An Easy Life Begets Imagined Injustices
I was running late with my evening chores the other day and remembered after dark that I forgot to take the trashcan out to the road. We live on 5 acres out in the country, so our driveway is pretty long. I picked up my toddler and held him on my hip with one arm, grabbed the heavy trashcan with my free hand, and headed into the winter night.
It was cold and dark. I stumbled a couple of times on uneven ground. By the time I made it to the paved road, my arms, legs, and lungs hurt. My one-year-old son peered into the darkness and pressed his little body against mine for security. I was cold and my muscles hurt, but in a few minutes, I would be sitting on the couch in my warm house.
My few minutes of minor discomfort reminded me of how fortunate I am. Like most modern Americans, I have not experienced true hardship. We live in an era of ample welfare programs that provide medical care, food, subsidized housing and childcare to those in need. Almost all of us have flush toilets in our houses. We have access to clean drinking water, antibiotics, fresh vegetables in all seasons, and a wide variety of safe contraceptives. We can walk down the sidewalk without constant fear of rape.
Our relatively easy life is a blessing, but it has caused citizens to invent complaints. In the absence of the struggle to survive and the abundance of food, clothing, and shelter, they decided that being asked to clearly state for the record whether they are male or female is a crime against their person. They claim they are attempting to achieve self actualization, but they don’t even know which one their selves are.
And if they do select a gender (or non-gender, because that is now an option in many states), they reserve the right to switch teams at any time in the future. Then they can get a haircut and switch back. Or not – lingering in the middle as “undecided” is okay, too. Several American states have joined Nepal, Pakistan, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Germany as legally recognizing people who identify as nonbinary or “third gender” on their state-issued identification cards.
This constitutes an identity crisis of unprecedented magnitude. If people can’t even accept which gender they are – a decision that is made long before they are born and visibly apparent at birth – how can they make major life decisions such as what career to pursue and where to live? If they are wishy-washy about which restroom to use to wash their hands, how are they going to lead a team of employees, start a business, or commit to a mortgage, marriage, or long-term job?
They would be better off if their biggest concern wasn’t the imagined social injustice of marking “F” or “M” on the intake form at their doctor’s office. In a sign of overall national prosperity, we have officially run out of things to complain about. It should be a blessing, but society pays the price with increased immorality with the rise of “Gender X.”
Wow, you live such a hard life… you had to struggle to take the garbage can to the end of the driveway? How did you survive?
Try being a black woman, unmarried, with children to support. Where is your next meal coming from? How do you afford to feed your kids? You work two jobs at minimum wage, and barely have enough to cover your rent. And now, President Dickhead wants to cut your food benefits in half. And your little boy has asthma, a common ailment in the cities, and his medicine costs almost half of what you earn, and there are programs to help but you have to spend 10 hours filling out forms, rush across town after your second shift to pick up his medicine from the free clinic, and the asshole Republican legislature in your state voted against Obama-care, so you can’t afford insurance. And you just found out you’re pregnant. There’s one Planned Parenthood clinic about 60 miles away, and they were supplying you with birth control, but they got banned because the Republican legislature is playing to their so-called Christian base.
Or you’re gay man, and you got fired from your job because your boss found out. Yeah, you have kids that you and your partner have adopted, and lovingly take care of, but the loss of income is going to hurt. And there’s no chance that you can get your job back because your state has eviscerated the labor laws.
Or you’re 60, thinking about retirement, and find out you have cancer. You have insurance, but the copays and medicine and deductibles will add up to over $200,000 the first year. Just the first year is going to eat up all of your savings and drain away the equity from your home, and you’ve still got another 5 years before Medicare kicks in.
Or you’re a 15 year old girl from Sweden, looking at a crazy world where the CO2 level of the atmosphere is rising every year, and 98% of scientists say that is causing the planet to warm up. You see the western half of the US and pretty much all of Australia burning on their own, and idiots in Brazil are burning the rainforests. Whole forests of pines in the Rockies and Northeast are dying because of invading bugs, and a third of bird species in the US are expected to go extinct in the next 20 years. Europe has had record heat waves for the last 20 years. More wars are being fought over resources, especially in the Middle East and Northern Africa, and there are more and more refugees from India and other low lying coastal areas of the world. And the fucking President of the United States is calling you names in the press, and you fear for your safety because of his idiot followers. He has pulled the largest emitter of greenhouse gases out of international treaties, and thrown his weight behind coal and oil.
Gender is not just male and female, it’s a couple of bell-curves with extremely male and female people at the center (and I’m sure we’ve met them) and the people at the edges of the curves that are gay or indeterminate, or don’t know what the fuck they are. I’m sure you had a hard enough time finding your mate from almost-50% of the population, imagine yourself (if you have any empathy at all) trying to find a mate from the 5% or so at the edges of the population. And getting fired, beaten up, called names, and criticized by so-called Christian Republicans who know nothing about being kind and decent to people who are different from them.
So, rather than talk about your “easy life” and “imagined injustices”, why don’t you get active politically and work on the real injustices? You have no right to criticize people for their sexual orientation. Leave ’em the fuck alone, and concentrate on your own garbage cans.
JSB having some trouble deciding yourself?
Joe, you are such a drama queen, and you have completely missed the point of the article. Really? A 15 year old girl from Sweden? You mean the neurotic, semi-autistic girl who has been coached by her parents but has no clue what she is talking about or what is happening in the world?
And which one of those scenarios fits you? Or are you just picking up the tired propaganda from the Democrat Party and regurgitating it as if you can relate to it?
Joe Blunder Brooder fits better according to your Sky-Screaming. We’ve all heard that “yell” for years and it means nothing anymore except stupidity of those who wanna be taken care of regardless of how they CHOOSE to live their lives… there are all kinds of help for people that NEED it. Of course there are the evil persons who abuse even kill their newborns and think they can cry that they were “on drugs” and Not Their Fault… oh yeah, life is soooo hard. Sure it is. Difficult in various ways for various people, challenged to do better than their parents (or “producers”) and better than their families or lack of them. Tomorrow is another day, another chance to be true to yourself to better yourself or lie on your buttt sucking drugs etcetera to give in to your REAL purposes to be evil and smoke pot in rooms with children … which incidentally no Marketer is mentioning. THAT will happen when babies die, children are hurt, when it is too late for those innocents THANKS to the EVIL that the whiners like you are excusing. Listen and Learn, Blunderer, that Dog Won’t Hunt Here Anymore. Take your howling to Venezuela, Germany, France (or even Californ ia to join that orchestration), etcetera. No Do Overs for anything. Execute child abusers, RussiaRussia Lying propagandists backed by SorAz&Spawn, and same end for “backers.”
ENOUGH.
Well Joe S. Bruder. you accomplished one thing with your equivocal comment. You exposed yourself in the most efficient manner, not only with your “injustices” but finally with your succumbing to language worthy of the image you have presented.
Absolutely. Ugly language always defines an individual as Low Class.
Such a luxury to complain about stricter standards for receiving free food and government benefits.
Get a job, save money, invest, and then you won’t have to wait with your mouth open for the government to throw a free range roast chicken into it.
Shut up and get a job, Trump has jobs for you, not handouts.
Sounds like JSB didn’t learn that sex comes after “I do” and thinks that the government should come to the rescue. There are consequences to our every decision.
As for our current President, he’s a 1,000% improvement over what we had before we voted him into office…for speaking our “language”.
Amen, Billy Miller! She should have remained celibate. Or married first!
P.S. Suppose a straight and naive young woman marries a sexually oriented screwed up person who can’t decide what gender … then, after marriage and children “he” decides what he really wants is another man instead of wife, family, and the ensuing responsibilities?
Think it doesn’t happen? Just look around. It does. That is also an illicit love affair that destroys families, except it’s with a man instead of a woman.
Such undecided individuals should leave the “opposite” sex out of the picture before marrying and destroying the lives of their wives and children!
Oh, grow some balls, you fucking snowflakes! Nearly every post on PB attacks anyone they think is a liberal with much worse language. Ann Henry is all in a tizzy about other people’s sexual orientation, and her worst fear is not making it back from a 100 foot trek to the end of the driveway? I’ve served in the state legislature, and have known many gay people there and in business. They go through a lot of challenges that straight people don’t even know exist. If anyone has a problem with their sexual orientation, it’s probably Henry herself.
If you really care about peoples problems, think about what minorities, immigrants, the poor and the elderly go through in the face of the relentless assault on human rights by the so-called Conservatives.
Insurance in the countries that have state-run insurance costs around $4-5K per year. Between myself and the company I work for, insurance for me and my wife runs about $22,000 per year, plus I’m on the hook for up to $10,000 in copays and deductibles. I know a husband/wife team who have their own accounting business, and for them and 3 teenage kids it’s $30,000 per year plus up to $20K deductibles. It doesn’t take long before you’re a slave to the insurance companies. A true conservative would say, hey, why don’t we let the government run this and save each and every person in the country 5 or 10 or 20 thousand dollars? I personally would be happy to pay an extra $5K per year in taxes if it’s saving me and/or my company $15000 in insurance payments. Don’t give me the line of crap about long waiting lines or death panels – insurance companies already force patients through all that, and there is no recourse through the courts or law. Canadians and the British LOVE their health care systems, and are appalled at the choices that Americans have to make to get health care.
Our country needs an educated work force. In some states, so-called Conservatives keep cutting education spending at the federal and state level in the name of fiscal responsibility, and it pushes the costs to the local tax base. In cities that have a lot of low income people, they have to choose between maintaining infrastructure, having enough police on the streets to prevent crime, or educating their children. A real conservative would look at education as an investment in the future of the country. Educated people can compete and even lead the world in developing products, and the larger tax base makes the whole country better off – less poverty, less crime, more money for critical infrastructure, and ultimately less need to spend money on the poor.
We Americans tend to look down on what we consider third world countries, because they can’t feed their people, are in the middle of civil wars, have economic or violence-related refugees, and lack basic human rights,. Most of those countries have lost their education systems (or it has been turned over to religious groups), they have a strong-man dictator who is robbing the country, they have a political system that minimizes the voices of the people and allows the rich to dictate the laws in their favor, they have little or no social spending, they have almost no laws to protect the environment or workers rights, and they have isolationist “us first” policies. Sound familiar? These are all policies pushed by Trump and so-called Conservatives. We look at Europe as first world countries, yet they have moderately high taxes on the wealthy, strong labor and environmental laws, strong social safety nets for refugees and the poor, a commitment to human rights, and strong international agreements that they respect and abide by. In the end, it’s the Progressives that are the real conservatives. Ask anyone who runs a business what happens if they stop investing in their business or their workforce. Conservative “Fiscal Responsibility” and American isolationism is the way to becoming a third world country.
Meanwhile, Ann Henry is busy denouncing the 1% of the population that offends her Conservative values, and that is in the least position to defend itself. And you call me vulgar for a bit of salty language.
Calm down Joe. You made some good points about the struggles of single Mothers. But let’s take a look back at LBJ initiating a welfare system that encourage single Mothers and absentee Fathers. Out of wedlock births from about 15% to 70%. This has led to many other problems including depriving millions of kids a relationship with their Fathers. The lady didn’t say how long her driveway was. Could have been half a mile. She emphasized her gratitude for what she did have and suggested others do the same. She felt if we all did this we would have a lot better perspective. You think the single Mother struggling to take care of her kids was spending time questioning her gender? Many of these gender problems are manufactured. Kids being manipulated. I heard a man testify who was taught he was this way from childhood. He feels it is a widespread problem. In this sense we are creating problems. Snowflake? Listen to some videos on the walkaway movement started by Brandon Straka. A gay hairdresser from N.Y. He talks about being villainized a lot worse by his liberal friends than conservatives after he started calling out falsehoods on MSM reporting. Your profanity and name calling follows that same pattern. You sound like an intelligent person who should be able to have a civil discussion. The radical left has a history of stressing emotions and division over civil discussion, Ask yourself why.
And of course, you have dusted off the remaining Democrat propaganda, and pushed them further toward the socialist left.
And STILL missing the point of the article…
Hey, there is still natural selection, and I like the way it works. It does not care whether you are white, green or blue, homosexual, independent or badly confused. It kills whomever drifts off. It has no remorse et strives for a better, more resistant, better adapted gaggle. You can fight it but doing so dooms you. So life ain’t fair. Get used to it.
Socialism is never an answer to any problem and socialized medicine is a step in the direction of government control . Free and open competition without government interference is the cure for what Obamacare has done to our health system.WAKE UP AMERICA
Hi Joe Bruder, I commend you for coming to the other side to have a look at what we talk about. Have you heard what the fallen leader of Boing Corp is walking away with after being fired for overseeing a real mess? It’s atrocious. And I well believe as the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson suggests that we need vocal liberal critics to help check this kind of abuse that the power of conservative freedoms can lead to. Yes, we need you.
And before I go too far let me say that the article above seems to have launched from a curious pad well into space without much of a tether. I can’t say I see any real causal relationship between soft living and the behavior she draws to. The theory may be true but I don’t think facts would help it bear out. I don’t believe everything I read.
But here’s what I want to tell you Joe. I believe we all want the same thing – the most wonderful country in the world to live in and raise our children to live in. And the differences between the foundation of my philosophy and yours are important to keep each other in check. But those differences run deep, so much so that most of the time we are discussing only the part of the iceberg that we see while the greatest mass is beneath the water.
What is that mass? Why are we so different? And if we understand that difference can we go back and begin to talk to each other again? I think so.
Conservatism was partly handed to me through my family and partly arrived at through my own walk in this world. The essence of it is that I look around and see that I truly do live in the best country in the world and, yes, I want to ‘conserve’ those things that made it so – and which I believe will continue to make it so. And in my personal struggles to make the best living for myself and my family I want the freedom to break out and go beyond the time clock. My biggest concern is my freedom and government is ever showing up on the other side of that coin to make my path difficult, and to take from me more and more so that the oppression of government has become my nightmare. As it stands now the government thumb serves to keep people from making more money – unless they can leap from poverty directly to wealth. This is simply my experience talking from my own efforts to rise above.
Your description of the costs of insurance is spot on. My insurance costs are similarly ridiculous. I really don’t have insurance and for the most part I skip any healthcare that isn’t absolutely necessary. But I’m guessing I am much older than you because I was already in business and already had health care before Barack Obama and the blue team pushed the ‘affordable’ health care act through.
OMG. The day I heard about that I looked at my wife and told her this is insane. Its simple economics of supply and demand and there’s no way it can work – even with healthy people pitching in and gaining nothing. The costs started increasing by roughly 30% every year until I had to give up my good insurance, my doctors, my health… and learn to live with some awful policy that might help if I fall into a horrible accident. I don’t have faith it will. And worse, I don’t think we’ll ever get back to where we were.
Common sense Joe – we can’t believe much of what we hear so we have to rely on our common sense and simple laws of nature to guide us despite what the paid pundits say.
Liberalism appears to me to be a very loving and tolerant disposition. I see that in so loving the world and its people the greatest motivator of that philosophy is to see to the care of your fellow man. It is noble indeed if I am correct in that supposition. My sister speaks that way, of the disenfranchisement experienced around her and the difficulties of those so disposed. I get it.
But while I agree that free enterprise must be checked, I cannot allow that check to come through big government which would more likely prove horribly corrupt. I cannot allow for one moment the idea that Liz Warren will grow government into an inescapable socialist monolith and do to all our free choices what ‘affordable’ care did to my insurance. And never be able to go back! I don’t believe at all that government should be our caretaker.
It isn’t perfect. You can find examples of everyday people that experience hardships which may or may not be attributable to conservative votes. I can do just the opposite. But the bottom line is that I don’t think our country would continue to be as great as it is if socialism became the norm – I believe that if we’re free to build our lives responsibly then the people in the country will be the best off. Not just me. Capitalism is the big difference between us and everybody else, isn’t it? It’s certainly not the diet.
Like many of my conservative friends and indeed most people in the country my heart goes out to those that suffer and I do many things to help them, but I do not want to send my money to Washington, let them take out 90% of it, and then let the leftovers finally trickle down to those in need. So I vote against most government programs. Not because I don’t care about the people – but because I don’t think it is the right way to go about it.
We could talk about environmental science, living with our physical deformities, or any number of topics for which there are two sides that are reasonable and sound. It isn’t all one way or the other and what we should be doing is not hating and destroying each other but listening and finding the balance. We can I hope, political correctness be damned.
Happy New Year Joe.