Newt Gingrich's treatment of his wives mirrors the Republican Party's treatment of women, poor people, people of color, and immigrant people in general. The GOP treats such non-people in a way that indicates they view them as both useless and disposable, with no long term value.
This way of viewing people is not limited to Republicans, though I would say it indicates a certain conservative frame of mind. A liberal is far more likely to see humanity in all human beings rather than only in those who make a certain amount per year.
The Republicans betray, by their actions, that other people simply don't matter to them once their usefulness has ended, or if they refuse to do what the Republicans expect of them. If we want to fight this type of belief, there's a lot of things that contribute to them, and the more I myself have had to fight for care and rights, the more apparent it has become to me that it is so very very much worse for the Americans that few powerful people want listen to.
Medication! We have medication!
For those keeping track, it only took over two weeks of calling the director's office every day, plus the Congress critter's office---and who as far as I know, did not call me back---the governor's office----who did not call me back, and the White House, who said they couldn't do anything at that level, but did give me General Eric Shinseki's phone number. The White House operator was very nice and genuine, quite a contrast to many of the people at the VA that I deal with. When you consider that all I'm trying to do is get my prescription filled, that I am a veteran, and that many men have done far less than I did in the service but got far more accolades, you begin to understand just how much more awful it must be for people who've never served. Supposedly, patriotic Americans respect the military. If that's so, I fear for ordinary Americans, as if what we're seeing with Occupy is not bad enough. Of course, once the Republican audience booed that gay soldier, the gig was up. Is this a society we can be proud of?
People have been saying, "I'm sorry," to me. Why? You didn't do it. I don't want people to sympathize. Some people can because they've been in this situation, in which case a full-fledged bull session often ensues. What I want----and I think what lots of other people facing institutional neglect want---is for people to care enough to get pissed off and start making phone calls and sending emails as well. There are too many people like myself, facing the fact that we just don't count, and here's what makes me so furious that all this crap is keeping me from going to vocational rehab: people like me who understand what it's like could offer so much to all the people out there who didn't have the luck to serve in the military.
For some people, my litany of horror at the hands of the VA is so uncomfortable to hear that they reject it out of hand---and with it, the notion that truly bad people are often completely ordinary. Their illusions matter more to them than the realities that people like me face. That has not been their experience----you hear this occasionally from some very young women, who comfortably say that they've never experienced sexism, nor catcalls, nor discrimination of any kind. That in turn is like living the life of the white girl on the milk carton---if you never go missing, that is. You matter more. Sometimes people believe it. Some people reject it. People value you more even if you just barely attain mediocrity. Class matters more. (Just ask the women and children of steerage on the Titanic, often cited by bitter MRAs as proof that women have it easy.) (Of course, for women, 'being valued' means being valued as a piece of merchandise, but that can take a while to dawn. Just wait till the 'everything must go' sales.)
When you don't have any value, the world looks very different from the bottom of the hole. People don't return phone calls. People don't do their jobs. Nobody's going to punish them. Who's going to notice? Who's going to care? Nobody's going to discipline them. They're going to assess you as having no value, and therefore no rights. If you persist in demanding the basic humanity that you're entitled to as a human being, people will often get angry at you, for demanding things that they feel should only be dispensed at their discretion, and for not giving them a chance to bask in your gratitude, which they expect. The less value you have to society, the more resentment there is when you refuse to accept society's low opinion of you. Thus the pervasive anger at black women, for example, who star in seemingly endless youtube videos, designed to make fun of the black woman's (stereotypic) seemingly volcanic temper, her endless capacity for loudness and invective, and whatever other stereotypes the film maker desires to show. (Notice how these are the stereotypes lying in wait to attack any woman who loses her shit at some sexist ass.) People don't typically turn on their cameras to preserve pleasant normal scenes, like the black woman and white man I saw seated on a park bench on my last trip to the VA, not a couple, but casually chatting over newspapers. It was notable because stuff like that---the basic decency of people----seems to consist sometimes of an absence of horror and bad deeds. Or maybe I just think that people are born decent and their upbringing and culture and choices make them into what they are later on.
The videos of black women that pervade youtube should give any all woman pause, because while they're designed on the surface to make black women look like, well, women, except far more so than other women, no racist or sexist limits their hatred to just one outlet. In almost all of them, whatever has caused the woman's outburst is not filmed, leaving only the response, and that response is always frowned upon, marking that person as both weak and unstable---and victimized, at the very least by the person with the camera. It is a curious---and infuriating-----feature of our culture these days that the person who is an asshole to one person to the point that that second person loses it is never the asshole. It's easy to keep your calm when you're not the one being attacked, usually for the things about yourself that you cannot change. We just ignore him---and it's very often a him. What I see when I look at many of these videos are women who are tired, driven to distraction, disrespected----which in turn results in an increase in desperation and anger----and desperate. What I see is myself, after I hang up the phone from the VA, where yesterday I got a smarmy condescending lecture from a pharmacist who took me to task for not knowing something I'd never been told. Looking at many of those women, one has to see what could happen to you on a bad day. As for the pharmacist.... Why on earth would I think that the VA would have so logical a system, after all? From the day they put me in a therapy group with a bunch of REMF sex offenders, to the times I was threatened with involuntary committment once it was ascertained that I feared nothing more, the VA has acted only with the logic of cruelty and indifference. At every medically-unsound decision or act, at every violation of HIPPA, at every incorrect medication doled out, at every symptom ignored, at every injury dismissed, the VA has been consistent in only one way, and that has been in delivering to me the message that I don't count, that no one cares. No one would put my face on a sign should anything happen to me, so to speak. No one would care. And that is the spirit that dominates some viewpoints, some mindsets,------and one of our political parties. You don't matter, and if you try and change that, you will suffer. They live in a pleasant reality made less pleasant by knowledge of your existence. To know injustice is to fear it affecting one's self. Best, then, to comfort one's self with the notion that those people are bad people, victimized only their own bad judgment.
Well-meaning people often offer advice, as if you're a moron who's too stupid to think of that yourself. You see this in any case where the intended recipient is female, for example, though being a female veteran has given me an unparalleled opportunity to watch conservatives twist in the wind like especially angry wind chimes as they weigh "Liberal feminazi bitch" on one hand with "a soldier but this is why we have to keep bitches out of the Army!" and arrive at, "Thank you for your service," often delivered with a wince and a grimace, as if passing a verbal kidney stone of immense size. "Thank you for your service" from some people these days is the equivalent of "Bless your heart" from people who hate you but don't have the fortitude to come right out and wreck their image by saying it. They always hide the hatred, making any response to it seem outsized by comparison. For people who've suffered from decades of that hatred, there can come that one final straw. Rush Limbaugh's entire career as GOP spokesman and Id comes from broadcasting that kind of hatred. It doesn't have to be that obvious. The fact that so much of it reveals a total lack of thought, well.....
If you're of a mind to consider giving advice, and it involves incredibly obvious shit, reconsider or resign yourself to a tongue-lashing. I've gotten a lot of that kind of crap, with people asking me breathlessly if I've.....applied for benefits, after I mentioned in the very post they're commenting on that my status is 100% disabled service-connected. That kind of thing, after repeatedly being reminded, inadvertently over and over again by VA staff that they can't be bothered to listen....well. In many posts I've referred to my shock and horror at finding out that the VA has declared me more than 100% disabled, yet invariably I will be treated to that particular question. It's especially bitter because I thought I would get, you know, treatment at this level. One doesn't have to be moderately cynical to wonder if the VA gave me, with that classification, a private note in a file somewhere that advises care givers to classify me as not worth treating due to the damage already done. Not listening sends a message.
Another bad situation for giving advice, while we're on the subject, is when people grandly take it upon themselves to lecture women on how to keep safe. This so clearly illustrates the mindset that I must bring it up. They never lecture men on how to rein in sexist or unscrupulous acquaintances, which attacks the problem at its source and takes advantage of the fact that men don't tend to listen to women. Any woman can reel off tales of saying something in a group of men and then being ignored......until a minute later some guy says exactly the same thing to applause and praise. Furthermore, the advice is often based on simply accepting rape as some degree of normal in society, like weather, and advising women to wear galloshes every day, as if any man would tolerate being told that they have to endure that kind of thing every day, all day, for the rest of their lives.
As Amanda points out, those lists of advice amount to a rapist's charter, labeling women who don't wear societal burkas as acceptable rape victims. Women are supposed to deny themselves a whole list of things that men simply would not accept if they were advised to take a similar course of action to avoid this type of attack, something that would be classified as a human rights violation----if the percentages of victims by gender were reversed. One has to only repeat Golda Meir's advice (during a rape epidemic in Tel Aviv) and gauge the response----usually horrified or resentful or both---to understand that the advice being given is not given with the woman's welfare in mind.
"Place a curfew on women," she was advised.
"Why? They're not doing the raping. Put men under curfew."
Better women get raped and restricted than a single man have to lift a pinkie, apparently. Women get the worst of such advice, but it's another form of bootstrapping, and that affects anybody who's not rich, white, and male. The message is that one's dilemma is simple to avoid and all you have to do is take some simple measures. Be it on your head if bad things happen to you. This absolves everyone but the victim. The fact is, with so many of us suffering, we're all being treated this way to a lesser degree.
Once one's social capital has sunk to certain levels---ugly, disabled, unattractive, old, fat, unfunny, unfun,, because OMG, what a drag!----one tends to notice an increasing absence of respect, kindness, or even response. If society loves the powerful, it prefers that the poor just disappear and this has happened quite completely on the mainstream news. Being on the lower rungs of the societal ladder gives one the feeling that one is a first wife about to be ditched after twenty or thirty years of marriage, children, and stretch marks for a newer model. The Republicans----in their role as the aggressive asshole in this paradigm---know quite well that some people regard asking permission or showing respect to people who can't hurt you as the ultimate in wusshood, while being placed in the position of defending one's self makes you look like a wimp. This is the philosophy of the predator, and it informs a lot of social interactions when different classes rub elbows.
Complaining is whining. We have a huge bias against complaining. Winners don't complain. For all the attempts to label 'snitching' as a prisonesque crime, general society has the same resentment, perhaps out of sheer terror that one day one could be in the same position. Not coincidentally, the whole bootstraps argument is based on the idea that aggression just short of assholehood is a good thing----after all, if you were a good person, you wouldn't sit there and give in to despair; you'd start a business out of your cardboard box under the bridge.
The belief that bad things only happen to bad people not only lays behind our resentment of the poor, but behind our suspicion that some people just need to try harder. I'm reminded here of that arrogant little white kid who set out to 'prove' that anybody could find a job and a car and a flat in one year, ignoring the advantages that he'd accrued---as in a society savings account----from health care, education, the privilege of being regarded beamingly by everybody as a literal fair-haired boy-----in his little experiment to basically prove that all those poor folks are lazy shiftless slackers who probably don't deserve help. He had mommy and daddy's platinum card in his back pocket for the very emergencies that drive people to dire straits and homelessness, and in fact wound up cutting his little experience in knob-polishing* short due to just such an emergency. I had a roommate like this. Blond, tall, the son of the Greatest Generation who worked their asses off so he wouldn't have to, he uttered the immortal words that led me to realize that he might as well be an alien: "I didn't have any problems, so what's stopping other people?" His mom and dad were paying his way, for a start. People like that, too, seldom find themselves on the receiving end of incredibly patronizing advice that advises them to do stupid crap like just leave an abuser or whatever, as if the door was being held open twenty-four seven by a liveried chaffeur, beckoning one's stupid ass to a Rolls-Royce limousine. Guys like that are always assumed to be doing everything correctly, when the truth is, they are correct, in that their birth lifted them over the lower classes automatically. It's never been any different for them, so what is there to notice? When you haven't been patronized and treated like you're stupid all your life, it's easy to miss it when you see it happening to other people.
This is to say nothing of the effect the crushing weight of illness, tumbling down the economic ladder, or losing one's whole world can have on one emotionally. Untreated---gee, wouldn't health care be great?----these things get worse and worse, and in turn, have still more deleterious affects on the soul and often the living conditions.
Being depressed, if one's in a suddenly awful position, is a natural human response. Such people need help, not prodding. Help can just be listening, a marked lack of advice, and non-pressuring offers of whatever assistance the victim feels is necessary. Of course, depression by its very nature, sometimes makes thinking of hopeful and helpful things difficult to impossible.
Depression is not being a little out of sorts. It's not the same as having PMS. In the most cruel form of bootstrapping, depressed people are often urged to 'cheer up', 'stop feeling sorry for yourself' (that one's especially sadistic), and 'get over it'. These orders, of course, are for the benefit of the giver, not the luckless person in their sights. Just as responding to a bully is regarded critically, being the recipient of advice that amounts to 'shut up so I can keep on ignoring unpleasant things' attacks the victim under the guise of helpfulness. People move to stomp down dissent, and pointing out that 'cheer up' is sadistic and manipulative is fiercely resented. Often times the stomping down comes in the form of a group whose members attempt to stifle the complainer by sheer weight of numbers, after which point they'll congratulate themselves on getting rid of that whiny loser. You can see this response in Newt Gingrich's snide, "Get a job after you take a bath." The view that people like me, people like you, unemployed people, homeless people, hopeless people, abused people, really are where we should be because we don't deserve anything better because we haven't earned it permeates so much of the discourse these days that one has to commit the unforgivable sin of constantly responding to sound bites with long analytical explanations of just why Newt Gingrich is so full of shit his eyes are brown.
It's been interesting to observe the ways one rises and falls on the social ladder and the way military service---which once provided protection from some of these vagaries----is finally proving that the Republicans are nothing but predators and are changing society so that kindness and care are weaknesses, while getting away with whatever you can and turning an obscene profit at it is the only goal in life. This is what we're fighting. It might be affecting each of us in different degrees, but the way we're viewed is the same, and that means we're all in this together.