I wasn’t really going to post anything about the strife in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and the Middle East. I mean, everything I have opined on the matter is on my Twitter timeline. I’m actually at the top of my Twitter game when there’s a revolution going on. During the Egyptian revolution, an NPR editor or something included me in a Follow Friday re: Egypt/Cairo/Tahrir, which was exciting. In a very vain, pointless, ego-stroking kind of way. But still. Occasionally I have those vain, pointless, ego-stroking moments.
Certain things have bothered me for a while now regarding these protests and revolutions. In no particular order:
Stop saying stupid things like, “In the MidEast, people are dying, and here, teachers don’t want to pay an extra 12%.” That is a bullshit argument and I have no patience for it. I got into an argument with a dude named Atraqchi who’s some kind of Iraq war analyst, a while ago. He’s a HuffPo writer (I know, who isn’t?) and he tried to advance the argument that Muslims in the US shouldn’t donate any money to the Park51 Masjid because Muslims overseas were dying in Baghdad and Pakistan and Sudan and Palestine.
That is straight bullshit. First, you can support both, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make in this context. Yes, it’s true that people are dying in the MidEast while workers across the country protest a crack-down on unions. But making that argument creates a false equivalency and is just plain disingenuous.
In this country, we are lucky enough to know that whatever happens, we will not be gunned down in the street en masse by the army or police. En masse, I said. (RIP, Oscar Grant, and the tens of thousands like you.) If we take to the streets in protest (say, about unions) we know that the President will not order air strikes on us, and we know the police won’t open fire on us as we do nothing but walk the picket line. We know this. Call it a product of American exceptionalism, that we don’t think the same things that happen in other countries can happen here, whatever.
We know this won’t happen here. We’re lucky enough to live in an environment that affords us that kind of security. We’re luckier than a lot of the world’s population. Great. Good for us.
But what we do hold dear and what we do fight for are our rights in this country. Currently, one of those rights is under attack – collective bargaining. You can’t put a price on collective bargaining. Stop trying to raise the 12% number. Just stop. The wealthy in this country have lobbyists (and, well, money). The working and middle class? We have unions. Unions are one of the top donors to the Democratic party for much the same reason, along with plaintiffs’ attorneys. And, of course, two of the things on the GOP agenda? Cracking unions and tort reform. Gee. Shocker.
The argument that people in the MidEast is are dying so we are idiots to be upset about a 12% raise is just ludicrous. The contexts and environments are two entirely different things. Yes, they’re fighting for their lives there. Here, we’re lucky to be fighting for our rights, not our lives. And just because people in Libya are being mowed down by Qaddafi’s security forces, we should shut up and sit down and twiddle our thumbs while we have our collective bargaining rights watered down and eventually stripped away?
Unlikely. If you honestly think that, step to the back of the line.
And this 12% business is really pissing me off. “Just pay the 12% increase.” I’ve heard this over and over. Um, why? Are we Americans so glued to MSNBC and FOX that we’ve forgotten the very nature of pensions and how they work?! Pensions are not a gift by some kindly employer. Pension funds are PART OF YOUR COMPENSATION FOR THE WORK YOU DO. It is YOUR money. It’s not being given to you by the employer or the government, given at will to be taken at will. It is YOUR entitlement for the work you do. That is how pensions work.
I could go on about this and hash out the economics of it all (my mom has been teaching economics for twenty years – really, I got this, it’s basically all we talk about at the dinner table) but this article says it better than I have time to.
“Really Bad Reporting in Wisconsin: Who Really “Contributes” to Public Workers’ Pensions?”
Read this. If you read nothing else on Wisconsin and labor relations in the US ever, read that. Understand how pensions work. Understand where your money is.
This isn’t about unions, it’s about the budget. No, it’s not. First, Wisconsin isn’t broke. They have a projected deficit of something like $137M, I think. Which is nothing, really, since the last time I checked, IL was about 6 or $7B in the hole. 😛 We really don’t know what we’re doing here. Anyway, $137M is low when compared to the rest of the states in the US. WI isn’t in dire straits. Yet. Or at least, not when it comes to its finances.
Aside from that, the Public Worker’s Union AGREED to Walker’s demands for pension/benefits cuts. They agreed. And Walker told them to go screw. And he admitted in that prank phone call from David Koch, I believe, that it was about cracking down on unions. I’m sure FOX News has found some clever way to spin it, but really? Really? When it comes straight from the ass’s mouth? I mean, horse’s ass? I mean, horse’s mouth? Really?
Also refer to what I said earlier, about unions being one of the largest donors to the Democratic party. Follow the money. Always follow the money and you will have your answer to just about everything. And you will be severely depressed and need lots of chocolate.
Om nom nom.
All those countries in the MidEast that are revolting – they’re all the same. Okay, no one actually explicitly said this, verbatim. But it’s the prevailing attitude. The glibness of it all – “Oh, what Arab/Muslim country is protesting today? Har har har. Eh, heard it before when Country A was doing it, now it’s just Country B’s turn.” It really just – grr.
First of all, try to be a bit more precise. Not all Muslims are Arabs. Not all Arabs are Muslims. I have the feeling the world just got a lot bigger for some people. (God, could I be any more condescending today? Fine.) In a lot of cases, these are NOT even Muslim countries! Sure, most of the population is Muslim, but that doesn’t mean the country is necessarily an Islamic nation and not a secular one. That’d be like saying that just because most Americans are Christians, America is a Christian nation.
… Okay, that’s a bad example, because America basically is a Christian nation, especially if you listen to those idiot Teabaggers. For more on that, if you’re interested, read American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips. You can find it here on GoodReads.
More importantly, Country A is absolutely NOT anything like Country B. That’s nothing more than a racist, xenophobic perspective that reeks of American exceptionalism. (Hm. That seems like a theme with me today.) Bahrain is not Egypt is not Libya is not Yemen is not Sudan is not Jordan is not Syria is not Iran.
I bet it’s easy to think in those terms. Break yourself of that habit. These are countries with different governments, different rulers, different histories, different cultures, different population demographics (the Egyptian revolution, for example, was led by a youth movement as I think some huge percentage of the population is under 30 so it just makes sense; in Libya, it’s the business and middle class that is leading the revolt with the youth movement close behind), different relations with other countries in the region, and different relations with the US.
Don’t lump them all together. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because Egyptians threw off Mubarak, Iranians can throw off Ahmadinejad or Pakistan can throw off Zardari. Don’t do it. It displays nothing but ignorance, and you’re going to anger a lot of people along the way.
I’ve gotten twitter replies to that effect: Oh, those countries are all the same. I never trusted myself to reply, so I didn’t. Because I would have said something really, really mean, and made the person feel like an absolute idiot. I just know I would have. I figured it was better to hold my counsel and let someone a little more patient somewhere down the line explain the folly of that mindset.
Just … don’t do it. You’d never say that Portugal and Spain and Andorra were basically the same just because they all share the Iberian peninsula. You’d never say that Sweden and Norway and Finland were the same, even though they’re all crammed up there in the Scandinavian peninsula. You’d never do that because everyone would look at you like you had a second grade education.
Don’t do the same in the Middle East.
Also, stop being so surprised that the people in the Middle East are standing up to their rulers. I’ve seen it all over the place – from lay people and from pundits on news shows and from writers for news sites. “Oh, wow, I never thought the Arabs would do this!” What? Stand up for their basic human rights? Really?
All that says is, “I never thought the Arabs were capable of doing this.” Because they’re weak and stupid and subordinate and don’t have the same taste for freedom and liberty like we do in the developed world or in the Western world. That they’re just not capable of standing up for themselves.
It reminds me of the romantic paternalism I despise so much. It sounds like a great compliment – “Yay, Arabs!!!1!” – but it’s just xenophobic and racist.
I mean, it’s an easy thing to fall into. I’m sure I’ve done it plenty of times. We generally do do it often enough – like when people remark that an African American is ‘eloquent’ or ‘articulate.’ The implication, of course, being that most usually aren’t, so we’re surprised when a black person actually is. It’s horrible and cringe-worthy but we’re used to it. That’s why few really notice the implication when someone says “I never thought the Arab world would do this.” The implication being, somehow, that they’re used to living in dictatorships, that they can’t imagine living under anything but a dictatorship, and that they could never be stirred to fight for anything more than living under a dictatorship.
And the only way to fix this is to really think about the underlying meaning of what we’re saying. It would be far more appropriate, for example, to comment on how astonishing it is to see regime after regime come under attack by protesters so quickly, like a domino effect. I think that’s what most of us are getting at – we’re surprised that Tunisia fell, and then all of a sudden everyone was packed into Tahrir with roses, and then Bahrainis retook Lulu Square after the bloody massacres there and all crammed into Pearl Roundabout, and then Libyans freed Benghazi and a day later, Tripoli fell.
That’s what we’re surprised about. That’s what we should say.
The Democratic Senators in WI (and also IN) should just COME HOME AND DO THEIR GODDAMN JOBS. You can’t say this and support the notion of the filibuster. You can’t. The Democratic senators are doing what they were elected to do – represent the will of those that elected them. And if you can find a Democrat in WI that wants those lunkheads back in the Senate so that Walker can get his bill rammed through, you deserve a cookie, because there aren’t going to be that many WI Democrats thinking that way right now.
And I’m sick of some Republicans saying this and railing against the WI 14 for bailing. With all of the filibuster threats from the GOP we’ve had to endure this past year? Really? What is Boehner’s threatened government shut down but a giant, “Screw you guys, I’m going home?” Some Republicans are just mad because it’s their legislation that’s stalled.
Hell, I’d have been mad if Republicans pulled this over legislation I wanted passed. But again, I understand filibusters and am fine with that, for the most part. Sure, we’ve been seeing a lot of them in our Congressional sessions recently, and they seem to be on the rise, which isn’t a good thing. But too much of anything isn’t a good thing; it doesn’t mean the concept of the filibuster itself is horrible and ungodly and turrible. So I’d have to grow up and deal with it if the legislation I liked was stalled because of a GOP filibuster or mass exodus to another state.
Also, a funny little aside: Abraham Lincoln jumped out of a fricking window so there would be no quorum and a vote couldn’t be held.
I think that visual is a good one to end on, don’t you? Abe Lincoln, hat and coattails and all, jumping out a window? I like it.
I’m sure there are more things that are bothering me. But for now, this will do. Plus, I have a hell of a lot of work to do today. And unfortunately, I can’t hole up in a hotel in Rockford to escape it. Don’t think I haven’t considered that, though.
I’ll end with a picture of a masjid in Cairo.