“Family values” is spoken of often in politics. It usually alludes to incredibly superficial issues – same sex marriage or abortion being among them. The actual politics of raising a family in this society are not mentioned often.
It’s incredibly expensive to raise a child in this country. Daniel Marans, a reporter for the Huffington Post, said that, in many states, it is actually “more expensive than college.” More specifically, the cost of child care for one infant exceeded that of the cost of in state tuition at a public four year university.
So, earlier this month I had an adventure. I decided, after feeling increasingly freaked out about the direction of this country, to take the train up to Vancouver to visit friends for a couple weeks.
As I started my journey, it became clear that I was not the only individual on edge. At King Street Station in Seattle, they showed a video on how to respond to a mass shooter, with a pretty detailed video showing a shooter running in to the train station and then an older man taking him out with a briefcase.
Everything that we have seen in recent years, since the market crash of 2007, seems terrifying, chaotic and crazy because of the frame of reference most Americans have.
I was a conservative from roughly 2004 - 2011. At only 29 years old, that was a very significant amount of time and a very critical point of time for forming intellectual ideas.
I was on a bunch of drugs most of that time too, as many of the readers and founders of this blog know well. That may very well have had an impact. Nevertheless, I read a great deal of conservative literature and genuinely believed in it.
The Republican Party does not like Trump. Strategists for the GOP are saying he will not be the nominee. The conservative friends I have have called him a "carnival barker" and an "embarassment." Yet that embarrassing carnival barker is drawing the poll numbers and the crowds while they, with all their good intent, have candidates who are in the doldrums as far as numbers. The basis of what conservatism is is apparent and it's not pretty. As I said in my first piece, Trump taps in to voters' hearts and minds while the rest of the party and its propaganda outlets are left flabbergasted and disoriented. He has been channeled very roughly by Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly and Rand Paul only to keep standing, nodding his duck face and his toupee (or whatever that rodent on his head is) in smug arrogance.
I am not sure how many Dagblog readers are aware of Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg is the modern conservative intellectual heavyweight, if there can be such a thing. He replaced William F. Buckley in heading the conservative magazine National Review and he has written a number of silly books including Liberal Fascism, a strange book that features a happy face with a Hitler mustache on it. (He's not very original so he probably got that idea from Alan Moore's Watchmen graphic novel.)
I wrote about it here before - my girlfriend, Jennifer Reimer, a beautiful and brilliant young woman who was nonetheless plagued by demons, died at 30 years old April 14, 2014.
Last week, I lost another beautiful angel - my grandmother, Dodie, Doris Kildall. I have had to lose two loved ones, from slow motion health decline factors, in less than six months. I'm not apologetic to anyone who feels offended by anything I say or do at this point - they can do it themselves and tell me what I've done wrong.
I said it in my last interview with him - Michael Maiello is one of my best publishing friends. He not only saw me through the hard and good times but also seemed to see something in me nearly from the beginning. Our regular "Open Mikes" Q&A idea was his own and he wanted to switch it up this time - asking me questions! Gosh gee, I didn't even know I had thoughts that anyone would find that interesting. Here goes.....
In Seattle, socialist KshamaSawant has been unusually successful in her progress as city councilwoman. While it will take a good while to apply, she did succeed in pushing $15 minimum wage for the city of Seattle.
The Socialist Alternative movement continued with Jess Spear, who ran a pretty stellar campaign against Frank Chopp for the position of speaker. Nevertheless, Spear was “overwhelmed,” as the Seattle P.I. put it, with Chopp raking it 80 percent of ballots, and the explanations why are pretty storied.
In a recent speech, Pope Francis said bluntly that "our economic system leads to war." In an interview with Michael Maiello that I did for this website, Maiello said in response to one of my questions that "capitalism isn't designed to care and no amount of socially conscious corporate governance or philanthro-capitalism can change that. We picked a system that makes it possible to manage materials but that doesn't meet human emotional needs at all."
Michael Maiello is probably at the top of my list of internet and writing/publishing friends. He is a regular contributor at Dagblog and the author of several books and a comical play about the Iraq war. I have known him for three years now and he has helped me a bit - gotten me published and helped me through some traumatic life events such as my rehabilitation from SSRI antidepressant use and the loss of my fiancé Jennifer Reimer. He did all of this online too! Maiello, like me, is a deep thinker, and through our talks we don't really seek to avoid but rather to inform. This one is short but filled with some very weighty topics that I know are on many minds. Here goes.
This Seattle Pacific shooting is some eerie stuff. Immediately after I heard about it, I told my landlord about it and her response literally was "What the hell?"
Seattle Pacific University is a very quiet, conservative religious university in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. The university is so quiet and (normally) uneventful that I was pretty unaware of its existence in to my late teen years and my recent trip there was my first real visit there.
