What’s the worst form of bullying in your workplace, household, community, neighborhood, or national experience? Is it sexual, cyber, voting rights intimidation; was it Slavery, school related, or women being paid 77% of a man’s salary? Is it football players being shocked to discover sexually assaulting a fellow student when she’s too incapacitated to consent or deny, has life changing consequences for both bully and victim? Or is it suggested message from media and parents that exposing the crime in real time on social media was greatest danger?
Is it pollsters and media ignoring specific important issues like equality of the sexes, while favoring the pointless over simplification of, “do you think the country’s moving in the right direction?” Well do you?
At best this question gives us an opportunity to ponder our nation’s “brand.” At worst, missing the point of what America misses when citizens, whether teachers & students gunned down, or blacks & browns voter delayed, or LGBT Cincinnati Saint Patrick’s Day parade denied by DOMA depraved, or former felons and War Veterans having served their time, just wanting to work their way back into a society not class dictated by C-PAC orgy: We’re missing out on what blessings we’d receive if all were allowed freedom from bullies, equal access to the table of plenty and regardless of sex or sexual persuasion, justice for all.
Historically our national internal conflicts, though often focus diluted by the ebb and flow of tributaries of white vs. red, then black, then brown, North vs. South, young/new vs. “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” or even the battle of the sexes, the one consistent, constant directional friction rendering us “a house divided” is, the ever widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots. With the intentional undoing of our Middle Class buffeting bridge between the two, the “Right direction” for the nation is to protect the Wall Street haves from the many Wall Street bullied into have-nots.
As long as Corporatism keeps us focused with delight or disgust, on Sarah Palin reruns, Rand Paul win, Michelle ‘dog walking’ Bachman and “Disenfranchised Whites,” they keep us as blind to the truth as a GOP still unable to internalize its White House loses to a black looking Hawaiian from a single parent home, raised by grandparents, working for community outreach programs in high crime Chicago.
Current National Right Direction: foggy, hazy, self-deluding:
1) Our national “brand:” criminally tarnished by Bush/Cheney Administration “Hubris,” leaving thousands of American families paying in blood, life and limb
2) Our Declaration of Independence: betrayed by politicized Supremes
3) Our international reputation: oiled by global Corporations masquerading as “The American Dream.”
Truth is, like Presidential Administrations, bullying, rape and Pope choices have rippling affects:
* nine year old Brazilian girl raped by her father, while Jesuit suspiciously close to Argentina Junta (1976-83) torture & genocide — anti-gay Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Roman Catholic Church excommunicated her mother and doctor who performed abortion
* insensitive police physical examination
* public condemnation of victim
* Rape and Incest anti-abortion
The truth is: The connecting dots between school/office/cyber Bullying to the fifteen State Governments who have refused to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment since its 1972 Congressional passage, are the linked arms of paid less, spouse abused, raped, murdered and bullied females of all ages.
I’m not saying ratification of the ERA will solve all our have/have-not problems, or even health, social and political issues for our ‘weaker better half sex,’ a minority who now outnumbers male dominated government and corporate institutions. And I’m certainly not saying bullying spousal abuse and rape will ‘cease and desist’ when three more states ratify ERA.
What I am saying is this: the failure of America to constitutionally acknowledge the equality of all Americans, even the female ones, is our current voter I. D.