Texty

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 the roasting pit villa tonight. It's 95 degrees in B'vue right now. Sigh...

On my way back to the Ham from home, I stopped to get gas. I was followed off the exit by an aging Taurus. Not unusual. What was unusual is that it followed me into the gas station and then parked in front of me. Crosswise.

A 40something, balding white guy stepped out leaving his (I assume) wife and two kids in the car. He proceeded to grill me--in a saccharinely polite manner--about my FSM decal.

Being, quite frankly, a little scared of this guy, I kind of blew it off as "an online in joke." Which it sort of is. But he wouldn't let it go. He wanted to know whether it was intended to be like the "Christian or Darwin fish" and whether it was "pro or con"--on the Christian fish.

I told him it was a joke on intelligent design. He nodded, and said, "Oh, OK." He got back in his car and left--his kids staring out the back window at the Crazy Anti-Kristian Lady trying to pump her gas in peace.

I realize that the decal in question is somewhat confrontational--that's the point--but I didn't exactly expect to be accosted by a guy with his kids in the car. He wasn't hostile about it, but just... creepy. I expected him to launch into a proselytizing tirade, but he didn't--at least not at me.

I've had plenty of comments on the things that festoon my car. I always have some bumper sticker or other, and there's usually some sort of political bent. For a while, I had an SLGC sticker on my old car, and had a rather scary experience with a truck full of nasty high school boys hurling insults at me at a stoplight. Usually--let's face it, this is a blue state--I just get the whole "hell yeah" and thumbs up stuff. It's strange to have someone actually get in my face about it, especially when the decal in question isn't particularly rude or mean-spirited it itself.

The FSM campaign, though it's a bit out of fashion now, does have some elements of mockery--oh, those silly Kristians and their 6,000-year-old Earth!--but there's a serious side to it, too. There's a good, solid argument behind the giggles: If they're going to insist that creationism be taught in science classes, they need to give equal time to ALL creation myths, however far-fetched they may seem, because none of them have any more scientific merit than the others.

Putting this decal on my car and supporting the FSM campaign isn't just about mocking. It's about pointing out that science classes need a foundation in empiricism. Without the scientific method in place as the foundation for all scientific education, we're screwed, because people will start arguing that gravity was just Newton's opinion, and their opinion that the earth actually sucks is equally valid.

I honestly don't care what beliefs people have about the origin of matter. Xenu, FSM, The Valar, whatever. If it makes you happy, go for it. What I have a problem with is people who try to teach those beliefs as if they were scientific fact, and people who try to teach beliefs that actually CONTRADICT established scientific fact. We may not know from whence the first hydrogen atom came, but we do know how humans developed on planet Earth. Declaring that we were made--separately from all other species--out of dust and bones by the hand of a deity goes against that. It's a quaint and interesting mythology, but it's not scientific fact and should never be taught as such.

I probably shouldn't have been such a wimp when this guy confronted me, but I didn't want to get into it right then and there in the rain. I hope he looks up the FSM thing (I told him what it stands for) and gets the message. Those wide-eyed, curious kids of his need to know.