Found on Bigsteelguy4′s YouTube channel. Originally submitted by Ann B.
Debra J. Dickerson
DEBRADICKERSON.COM
Anything you say can, and will, be used against you: Our leaders' hypocrisy
Watch this video if you support #OWS and especially if you don't.
The Most Powerful #OccupyWallStreet Clip You Will See This Month
Great Art from Occupy Wall Street
I'd huge-ify this. If I knew how.
If you want a cheap chuckle...
It took me a minute last night to figure out this was a spoof. (Forgive me, it was 2 am).
TIP OF THE WEEK Irradiated meat is just as healthy, if not healthier than organic meat -- radiation kills bacteria just as effectively as it does people, and saves billions of dollars that would otherwise have to go toward producing cleaner meat and maintaining the health of livestock.
You have to admire the persistence of those who put so much effort into unpaid labor like this. Or, maybe, they're just long term unemployed like me and have all but given up. Still, I'm much too lazy for so much 'pro bono' effort.
Check it out; it'll make you snicker.
Dude: Divorce your Alzheimer's wife and "start over"
Pat Robertson, still with the hypocrisy and the crazy.
Funny how he splits the difference between the twin abominations of fornication and divorce. Correct answer: "you can't, so sucks to be you right now."
His advice could only be the old "God doesn't give you anymore than you can stand" fail-safe for horrible situations, "but, dude, no tomcattin', no masturbatin' and no divorce. Man, I hate this job sometimes." (Robertson's anguish for the man seemed genuine.)
His sidekick actually tried gently to point out the hypocrisy and cruelty of this (so what if she doesn't know. Where does the Bible, or his typical sermon, say you can divorce a spouse with dementia or in a coma?) but Robertson basically cut her mic off.
The video ends abruptly, so perhaps Robertson found his way back to his fire and brimstone. Be better for us all if he found his way to Dan Savage.
Once More, With Feeling
To my surprise, I've gotten emails about my ChipIn thingee having expired, so I resumed it.
Unfortunately, I've spent more than a week on the post I want to go with it because my writing has become lugubrious, clunky and annoying. It chases its own tail. Takes me eight paragraphs of self-conscious, passive-aggressive double speak to say 'good morning' and even then it's all impenetrable, multi-footnoted and semi-coloned bombast. My writing these days can best be described as downright jungle-y; to go the distance with it, you'd have to hack through quite a bit of underbrush and overwrought clauses springing out at you from nowhere. Not to mention the pointlessly arcane words buzzing around your face like bottom heavy tsetse flies. I can't stop thinking about my personal drama, so I can't stop over thinking my writing, the thing that has always flowed so magically from me onto the page. (See? There's not anything that certain parties can't take from me.)
Also, the dilemma of deciding whether to take half an hour -- that invariably becomes two for the lugubrious among us -- from job searching to post can make you hyperventilate. What if posting keeps me from doing a better job applying for a position I might have gotten. Since no one ever tells you anything about an application that doesn't get you an interview, this is an extremely good way to get more and more of us to just give up.
I need a program that gives me a few warning bells then automatically prevents me from further editing - that's where the pettifoggery slips in - and posts the post. That'd teach me.
So, when I can stop writing like a Marxist blowhard, I have lots of brilliant stories to tell about we 'new' poor, we Family Court victims, and life during a recession so well entrenched that the unemployed have been all but written off.
Difficult as it is, I'll stop before I rewrite this into 4,000 words.
And I Thought I Had It Bad
This mom lost custody of her kids because she's unemployed (which was fine when she was a housewife). But mostly because she has cancer. So, now she gets to die alone in Durham while her kids move to Chicago.
Apparently, a psychiatrist's opinion carried the day.
When I've gotten some of my strength back, I'll be telling you all about just how unbelievably dangerous, unaccountable and incompetent the mental health community is when it comes to divorce.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Manipulation
It's Mother's Day and I've lost my kids to Family Court.
Still trolling for donations.
On This Mother's Day, I am a Mother No More
Bad stuff needs to stop happening to me on major holidays.
It was at least a decade before Christmas stopped being the commemoration of “The Day I Was Raped By a Fellow Soldier and the Military Punished Me" and went back to being just good old Christmas. I almost never think about it anymore. But I suspect that I will take more than a decade to stop experiencing Mother’s Day as one of heartbreak, mourning and bitterness because it’s now “The Day I Lost My Kids”.
They’ll be with my ex-husband even though I have sole legal and physical custody. Insert bitter bark-laugh here. Those meaningless sheets of paper matter about as much as the Restraining Orders found on women murdered by the former lovers determined to make them mind; absolutely nothing, to a certain kind of ex. Family Court orders just provide the ammo for a war of attrition that certain kind of ex has all the time in the world to wage because defeating you, making you mind, has their complete, all-day-and-all-night-long, obsessive-compulsive attention. They have all the time in the world, they make all the time in the world, to keep you on the defensive and in court forever. Or until you give up.
Court. Disneyland for sociopaths. The only place you can’t refuse to see them. The only place where they can torture you and watch you suffer with their own eyes. In real time.
Read the rest at Slate's DoubleXX.
Scenes from Family Court: A Very Early Meeting in the Ladies' Room
Five year "marriage". Seven years now, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, in Family Court. Me, end of rope.
Very early on, my ex's first (of six? now) attorney(s) entered the Ladies' as I was drying my hands and preparing to leave.
Our eyes met in the mirror and we both froze. In a flash, she regrouped and marched on into a stall, face once again serene. Presumably, years of doing what she does for money gives one nerves of steel. I don't imagine I could successfully pee, let alone drop my drawers, in the presence of one of my...whatever I am to her. But then. That's me. Perhaps that's why she's not all but homeless and I am.
Anyway.
I debated my options -- this being a woman I'd actually dreamed of slowly beating to death with a nail-studded baseball bat -- then just finished drying my hands. If you learn nothing else in Family Court, it's that anything you do, besides abject surrender, will only makes things worse. So I just dry my hands.
Almost immediately a Law Guardian -- they're court appointed to represent litigants' kids -- follows her in. Quite clearly, she'd seen "Susie" enter and followed her in specifically to catch up with her. Only a few seconds have gone by, pregnant as they were.
This is what the sworn protector and defender of helpless children caught up in their parents' Family Court battles followed "Susie" to ask. This is how attorneys -- ok some attorneys-- who make their living in Family Court greet each other, verbatim:
"So Susie! Ya makin' lotsa money!?"
I think it was the 'you go girl!" fan-girl adulation in her voice that stopped me short. And that it wasn't really a question. It was a girlfriend's request for a vicarious thrill: oh how she clearly wished she had the gumption to make 'real' money in private practice, rather than just staring at the clock til retirement and doing nothing to protect her charges.
Now, I've no doubt redecorated this in my mind, but I experienced her voice as a gun moll's from a 20's gangster movie. Imagine Leslie Anne Warren in Victor, Victoria.
As I fight to keep a roof over our heads, I hear her in my mind all the time:
Ya makin' lotsa money!?
Ya makin' lotsa money!?
Ya makin' lotsa money!?
Ya makin' lotsa money!?
Again, all this takes place in seconds.
I hear "Susie's" indrawn, 'oh shit' breath from the stall. Ah. So not completely devoid of human emotion after all. Also, there was that time she looked a tad uncomfortable accusing my mother of being insane. When my mother was in the court room. Not that it stopped her.
But I digress.
I only have a split second to decide. I decide to go for it. It's not as if Susie could work any harder to destroy me, right?:
Is that...woman "makin lotsa money!?"
"Yeah," I say. "And all of it offa me."
And then I left them to whatever conversations girlfriends such as they have in the Ladies'.
My Latest Post at Slate's DoubleX
It's about deadbeat parents.
Still Trolling for Donations, y'all
You can help a sister out right here. Thanks!