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Got in to work several hours late due to a downtown B'vue power outage that took out my building (as I was on the way in; I arrived to find it shut down.) Tried to get a few things done by parking in M's office on main campus, but without tool access, I was fairly hamstrung. The bummer is that I won't get paid for those missing hours, of course.
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Sickened by the ongoing story about the family who let their diabetic daughter die because they believe illness is the result of sin. Ugh. Of all the religious fanatics I hate, the ones who visit violence upon their innocent kids piss me off the most. Fair enough if you want to starve yourself or not get blood transfusions or beat yourself with a stick every night or whatever else you think will get you closest to $deity. But don't do that shit to your kids, who have no choice.
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Also randomly pondering the relative political issues of different kinds of poor folk.
Not all poor folks are poor for the same reasons. Racism has to be addressed for PoCs (and in different ways for different communities), language barriers for immigrants, crime and environmental issues for the urban poor and lack of access to services for rural poor. And even when some communities seem the same on the surface, they can be very different. An immigrant from Mexico fleeing economic persecution faces very different issues than one from Somalia who is fleeing death squads, even if both need access to basic services in a language they can understand. A poor white woman in Appalachia faces very different issues than a poor black woman in Dallas, even if both may be trying to escape domestic violence.
The pity is that this sort of thing frequently gets percieved as competitive, when it shouldn't be. Giving targeted help to one community should in no way mean less help to another. We can acknowledge that some groups may have more critical needs than others while still not abandoning our obligations to other groups, or assuming that because they have some measure of privilege that another group may not, that they don't need help at all.
And truly, IMHO, that's the key to solving most social problems: Not homogenizing people who need help, as if they were just some great, unwashed mass about which we don't want to have to think.
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Really dreading the idea of going back to theroasting pit villa tonight. It's 95 degrees in B'vue right now. Sigh...
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Sickened by the ongoing story about the family who let their diabetic daughter die because they believe illness is the result of sin. Ugh. Of all the religious fanatics I hate, the ones who visit violence upon their innocent kids piss me off the most. Fair enough if you want to starve yourself or not get blood transfusions or beat yourself with a stick every night or whatever else you think will get you closest to $deity. But don't do that shit to your kids, who have no choice.
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Also randomly pondering the relative political issues of different kinds of poor folk.
Not all poor folks are poor for the same reasons. Racism has to be addressed for PoCs (and in different ways for different communities), language barriers for immigrants, crime and environmental issues for the urban poor and lack of access to services for rural poor. And even when some communities seem the same on the surface, they can be very different. An immigrant from Mexico fleeing economic persecution faces very different issues than one from Somalia who is fleeing death squads, even if both need access to basic services in a language they can understand. A poor white woman in Appalachia faces very different issues than a poor black woman in Dallas, even if both may be trying to escape domestic violence.
The pity is that this sort of thing frequently gets percieved as competitive, when it shouldn't be. Giving targeted help to one community should in no way mean less help to another. We can acknowledge that some groups may have more critical needs than others while still not abandoning our obligations to other groups, or assuming that because they have some measure of privilege that another group may not, that they don't need help at all.
And truly, IMHO, that's the key to solving most social problems: Not homogenizing people who need help, as if they were just some great, unwashed mass about which we don't want to have to think.
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Really dreading the idea of going back to the
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