Fear and Loathing in the US

Trust me. NO ONE enjoys a verbal scrap more than me. I absolutely delight in the written dodge-and-parry, and with each day that passes, FaceBook is proving to be a treasure trove of joust matches.

I'm not sure whether it's a function of the mix of folks that comprise my friends list, or a general trend, but I've noticed that the most hotly contested debates on FaceBook are political. For every Rush Limbaugh fan, there's a Bill O'Reilly hater throwing stones, and for every staunch conservative, there's a bleeding heart liberal ready and willing to go toe to toe on every issue.

Every issue. Every day.

Let me preface all of this by saying that I've never been one to debate politics. There are a few issues that are hot buttons for me, but much like organized religion, big time politics makes me uneasy, and I avoid wading into the cesspool at all costs. Some would argue that it's my civic duty to stay "engaged" in the process and the parties and the issues, but it all feels like watching football on TV to me. No matter how much you yell and cuss and throw popcorn at the screen, the outcome remains unchanged. Despite this, you still have your facepainters, and your tailgaters, and your fans that live and die by the success or failure of the team, oblivious to the fact that they are about as integral to the team's performance as the Astroturf.

So . . . . why do people invest so much energy? I was discussing this last night with a very smart new friend, and the discussion ran the gamut from Obama, to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, to Bush lovers to Bush haters to Clinton . . . . you get the idea.

I had a small epiphany while we were talking, and it's probably something that others recognized long ago, but for me, it's sort of a revelation:

Politics feeds off of and breeds fear.

People in the US are scared to death, and have been for years, and the entire country is reacting (and voting) from a place of fear. Political parties continue to pit us against one another, but the underlying "crisis of confidence", I think, stems from the entire country being scared shitless.

I'll try to explain where that came from.

Remember seeing the video clips of the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta? There was this explosion, and milliseconds after the shock, people took off in a dead run, like antelopes when the tigress hits the Sahara.

Understandable.

I remember people being so angry about that, and cries of "Where was the security?!?! Why couldn't they catch Rudolph? Where was the FBI?" echoed. People were in a dead panic for months.

I remember noticing a similar reaction to Katrina. Video of absolute devastation seemed to run 24/7 on every news outlet, and people were so pissed off, and scared, and upset. The outcry was the same: Where was the Core of Engineers? Where was the military? Where was FEMA?

And 9/11 was the worst of all. Images of planes hitting buildings were shown over and over and over until the entire nation saw the carnage in their sleep. Within hours of the shock, people were screaming for blood: How could this have happened? How could a handful of terrorists with a few hours of flight training take down the World Trade Center? Where's the CIA? Where's . . . somebody?

Oklahoma City, the abortion clinic bombings, levees giving way in the Midwest, forest fire destruction on the West coast . . . . all of these tragedies were visited upon us, in full color, with overzealous broadcasters willing to turn up the gore and the fear factor to up the ratings.

People can only handle so much of that kind of thing before the stress starts to show, and it's only a matter of time before people become enraged and start screaming for answers. Someone has to pay, someone has to be responsible, and we all thought that The Government of the United States, the most successful, strongest country in the would, could protect us from all this. It was a mighty blow to discover that it couldn't.

And we had to accept that.

But, you know, it's one thing to shake your hand at the sky and denounce natural disasters, or call for the head of an insane terrorist, but our country also had plenty of OTHER crises that shook us to the core. There might have been sexual scandals that were worse than Jim Baker, or Bill Clinton, or Jimmy Swaggart, but again, they weren't served up on the 6:00 pm news along with the potroast and baked potatoes every damn night. Ditto for the S&L and banking scandals. There might have been bigger crooks than Lay and bigger implosions than WorldCom and ENRON, but none took place in our living rooms like these did.

It happened a little bit at a time, but slowly slowly, all of this eroded our belief in what we all thought were the most trustworthy parts of America: our appointed leaders, and our financial institutions, and those that spoke from the pulpit to the masses. They all started looking like "confidence men", and we became distrustful and bitter. And scared.

And our reactions were real. Fear is real. We might not have ALL lost our retirement savings in the ENRON debacle, but we experienced the anguish and pain firsthand by watching endless interviews and exposes on those that did. We might not have had to swim for safety in New Orleans, but there we sat, begging for someone to rescue the people we saw waving from their rooftops. We might not have been in NYC when it all went down, but we watched as desperate people jumped to their death, and heard the sirens and the screams.

I don't know about you, but once you've been burned by the stove a few times, you learn not to touch the stove, and once you've been battered by scenes via the national media enough times, you resort to placing your confidence elsewhere.

Enter . . . . the internet.

You know, if I were walking down the street in New York City and saw someone standing on the corner with a handmade sign and screaming about conspiracies, I wouldn't be all that impressed. Certainly not impressed enough to stop and listen and put any creedence in what he was screaming. BUT . . . . if you put that same screaming lunatic in front of a computer and gave him a free Blogger account, and he was lucid enough to type all the shit he was screaming, chances are, he would have a legion of followers, believers and those that would expend precious energy arguing over his every point.

Cause, see . . . . the internet is grassroots. We were taught in the 60s that grassroots is good, and grassroots means the truth, cause it's REAL people, not the talking heads from the Establishment.

And when you live in a mentality of fear, and you don't trust the authorities anymore, and you are looking for answers, and you start searching on the web, it feels like you've hit gold when you find a blog that explains it all, like . . . .

9/11 was an inside job.
The government knew Katrina was going to happen.
There ARE aliens, and the damn government just won't tell us.

And when you have ready access to the flood of information on the internet, it's easy to find an explanation that's palatable for you, which is MUCH easier than facing the fact that bad things happen, and they can't always be prevented, and no matter the size of the government, or the man in the office, people die that don't deserve to, and bad people do bad things to good people.

But it FEELS so real when you get a Twitter message from the Obama campaign, cause Twitter is grassroots, man!

And it feels like you are finally getting to the truth when you see the people you know, your friends, your family, when they all take a stab at the TRUTH about what's going on in politics on FaceBook, cause . . . . you can't trust the goddamn politicians, but you can trust your friends and family. And you feel a compulsion to save everyone you know with YOUR truth, the truth you uncovered by talking with the conspiracy theorists, and the rightwing militants and the leftwing liberals. You get to a point where you are saturated with it all, and you filter it all, and you come up with a patchwork of truth that makes perfect sense to you, and you want to make sure everyone you know knows what YOU know.

And you want to surround yourself with likeminded folks, and fight those that see it different with everything you have to throw at them.

But, they're being manipulated by the same thing that YOU are.

Fear.

And while we are ALL watching the Punch (dem) and Judy (repub) show, no one is looking behind the stage, and addressing the REAL issue.

We are all scared to death.

Happy 75th Anniversary!

Whee! 75 pounds gone! I've been having a little celebration around here.

I bought myself a neat ring and a pair of Baby Phat jeans (size 16, natch). They were even brand new - not from a thrift store or anything!

I didn't feel the need to commemorate or celebrate the 25 lb loss, or even the 50 lb loss. I thought it was a fluke.

Hell, it's only been this past week that I was able to force myself to clean out my closet of all of my favorite clothes. I felt sure I'd need/wear them all again, even though they were in the largest sizes that I wore before the surgery.

I'm still getting used to all this. Standing in the closet looking at all the empty hangers was just about as wierd as getting catcalled at the gas station the other day by a truckload of migrant workers.

Don't get too excited, though. They always like the big ones.

Hey Paw! What's fer supper?

Fried chicken, green beans with fatback, and hot cornbread with sweet tea! Sallll-ute!

Yeah, not quite.

More than any other question, the question of "What do/can you eat?" crops up when the subject of my gastric bypass surgery is on the table.

The answer is: not much.

I'm about to celebrate my 5 month surgery anniversary, and unlike other folks I have spoken with, my diet has not advanced very much past what I was eating just a few weeks post surgery.
I keep reading that re-establishing eating is hit or miss, and what you can't tolerate today you might be able to tolerate tomorrow. I am the poster child of that particular little nugget of wisdom.

These days, after many MANY experiments, I pretty much survive on Wendy's small cups of chili, cooked beans, hot tea, coffee, mini ricecakes, and diet fudgesicles.

I have a very VERY long list of foods that just don't work. For instance, I cannot tolerate meat of any sort (with the one exception of ground beef in well-cooked chili.) My old loves, rice and grits, cornbread and, well, ANY bread are a thing of the past.

Strangely, I CAN tolerate corn chips and cheese dip, which seems like the LAST thing that would agree with me. Ditto for mixed nuts, and I have been known to have a few peanut M&Ms with no complications.

The big takeaway from all of my post-surgical appointments is to eat enough protein to meet the daily requirements.

That seemed easy when I first heard it, and it's anything BUT easy.

New for 2009

Well, I know I'm a little late, but I finally feel like it's a new year.

This would probably explain why I still had Christmas lights on my bushes up until last week.

I think the inauguration had to occur for me to feel like it was a fresh new year with a chance for a fresh new start. I have to admit that that Aretha's hat completely invigorated me.

I hit two huge milestones just this past week. I charted a 75 pound loss on the scale and I dropped under 200 pounds, ceremoniously entering into the 100s on the scale. This phenomenon is affectionately known in weight loss surgery (WLS) circles as "entering OneDerland."

Along with the adjustments that I've been making to my new habits and changing body, I've also been adjusting to homeschooling and have picked up a few new hobbies. Sweet girl and I have jumped headfirst into scrapbooking. She's much better at it than I am. I've also joined the Yelp community, and received an Elite designation for '09.

One of the good things to come out of the last year is a more reliable energy level. I hope that means that I will be able to write more, and more often. I kind of lost my mojo this past year, but like a loyal pet, the ol' blog was still here waiting for me when I returned from my long absence. I've straightened up the place a bit and added some new "baby" blogs ot my repertoire: My Kid's Krazy Krap and Cheaper than Marriage Counseling. You're welcome to check those out if you'd like using the links on the right.

SO . . . onward and upward, and oh yeah, Happy New Year!

2009? Already?!?!

Yeah, it's one of THOSE posts.

You know, full of the usual "where does the time go?" and "here's the best/worst things that happened in '08" and "here's what I'm going to make happen in '09" and all that kind of crap.

When you blog, it's pretty much a requirement that you create a wrap-up post, so . . .here tiz.

In short: 2008 was a doozy. To keep it simple, I think I'm just going to list a few highlights. I'm too tired/uninterested to do much more, but I may elaborate more later.

National stuff:

Collapse of the US financial structure. Michael and I kept our jobs; many others didn't. We kept our home and cars. Again, others weren't so fortunate.

Presidential election: We were all relentlessly hammered with speeches, propaganda, surveys, debates, bigotry, doomsday soothsayers and SNL skits. Frankly, I was glad when it was all over, and by that time, I had very nearly lost interest in who won. Now that we are a month out, I have some flickers of optimism about what will come during this new president's first fledgling months in office.

Olympics: Uhh, I didn't watch it. My bad. I think Michael Phelps won the whole thing, according to the endorsement deals.

Gas crisis: That was a trip. Not that I leave the house all that much, but I was stranded here with NO GAS more than once. Hell, the whole city was. When you COULD find gas, you damn near couldn't afford it.


R.I.P:
George Carlin. I'll always remember the 7 words you can't say. Always.
Heath Ledger. Pointless death. I was surprised how angry I was.
Bernie Mac. Damn, that sucked.
Tim Russert. Huge surprise. He would have loved this election.
Isaac Hayes. Even though the whole Chef debacle was stupid, I still thought you were cool.
Paul Newman. One of the greats, and I'm glad he stayed out of the spotlight near the end.


Cool Stuff We Did This Year:

Disney: Man, I could talk all day about Disney. I generally do, but you know, just to myself.

Fall Ball: Once again, I enjoyed the heck out of Little League. Ian had the best coach yet - Coach Ron. Go Scrappers!

GVA: The Georgia Virtual Academy was one of the best things to happen. Miss Rachael and I started our first year of homeschool!

FaceBook: Addictive, but a conduit to deeper friendships with those that shared my past. It's been an amazing experience rediscovering all of the people there.

Concerts: TOOL, Van Halen reunion tour, Plant Krauss. All three worth every penny.


Stuff We Survived:

Hospitals: Between us, there were 3 hospital stays and 2 surgeries. 2008 was the Year of the Doctor Visit. I'm extremely hopeful that 09 will be a healthier one.

The Big Cut: My gastric bypass surgery has changed me, and in turn, the dynamic of our entire family. Hands down, the best decision of the year.