I admit it: as a mom and a bit (!) of a Facebook junkie, I enjoy the site STFU Parents.  Though I am darkening the door of forty, I am still extremely immature and enjoy a good laugh at someone else’s expense whenever possible.  Happily, I am not so oblivious that I don’t recognize myself in some of the posts, especially the ones that are pointedly labeled “first world problems.”  Why, just last week I whined on my personal FB page:

 Did I get dumber? Or did the school picture order form get exponentially more difficult?

I got more replies to THAT post than about anything related to SlutWalk, let me assure you.* It seems I’m not the only one who finds the process annoying.  Yesterday, though, I got a much-needed real world reality check.  Yesterday, at the urging of a neighborhood supermom, I volunteered to assist in the photo-taking process at Miriam’s school.  I straightened collars, adjusted wobbly headbands, and urged kiddos to sit up straight and smile.  I was taken aback, though, by how many children didn’t have their annoying order forms in their hands.  Some asked if they would still be able to get their pictures taken, and I assured them that everyone, yes everyone would have a chance to be yelled at by the already impatient photographer.  Though the school office put out the word that scholarships for photos would be available, there were far too many children who either didn’t get the message or didn’t snap up available funds in time.  I strongly suspect the latter.

I felt very, very dumb.  Filling out that form have me headache, but not because a 5×7 photo for the Wisconsin grandparents was beyond my family budget.  And my daughter’s school is among the more comfortable in our large urban district.  STFU, indeed.

In the meantime, the fact that President Obama is finally committed to taxing America’s wealthiest individuals and corporations has supply-siders crying into their silk hankies.  Michelle Bachmann calls it “warfare,” but here’s a news flash: the rich declared war on the poor a couple generations ago.  While folks like the Koch brothers pour money into teabag campaigns like hers, ORDINARY FAMILIES CAN’T AFFORD TO BUY SCHOOL PICTURES.  School pictures!

It’s infuriating.  It makes me want to scream “STFU ALREADY!” at the top of my lungs.  It makes me want to make this face:

*Confidential to non-parent readers: thanks to the millions of school photo options now possible with digital technology, the order forms are as challenging to complete properly as 1040s.**

**Confidential to Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, et al: 1040s are the forms we little people use to pay our taxes. You’re welcome.

My state’s government shut down today. 20,000 employees were pink-slipped, important social services have been cut off, and perhaps most importantly for a family with two small children who are traveling to Grandma & Grandpa’s house for fireworks this weekend, all rest stops are closed. Why? An impasse between the Republican-controlled legislature and our Democratic governor over our state budget. Apparently it’s news to the GOP that corporations and churches don’t fix potholes. As Robin Marty just tweeted: “this is what happens when you elect a bunch of people to run the government who don’t like government.”

Image via Crooks and Liars

If every child in Minneapolis were as safe, well-fed, healthy, and appropriately educated as these two little girls, I would support your plan for a new football stadium.

But they’re not. These two girls are the lucky ones.

Consider this: the poverty rate in Minneapolis is 22.6 percent. Hennepin County admits that, within its borders, “on any given night….more than 3000 men, women, children and young adults are homeless.” Minneapolis Public Schools expects a budget deficit of at least $30 million, which will have devastating effects on the district’s already abysmal achievement gap. Recent reports that half of mortgages in the Twin Cities are underwater should tell you that the need for social services will only rise, not lessen, in the decade to come.

Just say NO to public funding for a football stadium.

I noticed an unusual amount of traffic on Ye Olde Blogge lately, most of it centered around my November post about Minnesota representative Tom Hackbarth. Remember him? He’s the exurban pro-lifer who was caught packing heat in the parking lot of St. Paul Planned Parenthood, then defended himself by admitting that he was stalking a woman he met online (an alibi that Scott Roeder’s attorney regrets not dreaming up first). Here’s what Tom Hackbarth looks like:

Nothing too interesting there–just the typically smug expression of an entitled white dude, (amirite, Cackle of Rads?). He lacks the clearly cuckoo-bananas visage of alleged murderer and admitted misogynist Jared Loughner. Ahh, I get it now! Journos, looking for a fresh angle on the Loughner story, are digging for stories about other well-armed men who get crabby when women tell them NO.

Another post from the archives, this one from a more innocent time: 2007.

May 2007

I am happy to admit it, totally honestly, without a trace of irony: I’m a Fanjaya. That is, an honest to goodness fan of Sanjaya Malakar, the 17-year-old American Idol contestant whose wacky hairdos and wobbly vocals made him a target for derision from the web to the grocery tabloids to network news. I participate in pop culture silliness as much as anyone (I still have my Spice Girls dolls), but I really do love this kid. In fact, I’ve had a mom-crush on him ever since his first audition in Seattle, long before he shocked the nation with his pony-hawk.

Shall I break for another pop culture definition? A mom-crush occurs when an adorable kid provokes a powerful desire to pinch the object’s cute cheeks and serve him or her homemade cookies. In common usage, one might say: “I hope they never recast the stars of the Harry Potter movies. I have a mom-crush on all three of them.” And Sanjaya definitely had the toothy grin and the goofball charm to win over the stoniest mom in America. When he wept openly after his older sister was cut from the competition, I felt a bit teary myself. Who sees a boy cry on television any more, much less out of genuine tenderness and emotion? I loved it. He was my Idol pick, no matter how he styled his hair.

But fellow moms and Idol geeks like my friends Pam and Liz thought I was nuts when I confessed that I was dialing for Sanjaya. “Are you serious?” Pam squawked. He was terrible! Liz e-mailed. These are sensitive, loving women who are both capable of serious mom-crushing. But eventually, I realized what made them immune to Sanjaya’s charms.

Neither were mothers of sons.

Now someone else’s son is in the news, and for something far more disturbing than off-key singing: on April 16, 2007 Seung-Hui Cho opened fire on his university campus in Virginia and killed 32 people before turning the gun on himself. Media coverage after the massacre followed a predictable pattern, with a parade of pundits expounding on gun control laws, why students ought to own guns, pervasive mental illness, the rights of the mentally ill, violence on television, violence in video games, the logistics of campus lockdowns, and more. All that changed the day NBC announced it had received a package from the killer himself, containing videos and photographs of himself decked out in his murderous finery. In one image, Cho brandishes two firearms, holding them from his ammo-clad body at right angles, his face glowering with rage. It’s too perfect. It could have easily come from any grindhouse movie; hell, it could have come from the movie Grindhouse. This is not to blame Hollywood, but to recognize the image’s brutal allure. In America, we love power. We need it; we feed on it. The power that comes from violence is the cheapest and easiest available to those who are the weakest among us.

I was pregnant with my first child when the home video footage made by the two Columbine killers was made public, to be shown 24/7 by news outlets in a desperate attempt to understand what these boys had done. Not long before, a fuzzy black and white ultrasound had shown that I was going to have a little boy of my own. Two television screens, showing two separate images of boys in America. My typical first-time mom jitters gave way to full-blown panic. There was no chapter in What to Expect When You’re Expecting about this. What on earth was I going to do with my American boy?

Fast forward seven years and I still don’t know. No one else seems to either. Seung-Hui Cho, despite a youth spent in South Korea, idolized the Columbine killers as “martyrs.” I adore my boy, but I fear for him. No talk show or how-to book is going to sort this mess out. But maybe one boy’s spontaneous tears on the country’s most popular television show will help.

I know I had best not pin all my hopes on this one American boy, a reality TV star at that. Of all media icons they tend to have the shortest shelf lives. I have a lot of difficult, ugly parenting work ahead of me, and Sanjaya will be busy just growing up. I thank him for the courage he displayed on the show week after week—and I’m not talking about the spectacularly funny hairdos. It takes guts to be yourself in America these days. It takes strength to take chances, to stand up to criticism, and to cry when it’s all over. That’s a kind of power that is neither easy nor cheap, but it will last him a lifetime.

I hope his mother is proud.

Below is an excerpt from a blog that I posted on October 27, 2010*:

I was born in Minneapolis and have lived nearly all of my life here, so I don’t fear snow. What I do fear are snow days, and last week the kids had two. I am fortunate that I don’t have a 9 to 5 work schedule that required me to take unpaid leave to keep an eye on the little goofballs–I’m unpaid all the time! Sadly, I was hoping to use last week to change that (have I mentioned The Radical Housewife, my completed manuscript, lately? Yes? No? Maybe?). Still, I was able to scratch out a little time for writing, with the following treats now available for your online enjoyment:

Not long ago, Matt commented on something he’d read in the newspaper: “It says here that heart disease is the leading cause of death in this country,” he said. “If that’s true, then why do we know so many people with cancer?”

Good question. I wondered if it was because of our demographics–as thirtysomethings, we tend to hang with folks whose cholesterol profiles have not yet caught up with them. We eat cheese and drink beer with abandon. “That still doesn’t explain all the cancer,” he grumped.

This weekend Matt is on the east coast visiting a good friend and cancer survivor. It is a trip I made several times myself, before my own east coast friend succumbed to the disease in late 2007. This week alone we experienced both of cancer’s schizophrenic extremes: a diagnosed family member received wonderful PET scan results, while an old friend from high school had a five hour operation to remove a tumor from her brain.

I’m at a breaking point. I AM QUITE LITERALLY SICK TO FUCKING DEATH OF ALL THIS CANCER. It doesn’t help that the national nightmare that is health care reform in this country has brought end-of-life care and medical rationing into the debate.

I keep having flashbacks to the one time I accompanied Liz on her chemo day, at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. One tiny positive through her whole ordeal was the fact that her insurance picked up the tab for all of her treatments. Avastin alone, she gasped, would cost over a hundred grand to someone who didn’t have insurance. Liz had Avastin, and a seemingly endless string of chemo drugs in addition to radiation, several surgeries, and many long hospital stays.

Liz was 33 and a half years old at the time of her diagnosis. She died two years later. How much did those two years cost her insurers? I don’t know. What would it cost not to pay for them?

Take a guess. It’s been nearly two years since she died and I can’t type this without feeling the too-familiar panicky clutch in my chest, the stinging tears welling up in my eyes. I would do anything, anything, to have her back again.

I think about her a lot. At times I smile when I think of the venom she would spew at those who believe that a single-payer system would limit access to the treatments that kept her alive–she knew that these treatments were out of most people’s reach already! Liz knew that our health care system was a moral disgrace. She had no doubt that thousands of other people with colon cancer would love to sit in her chemo chair at Dana Farber, but couldn’t. She knew those people would die more quickly, less hopefully, and certainly a hell of a lot poorer than she would.

Of course, she never planned on dying at all. I last spoke to her on October 29, 2007, when she called from her hospital bed to wish me a happy 36th birthday. She sounded frail, both physically and mentally. I was too afraid to ask about this strange thing called “end-of life care”, and she never mentioned it. All I could tell her was that I loved her, and that would have to be enough. She died two weeks later.

What DON’T we talk about when we talk about health care? Death. Money. Economic class. Equality, or the lack thereof. Fear. Mortality. Losing the illusion of control that we all hold so dear.

I can’t think about “health care reform” and not think about all the fucking cancer. I can’t hear “end of life” and think that death is going to happen to someone else. Death is coming, and death is real. Death is in the future for you, for me, for my children, for President Obama, for Rush Limbaugh, for everyone who panics at the idea of a single payer system. Death is a certainty. No one can escape it. The existence of death ought to humble us and make us more respectful of life. After all, if a dying woman can muster the strength to give a shit about the uninsured, why can’t everyone else?

My friend Laurie Olmon, whom I’ve written about before (“Candidate Confidential,” August 2010) shared some distressing news with me: last weekend, persons unknown vandalized her campaign signs with the slogan BABY KILLER. In lipstick, an interesting choice.

At first, I reacted as I would to any friend who’d been bullied, with words of support, all very “you go, girl!” kinda stuff. I wasn’t worried.

Hours later, I watched the video of the MoveOn worker getting her head stepped on by a Teabagger in Kentucky. I clicked links that would allow me to download Rachel Maddow’s documentary “The Assasination of Dr. Tiller.” I started to worry, and I remain so. Very, very worried.

Obviously, this vandal knows that Laurie does not literally kill babies. I’ve been called this name a few times myself–in the presence of my two young children, no less. No, the term “baby killer” is not meant to be a literal accusation; it is meant to invoke fear. “Baby killer” is a term that successfully whipped a lunatic like Scott Roeder into a homicidal frenzy. It transforms a debate into a fight, a discussion into a brawl, a disagreement into a head-stomping melee that puts someone in the hospital.

It means something to use those words. It means the same thing to Laurie and me as it did to Dr. George Tiller: YOU ARE A TARGET.

I don’t mean to suggest that this vandal means to kill Laurie, any more than she (lipstick, remember?) truly believes that Laurie has committed murder herself. But isn’t it something that this angry woman didn’t write “FUCK OFF”? Nor did she scribble “YOU SUCK” or “I HATE YOU.” She chose her words very carefully. She wrote what she did to scare the shit out of someone who put herself in the public eye to protect the rights of others…..not unlike a certain dead doctor from Kansas.

What to do? Here’s a few ideas:

• Attend the Rally for Sanity Minnesota, Saturday October 30, in the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol. I will be speaking on behalf of the Cackle of Rads…er, Minnesota NOW around 12:45-ish, though that may change. Check my Twitter feed for updates: @radicalhw.
• If you have the means, consider making donations to the following: the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers in North America; the National Network of Abortion Funds, a group “connecting rights to resources,” because a woman only has a choice when she can afford to pay for it; and the radical cacklers at the National Organization for Women.
• Vote next Tuesday like your life depends on it….because it does.