Good Intentions Gone Wrong

My third grader was assigned a black history month project. Kids were instructed to write six letters as though they were friends with a major historical figure, who did not have to be black but had to be of some general cultural importance. Whitesplaining and bootstrapping follows. It is hardly Z's fault that at eight years of age she still has cultural baggage to unpack. It's a big culture and she's a little girl. Let's check this thing out without her.


Dearest Zee,

Life on the plantation has been very unusually hard this time, but I'm hoping it will stop. All the fuzz and lint in the air is making me cough. I can't concentrate, so I keep getting whipped. Tomorrow I hope I get to work with Mrs. Cook's husband and not her.

Sincerely, Harriet.


Here I give Z a few points. It's not Harriet's fault she's being whipped, it's a result of external forces. Harriet is not defined as lazy. Z can't be expected to realize a young female slave might avoid the master.


Dearest Harriet,

I am so sorry that you have to deal with that. I hope that you get to work with her husband instead also. Please have some good news next time!!!!

Sincerely, Zee


Here things start to go, um, South. While Z is appropriately sorry she doesn't really get what whipping is. Harriet is encouraged to be less of a downer. After all, mail should be happier.


Dearest Zee,

Well I can tell you that I have some good news. I got to go back to my family, but I have to work in the field. I just helped a runaway slave but got hit in the head with a weight. It left a scar, but I'm ok now.

Sincerely, Harriet


Whew, at least Harriet isn't always going on about her problems. Because Z is not here for that. I give her points for bringing in family separation and the risk involved in helping a fugitive.


Dearest Harriet,

I hope you don't have an aching head too much. I hope you get treated with respect by not just other slaves, but by slave owners too. I would also like to find a way to help you keep your hope that you will find a way to be a free person.

Sincerely, Zee


At the beginning of this letter I thought we were headed up. Z shows compassion for Harriet and a desire to improve her life. Unfortunately, while acknowledging her own helplessness she accepts the reality of slave owners. Z stops short of wishing slavery would end, because that's radical. Z wishes for her friend's freedom, but not an end to slavery. This is an interesting bit because it falls into Having A Black Friend. Z has inadvertently shown the typical response of a white friend to injustice suffered by a person of color; a desire for the specific person to be well treated rather than an end to the system that mistreats.


Dearest Zee,

You are the best friend ever! And thanks to you, I am finally free! There was a man who worked on the same plantation as I did named John. He was a free slave so he wanted to stay but I didn't want to keep being a slave. I used the skills my father taught me and got help from a Quaker woman. Now I am free! I have money! Thanks!

Sincerely, Harriet


Where do we start? Z has given a few encouraging words and some empty wishes to Harriet and in return Harriet has ceded all the credit for her escape. Without that lightbulb moment, our fictional version of Harriet might have stayed under the whip. Instead she bootstrapped her way over to the Quakers and increased her economic standing. This is where I realized how deeply ingrained cultural fictions are in historical lessons at the grade school level. Because dude. Z wrote this. With sincere intent.


Dearest Harriet,

That's great! I hope you can get your family and friends to freedom too. I'll try to meet up with you sometime soon! Hey, you know, you should help other slaves too!

Sincerely, Zee


This is just so brilliantly dominant culture that it could be satire. Z blithely accepts the credit then offers to party. As an afterthought, she creates the Underground Railroad. The fictional version of Z doesn't offer to help the fictional version of Harriet Tubman because anti-racism work is hard and it's something that should be done by people of color. I'm not sure how Z sees the fictional version of herself or what she considers her obligations to be in this relationship. I'm going to ask her when she's ten.

High Finance

Pictures and Words (XKCD is out sick today)

Bank: I stole a slice of pie.
USGVT: We could arrest you but we won't, give us a bite instead.
Bank: I just stole another.
USGVT: GDit! You owe us another bite.
Bank: No, dude seriously... I just stole a third piece and legit I think I'm going to be sick.
USGVT: It's OK, Bra. We've got a third fork.
Bank: I got a fourth slice, but I pulled it from that baby murderer's pie you said I wasn't allowed to give pies to. I gave him the rest.
USGVT: You are seriously too big to jail. Like, I don't think we have a prison wide enough. Fat ass. Come here and give us another bite.

Then they tousle each other's hair and have sex.
The End.

Bad Guys And Their Guns

I haven't blogged about Newtown because what do you say?

No, this shouldn't have happened. This should never happen. It feels wrong to minimize what this community has gone through by discussing the communities that go through this every day. A 7 year old child sitting in their classroom on a bright winter morning should not be murdered. Neither should a chid peacefully sleeping in her home. Or sitting in a car. Or walking down the street. Or playing on the swings. Thousands of our children have been senselessly murdered in the name of our second amendment rights. These rights are themselves a fictional construct of powerful special interest groups on both sides of the idealogical aisle.

Every year, every moment, we place a fairytale above a child's life. I want to believe Newtown is a tipping point. I don't want to be disrespectful by asking why it would be. Is it because the children are mostly white? Is it because they are mostly wealthy? Is it because they were killed together? The last time I thought a child's death was going to be a tipping point was when 7 year old Aiyana Jones was murdered for sleeping on her sofa. I don't know why I thought Aiyana would change us. She wasn't different from all the other children needlessly killed by the culture of violence we celebrate. In fact, she wasn't killed by a random criminal at all, Aiyana was shot to death in her Disney Princess sheets by a police officer. A few months before that I thought it was going to be the death of 6 year old Makayla Sitton. She was murdered in her bed by a cousin brought to her home for a holiday. By 2011 when Christina Taylor-Green was assassinated for attending a speech by someone she admired I'd given up on America and mass violence.

These are three children out of hundreds and thousands. Children have been killed since Sandy Hook. Newtown was not an aberration in any fashion unless you consider being forced to face the deaths of our children is an aberration. It doesn't hit home. What does hitting home even mean? We want to see the faces of the children, we want to hear their stories. By this we mean pictures of them happy and healthy and whole. Stories of the love their family shared and the shock they leave behind. We want to whistle past the graveyard they lie in. Long after we've moved on, long after we've turned to the next mass shooting and ignored the bodies piling up in single or double or triple numbers around us, the first responders will still see the faces of those children when they close their eyes. Their images won't be happy or healthy and they certainly won't be whole. The damage done by the weapons used at Sandy Hook is the sort that stays with you for a lifetime. These men and women will be dealing with this for the rest of their lives, just as the families of the children will.

America, I think we will deal with this for about five minutes. Then we will turn away, as we always do. There is a fairy tale in our country that video games kill people. Movies kill people. Films kill people. Mental illness kills people. Anything but guns. It's never guns. It's never our easy access to weapons of war, weapons designed to kill each other as quickly as possible. This morning in a good neighborhood where this sort of thing doesn't happen (and what does that mean, really, except that lives are not equally important) a woman went for a bike ride. A man she knew stopped her. They had an exchange of words. He shot her to death and escaped. What if he'd punched her? Knifed her? What if he'd not had the power of the gun in his pocket, the secret knowledge that her life belonged to him just on the basis of his own whim. Would she be alive? Would Jordan Davis? Would Trayvon Martin?

I don't know whose cold dead hands will finally make America drop their weapons. For my kids, for your kids, for all the kids, let's go ahead and drop them now. We can't stop evil but we can disarm it. That's what fairytales are supposed to teach us. To want more. To expect better. To turn away from evil and embrace good. Let's open a different book. Please.

Yes, Virginia, this is about guns.

   Some person somewhere, who is claimed by many of our species to be a member of our species, genuinely argued today that we should train children to tackle gunmen, and that that would solve everything.  

Also, as in the wake of just about any mass shooting I care to recall, there has been a knee-jerk freak-out from gun enthusiasts explaining that the answer is more guns.  Talking points have been hit, as they are want to do.  Switzerland, and their world leader percentile of households containing guns (which are there due to their being issued for mandatory military service by citizens as Switzerland has no standing army...) and low gun crime was brought up.  Just don't mention that all  bullets are strictly controlled by the state and only available for purchase and  use at approved shooting ranges, or that bullets issued to service personnel (in case of invasion while traveling to military installations) are given in sealed packets which are checked to ensure no unauthorized use, or that a national inventory is taken to confirm the whereabouts of each bullet... Shockingly the NRA fell silent until today - lord knows how they'll tackle this one.

  But look, squirrel, moar guns in schools comes the tweety-bloggy cry - because if someone had been there with an ankle piece in a sock or a fanny pack holding their Saturday night special, then somehow none of this would have happened.
   It's that school yard fuzzy logic in motion for the particular Death Wish Gun Enthusiast - in which a gunman comes into a school and shoots no one - because someone reading his mind shoots him instead though they never go to jail for it because it was proactive self-defense.  Everyone gets puppies, and free ice-cream, and if you really want to know the truth of it they're holding out for a quick handy from a grateful teacher or two.  Oh and also they're taller than in real life.  Maybe an inch or two.  Except the gunman's mother is still back home dead, but just push that under a rug.  Good.  Now.  Everyone neat and pretty?

When I was younger and the space shuttle Challenger exploded in the air, I had an acquaintance my age who was very upset by it. Christie McAuliffe, (a teacher we might note) quite publicly died in the explosion with the rest of the crew. This kid was traumatized by her death in particular, I think because he didn't know any astronauts, but he saw teachers every day at school.  Perhaps it may have been a little Everyman at play as well.  I'm sure from his test scores he held no illusions about his space camp potential, but hey if the woman who grades vocab drills could make it - maybe he had a shot too.  He watched all the news whenever he could leading up to the launch, and made McAuliffe his own.  Then.  Well.  Shock, denial, most of the stages completely out of order.

  For hours and hours he'd argue with me about basic physics (which were still too advanced for our age set), demanding that if only she had waited and then jumped up in the capsule right before impact she would have survived!
  I said no - she was probably already dead before impact, but even so, even if she somehow amazingly was alive, awake, unhurt, and able to time a jump with superhuman precision, she'd still be going really, really fast because of kinetic energy and she'd be just as dead when she "landed," because that's how the world works.
  My brother-in-law did engineering work in jet propulsion, and was often engaged in or somehow otherwise consulted on NASA projects.  A Floridian, he had made a habit of watching every space shuttle launch possible on live broadcast (if he couldn't be in the state I suppose).  I'm not even sure he'd missed a launch before that one. 
  As I understand it from the time, he'd refused to watch that particular launch on the grounds there would be a high probability of catastrophic failure.  There had been problems with sealant rings, with earlier launches postponed, but it was evidently clear to him that the conditions causing the malfunctions would not have been adequately fixed by the steps that they had taken.  Other engineers would have undoubtedly had similar concerns, and no doubt warnings were given, but this is a highly specialized field - and it's possible the greater majority of people on the team were not even aware how one subset of problems might affect things.  Unfortunately it was also a period in NASA's history in which the actual scientists had been pushed out of any higher management or decision making roles in favor of project leaders with significantly lower technical understanding but a good sense of organization skill.  Part of the mission management may even have been political appointees.  Why am I reminded of all this?
  First because telling me that the answer is more guns in school shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works on par with a third grade understanding of physics.  Second because this situation may be completely avoidable if the right steps are taken - namely sensible gun law based on practicality (instead of trauma or NRA lobby dollars) and as or even more importantly, reliable mental health care.
  We all know there is a problem with the system.  The people who have been trained in this field tell us there is a problem with the system.  We continue hitting the launch button anyway.
 
  Fill schools with guns. Go ahead. What then? Grenades when someone throws a grenade in a school?  Improvised Explosive Devices in the lunchroom?  Dirty bombs in every class?  What about buses?  Grocery stores?  The movie theater?  Restaurants?  Build-A-Bear?  Gymboree?  Is Chuck E. Cheese packing?  Is Ronald?  Guns everywhere?  Every waking moment?   In every hand?

  The heart of the matter:
  26 people were murdered in under three minutes, many of them - let's be frank - with multiple shots to the head.  There's no sensible reason that ammunition clips of that capacity should be sold to the public. Anyone with a gun would likely not have even gotten it out in time before it was all over. There's no sensible reason it should be easier to purchase a gun than to identify and help treat a mental disorder that would cause someone to want to use a gun in this way. Setting aside that the person sitting around daydreaming about the opportunity to "take out" a would be shooter is, I daresay, one bad afternoon's distance from being the person sitting around daydreaming about being would-be shooter. 
  The solution to a horrible misuse of guns (if we are to presume the position that they have necessary uses) is not to inundate and drown our culture with more, more, and more guns. 
  What are you teaching the children in this school? In every school? That the answer to someone being mentally unstable is not to have bothered to restrict a gun purchase, not to have bothered to find the reason for their instability before selling them a sidearm, nor have bothered putting in place a system to address it... To have just not frankly bothered.  Instead teaching every child in our country that the fix is learning to kill faster, kill quicker than anyone else can, world without end. 
  I cannot imagine a more dehumanizing, wholesale race to the bottom of human endeavor.

How Much Is That Baby In The Window?

When is stealing a child socially acceptable?  In America, the answer is tied up in issues of class and race. Adoption has many faces. When we think of it we prefer to think of children saved from abusive homes. We embrace the celebrity model of Mia Farrow or Angelina Jolie while trying not to look too closely at the more common Madonna model. In my own life I know several adoptees who are thriving.  I've also taken part in too many conversations where the potential adoptive parents frame their desires in understandable but problematic ways. With an international adoption, I've been told, there is no chance of having to give the child back. I can't ignore the underpinnings of race and wealth in these discussions of the 'good' countries from which to obtain this desired item, this child. The discussions don't center around the countries with the cleanest records. If the child is actually available for adoption is obscured under the cover of giving them a better life. 

What happens when you adopt an older child? One who reveals that the story told by the adoption agency isn't true? We'd like to think that a child who, upon learning English, asks after her parents and siblings is quickly returned to them. Sadly, that's quite rare. While I've read a few stories where the child is returned I've read far more where the adoptive parents justify retaining the child. How many stories go untold? In the case of a child adopted as an infant the truth may never arise. This is where our complicated feelings about race and wealth lead us. Frame a potential abduction as an adoption and all the sympathy reverts to the adoptive parents. It is nearly impossible for parents from the country of origin to reclaim a child adopted into America. In some cases it may seem cruel of the parents to even try. 

While we import these lighter skinned children, we export adoptable babies and children of darker skin.  The myth that America has a shortage of children needing homes, that adopting a child in America is too difficult, is disproven by our own standing as a source of children on the international stage. While adoption in America can be a long and frustrating process, the alternative is potentially being complicit in a child's abduction. I can't read about a Chinese father tirelessly searching for his missing daughter without wondering if she's taking a dance class in my town. The desire for a child, the complicated myth of saving a child, the text of a better life changes from county to country and from household to household. Is the African American child in Chicago likely to live longer in Ireland? Is that a better life? Is the Guatemalan mother working here illegally automatically unfit to raise her child? Who decides what better means?

There's a case working it's way to SCOTUS right now that illustrates the conflicts of color, wealth, and truth in a way that motivated me to discuss them. While the facts are in dispute, a few things seem clear. A child of the Cherokee Nation was offered by it's non Native American mother for adoption. The father, serving in the Iraq War, disputed the adoption when the child was four months old. For two years the adoptive parents fought to retain the child.  She was recently returned to the father under the ICWA. The birth mother did not disclose the child's Native American status during the adoption process, claims the father did not support her and that he signed away his rights. The birth father claims that he did not understand the papers and that the birth mother refused contact with him during her pregnancy. Regardless of the legal truth of the case most of the reporting focuses on the ICWA law, it's intentions and the percent of the child that is Indian. On one side, the case is that the child will have a better life surrounded by her heritage and her birth relatives. On the other, that the child will have a better life in an open adoption with parents chosen by the birth mother. Whatever the ultimate result the child is going to pay.

When The Dogs Whistle

Twitter is an interesting place to watch people express themselves. It all feels ephemeral. While some are obviously playing roles, far more comments are made by average people revealing themselves. Recently I was following one of the many tags aimed at the election. I think it was the convergence of #Romnesia and #ThingsObamaVotersSay. What struck me about the latter tag was the number of times the tweeters invoked food stamps. In their view, being on food stamps is a vile thing done by vile people. It's a terrible program symbolizing a lack of moral character. In short, those who oppose the President also oppose feeding hungry children. I'm not really sure how you open a conversation with someone whose core belief involves citizens starving in the street.

If these figures can be believed (and I think they can) your average food stamp family is (white) employed and raising children. The family is given about $70 a week. Yet the conversation in the tags is not about people with jobs. It's not about children. It's not about trying to feed a family on $70 a week or why so many jobs in America pay poverty wages. It's about those lazy (often black) people that feel entitled. American residents, thinking food is something due them. Thinking their kids should sleep with full bellies, or even simply not on empty ones.

Of course this is classism and racism converging. When faced with a specific person on food stamps most of these folks will say they don't mean that person, they mean the other persons. The underserving persons. You know, the food stamp people. Not this particular food stamp person. The mythical food stamp person they've created in their head. The one their unexamined biases would prefer to see turned away from food, shelter, and medical care. The grasshopper to their ant.

To me when you say food stamps, I think of myself as a hungry kid. I think of the child my brother told me about a year or so ago. The child who spilled their Salvation Army Thanksgiving dinner and burst into frantic tears at the loss of a meal. The child who kept crying when the meal was replaced, because getting two chances at hot food was so hard to believe. I heard that story at a table with more than my kids could possibly eat. I remembered being the kid who would have sobbed at the ruined turkey. When you say food stamps to me, I'm not thinking about a mythical person I made up in my head. I'm thinking about my life, the lives of my peers, the life of that child in that shelter sobbing over a ten cent roll.

Recently our area began offering free breakfast to all the children at all the schools. The hungry kids were hesitant to claim the free meal because of the scorn from the full kids. The hope is that with the principals taking their meals there, with the staff encouraging everyone to get a good start to their day, that the hungry kids will stop being afraid of someone knowing who they are. The idea has it's opposition. A number of parents are concerned that people will come to rely on the free breakfast. They might expect it. Kids who can eat at home may choose to eat at school. What kind of country would this be if people knew they could always have a meal waiting? How could we ever succeed if hunger didn't drive us? These are the thoughts of people who have always eaten. As Jacques Prevert wrote in La Grasse Matinee "que de barricades pour six malheureuses sardines..."

This, this is why they call me opinionated and critical...

Ok so ... Kermit Roosevelt Jr.
This week saw much pain, stitches and medicated, ice-packed reading for me, which resulted in a convergence of things probably only kind of interesting to myself.
Plus, teh dot-edu internets is magic.

Paul Ryan wants 1950 back and wimmens makin' babies and mens deciding health stuffs for them because 1950's Daddy Knows Best.  Conservative politics wants to steal your money and finish gutting the US economy.  Democrats want to continue not doing anything much all that progressive or useful.

Friends of mine are still convinced that we went into Iraq because of the Terror, because Glenn Beck's deranged schizophrenic dysfunctions talked to him and said so. Nevermind that.

I mean when we hired Saddam Hussein to help the CIA organize a coup in 1963 and help us assassinate the Democratically elected Iraqi president, then set up the Ba'ath Party as the ruling power and then made Saddam head of their Secret Service - well all that was just in the name of spreading democracy and Light and Hope and shit like how we do - right?  I'm sure it had nothing to do with US and Corporate interest.

Just like in 1953 when the US sent Kermit to head up the CIA action overthrowing the Democratic Leader of Iran and installed the Shah as ruling power.  Nothing but Humanitarian interest there.I mean to be fair, we were busy anyway.  We'd just come off of crushing an independence rebellion in Puerto Rico, we had that thing in Korea... Over the next four years we had Nuclear threats to or Military in Vietnam, Guatemala, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq (we were warning them against invading Kuwait.  Ironic, isn't it?),  China, Panama, then a freaking war in Vietnam...  It's like, why do they hate us for our Democracy imposed on them?
But I digress.We do good work.  We kill a million people in Indonesia by way of CIA assisted Army coup in 1965, we invade the Dominican Republic the same year, the Army kills 43 POC in Detroit.  I mean the American Freedom Train is really humming along.

Sure - we carpet bomb Cambodia and destroy the government for ten years, killing 2 Million people through explosions and starvation, but you have to break some eggs, right?  Besides if we hadn't smoothed the road for Democracy and Freedom there, you never would have gotten that cool movie about Pol Pot with Sam Waterston.  Dude won an Oscar for that.  He was on Law & Order - he's legit.

Then there was that Wounded Knee siege against the Lakota in South Dakota in '73...  but this is getting away from the point - Which is:  The US... it does God's Work all the time with its Armed Services, defending the Nation, never putting them in harm's way for profit, making it safe for roasted hotdogs and black powder displays of the Nation's Moral Purity once a year.

Oh yeah and Chile.  Don't forget we killed the President of Chile.  Shit we had a lot going on.

ANYWAY MY POINT is how shocked I was to discover how the financial system works with regard to IMF/World Bank and Debt forgiveness.
See it works like this:A bunch of really well meaning people get together and they say, SURE third world developing country, we will loan you money via the World Bank to build infrastructure so your peeples can has electric if you hire say, Bechtel or Halliburton to do all the work. Nice deal.
Then the country has a shiny building or two in the square, maybe some electric grid, and the work is done by US or Multinational companies so they profit, maybe one half of one percent of the native population gets very rich and invests that money in international currency markets and Swiss bank accounts so it's completely out of the country.  Good deal. Only one drawback, really, and its not a big thing, just... nobody can really afford the electric at the rates that Foreign company is charging, because none of the population got any work or learned any trade since Bechtel imported their own contractors.  Oh and the debt.  The dirt-poor people still have the debt... and no water treatment facilities, because most of the GDP goes to paying down the debt.So what's to be done?

Le Sigh...  The International Monetary Fund looks at them and says, "Silly goose!  You ain't got no monies!"  Well, they can approve a loan AGAIN but they can't do it with all that debt riding ...  Instead we get some celebrities like Bono, and they do videos and stuff, and we all talk about how awesome cancelling that debt would be, because debt forgiveness sounds really super charitable... So that's what we do.Conditional Debt Forgiveness.

Conditional on Privatization of the water treatment (because honestly third world country, you already can't manage your electric grid) So a company like Halliburton or Bechtel comes in and uses up all the money building and then privately running the only water treatment facilities at something like three times the previous cost, but I mean, they have to make a profit, right?  They don't do this stuff for free.  They have kids to feed.

What else you got third world country?  Besides life-threatening poverty for 80% of the country and crazy preventable disease and child mortality rates?  You need roads?  You got Oil?  You got mining we could do?  We could do this all day!

So election day comes, and the companies send in representatives and they meet the new guys after inauguration, and everyone shakes hands and says hey congratulations.  Then the Company men reach in a pocket and say, "Hey yo - here's 200k to play ball.  That's the left pocket.  You don't want the right pocket because that's everything that could happen to you and your family when no one is looking."  Now, imagine you're a president, and you're wondering if you really appreciate what's happening here.  Maybe you even want to have some integrity, but besides being thrown out in a CIA backed coup, or dead along with the whole of your family, what's the guy after you going to do?  It kind of sets a bad tone, getting murdered.

So now you're corrupt!  Shame on you, Mister or Madam President!  What your people say they needed was a strong leader to manage their resources in a sound way - not IMF/WB loans and debt to foreign companies siphoning natural resources!  In fact that's what two generations of South American Presidents have been saying and they keep getting elected being socialist and anti-corporate and the US has to talk about what an enemy to Good, Clean, Pure US Interests they are.

And occasionally we kill people in the name of Democracy.  It just happens.
So, at the end, what I found really disturbing is that we have this really clear history of Humanitarian Righteousness when it comes to US Foreign relations, yet for so long the US has been left out of it's own Democracy Parade.

We started out good in Iraq setting up a puppet dictatorship.  Then they got mouthy and we flexed a bit.  Then years later they acted like they didn't like our trade agreements and we sent in some CIA guys to... actually shit - we couldn't, because that crazy ass Saddam guy had tons of loyal guards and body doubles.  So we had to invade... a little.  because at the end of the day we figured he'd keep Iran in check, and play ball, and  know who the top dog was because the US is WHAT!?!?!?   His crazy ass was still not doing what we wanted... and we had to invade ALL OVER AGAIN.  My God.

Now we had to fold that into our Afghanistan thing (which actually was really convenient because we had a closed meeting about how to design new currency for Iraq after wrapping up our plan for killing the leader in the first week of Bush's term, and then some crazy people blew up stuff and it was party time), and we sent troops and we privatized as much as we could with independent contractors and Halliburton built showers for our troops that had uninsulated wiring and electrocuted a few, and they built cisterns of stagnant water that made a bunch of troops sick, and ... well you get it right?

Why do they hate our Freedoms?  Cheney got 34 Million out of the deal from Halliburton ... it's not like he had anything to gain from funneling them money.
Why do WE hate our Freedoms?

But wait - what is that Siren Song of Righteous freedoms I hear???
Now Conservative America wants to spread that Dream of Democracy to the shores of... that's right!  AMERICA!!!  It's finally our turn!  We'll Privatize school, and prison for profit, and Social Security, and Medicaid, and just about everything that can bleed money.

I mean Social Security?  That's a HUGE drain on the national budget - Paul Ryan just said so, while joking that he hoped the sixty-five year old dude he'd directed police to wrestle to the ground had taken his blood pressure medication (see because he was mad that Ryan was calling Medicaid and Social Security an entitlement program, which clearly it is, if you consider that paying for something out of your own pocket in the US entitles you to get it).

Just think it's money, right, that private people and their employers pay in over a lifetime that is also reinvested for a profit for the Government.  Christ on a Cracker.  Leaving money that people put themselves into an account that is ostensibly set up just for them, that the Government collects the interest on all alone?  They pay in for fifty years and then take it out for ten?  HELL YES that has got to be a drain on the economy, leaving all that money that's already theirs in their Government kept pockets.  Let's get a Privatized company in here to empty that shit post haste!

Because stealing your money - hey that's Conservative.
Now if we could only focus on Iran, and it's human rights problems, and the horrible, sticky condition for women under the brutal dictatorship that we set up on purpose after killing their president in the 50's?
Or solve the corruption problems with these Banana Republics that we pay off or threaten with death if they don't get corrupt right quick?  I mean, our politicians don't have a problem removing impediments to multinational Corporate interests donating the GDP of Brazil for an election.  OUR politicians don't balk at the hard work of limiting human rights within our borders.  OUR politicians are saying they're totally cool with stripping women of their rights (and presumably everything else).
Is this not the glorious One World the United Nations was conceived for?

The world would be a better place if they accepted the Dream of US Democracy and embraced us as Liberators instead of taking the money we buy them off with or dying from the bullets we put into them in the middle of the night.  Or maybe all of the above.
Oh Shit!  Maybe we get to shoot Senior Citizens now?

Women hanging from a crane in the public square for being raped...?  Hey America, you swiped the credit card to rent that boom truck.  That enemy is still us.  Semper Fi.