM OUT OF OUR LIVES
Then, Damn them to Hell where they belong
***
What you and I can do:
Contact your representatives in Congress and demand they pass the Violence Against Women Act as it stands today with expanded services: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
Will my son, Jacob, succeed in life? Will he pass Spanish? Will he become a useful member of society or will he remain in the basement until he is dragged off by the Health Department?
But today I learned that I have one more worry to add to the pile. You see, now I have to analyze his text messages for clues about his health.
Shit.
Yup, it’s true. Because today in an article I found on Reuters.com, I read that there is a new malady, called “Dystexia.” It’s when a person texts back nonsense in response to a regular, ordinary question. And it can involve a trip to the emergency room.
The article linked to above, talks about a husband who realized that there was something wrong with his pregnant wife when her texts didn’t make sense. She was rushed to the hospital and they found out she had had a stroke.
Now if you have a child, aged 8 to 25, you’ve already figured out where I’m going with this.
Because personally, I think I’m going to start worrying when my son’s text messages start making sense.
Unless, of course, he wants money. Then I’ll be sure it’s him and that he’s broke in a whole different way.
Rumor has it, that today is my bloggin’ buddy John Erickson’s birthday. You know John, of Commentality. Approximately 60 seconds after I first “met” John, he became the top commenter on my blog. He is interested in a million things, particularly history, space travel and sci-fi movies, TV and likely books. John is quite well versed on stuff. All kinds of stuff. He is smart, funny, and sweet. Not necessarily all at the same time though. He spreads it out.
I will admit that John’s comments don’t necessarily make sense, but they are great for your statistics. So encourage John. Really. You’ll be glad you did.
Now Ill tell you a secret. Unlike most folks approaching the half-way mark, John has been a wee bit apprehensive about this birthday, because it is a biggie. The Big 5-0.
Fifty. Yup.
To welcome John into the Old-timers Blogging Group, I will play age appropriate music:
Still, I am pretty sure that John won’t go down without a fight. Not a guy who has spent nearly 50 years studying military history. He knows the details of every battle fought between 1412 and 1945, and just exactly how to load a flintlock. Nope, John will never give up; he’ll never surrender. (He could use a Coke and a couple of Advil, though.) Here is a clip of a younger John taken from some important “Historical Documents.” Only they couldn’t get the goat in the picture.
By Grapthar’s Hammer, John, I’m wishing you the Happiest of Birthdays. And I am wishing you health, wealth and good cheer for all the years to come.
But just like me, you ARE gettin’ gross. But I’m pretty sure you can deal with it! But to soften the blow, if it’s OK with Frank of AFrankAngle I will be happy to use my newly acquired Queenly powers to knight you.
FiftyFourandAHalf 