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“Never Again”

December 14th, 2011 by Suzanne | 3 Comments | Filed in Asshole idiots, evil, other rants, those were the days, What is wrong with people?

From the AP Poli Sci journal:

Feb. 6, 1994

At the end of World War II, someone promised that “never again” would there be a holocaust like the one that just ended. At the end of World War II, someone invented the word “genocide” to describe what had happened. Yesterday, 68 Bosnians were killed and 200 more injured when a market was bombed. “Ethnic cleansing” the Serbs and Croats call it. Not very much is being done to stop it.

Steven Spielberg has come out with his masterpiece “Schindler’s List.” He said in an interview that he hoped that people would be moved to action by it. He said that what is happening in Bosnia now, this “ethnic cleansing,” is genocide. “Never again” doesn’t mean that we will never allow another JEWISH holocaust, it means that we should never allow genocide again. Period.

Someone – a priest I think it was – wrote a poem. He said, “When they came to take away the Jews, I said nothing.” It continues about how they kept coming back to take more and more groups, and still he said nothing. It ends with, “Then they came to take away me, and nobody said anything.” The Talmud says, “He who saves one life saves the world entire.” Spielberg said that he hopes that “Schindler’s List” would wake the world, or just one person eve. Because one person makes a difference sometimes.

When I think about what happens in Bosnia, I cry. I see my family’s experience. I see people in trouble and the world turning their backs on them. When I think about Bosnia, I get angry. There people want democracy. The world claims to fight for democracy. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, a NONDEMOCRATIC country, we wasted no time getting our asses over there to “defend democracy.” Huh?!? Nice try. We just needed to defend our oil interests. We then stood by as the Iraqis slaughtered the Kurds, even though we provoked it. Ah, but silly me! I forgot that oil means more than human life. (Where are all the “pro-life” forces now?)

Silly me! I forgot that some people count more than others. I forgot that “never again” meant, “Well, only if we stand to profit from it.” What a beautiful world we live in!

I AM PRO-LIFE

December 13th, 2011 by Suzanne | 2 Comments | Filed in Asshole idiots, Damn, evil, other rants, those were the days, What is wrong with people?

From the journal I kept for AP Poli Sci, and I am glad that my thinking is a little more sophisticated now…

Feb. 3, 1994

19 kids found living in horrible conditions, fighting for food with the dog, crawling with cockroaches, etc.* The DCFS did nothing. My [relative] is a teacher in [a low-income suburb]. She told me that she knows of other children who live in similar situations. She told me that it recently took DCFS over SIX MONTHS to get one of her students removed from the CRACK HOUSE he lived in with his crack-addicted parents. What is going on here?!?

I’m so angry. I am also very bitter. So many issues are relevant, even contributing to, this disgusting abuse and neglect of kids. My relative pointed out two things. First, she said, DCFS is stuffed with too many burned out workers and people “who just don’t give a shit.” Second, she thinks that many families are not adequately taken care of because they are black. She feels the DCFS lets more bad things happen because they don’t care what happens to black children. I think that a lot of the mistakes DCFS makes is due to the screwy philosophiy that some members hold. I read a quote from a DCFS caseworker in some magazine (for the life of me I can’t remember which one) a while ago. He said that they feel it is more traumatizing for a child to be taken out of an abusive situation than to leave him with the ones he loves and is familiar with. Hmmm… when people who are in charge of protecting children from harm think such perverse, backwards theories, it’s amazing that anything gets done!

What makes me angriest, however, is the so-called “pro-lifers.” If they are so concerned about protecting life, where are they when children are forced to live under the poverty line, in misery, surrounded by drugs, gangs, prostitutes, and god knows what else?!? Are they down there working to clean up the neighborhoods? Are they clamoring for more health care benefits for these kids, better schools, better standards of living? Are they fighting for day care so that the women forced to bear children they don’t want can go to work to earn a living? Do they want to provide welfare so that mothers can stay home and care for their unwanted children? Are they adopting every single child who is born unwanted? If so, why are there more than 500,000 kids available for adoption that no one is taking? If 1.5 more children, unwanted by anyone, hated by society, are born EACH YEAR, where are they going to go?

Yes, all of this ties in to the 19 children who were found in their own hell. Because until our society is ready to care for every child who is born, we have no right to demand that women bear them.

PS – let’s not forget that poor women should not be able to have abortion because they can’t afford it. After all, they are the least able to raise children – with no resources, no education, small housing, etc. Women who can afford abortions are unaffected by the Hyde Amendment are allowed to plan their families. They can stop having children whenever they choose. (They also have better access to birth control.) Oh, never mind! I’m so frustrated!!!

*http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1994/04/24/why-leave-children-with-bad-parents.html

The ‘Gates of Hell

December 12th, 2011 by Suzanne | No Comments | Filed in Asshole idiots, evil, other rants, those were the days, What is wrong with people?

From my AP Poli Sci journal:

Jan. 31, 1994

I am so damn sick and tired of reading about “Whitewatergate.” The whole thing is SO blown out of proportion that it’s not even funny. Yes, fine. Maybe the Clintons did a little financial dance or maybe they didn’t. I don’t care. I can think of many more people who screwed around with money in the ’80s and weren’t punished. The catch phrase of that sick and decadent ear was aptly coined by Michael Douglas in the movie “Wall Street”: “Greed is good.” A lot of people, then, deserve to be punished for the ’80s.

At any rate, this is nothing compared to the corruption of Ronald Reagan. This man is the ultimate evil.* If he didn’t have a role in the Iran Contras, my name is Bob Dole. This man is responsible for the bad shape of our country today. (Actually, I’m getting off the subject.) Why are there no special prosecutors investigating Reagan and Bush for their roles?!? Why are we wasting time on a stupid and annoying issue (Whitewatergate) when these people are getting away with murder? And good old Oli wants to run for Senate?!?! Excuse my language, but these crooks can just kiss my ass.

Another thing that annoys me about this whole every-scandal-from-now-on-must-end-in-the-word-”gate” thing, is that it really undermines what Watergate was about. It was about the President believing that he was above the law – he’s the President and can do what he wants. Nixon deliberately subverted the laws he was supposed to defend. How can one compare Clinton to Nixon? One (Clinton) works to make life better for people, while the other (Nixon) used his powers to make his enemies’ lives a living hell.

Clinton is a good, for the most part. This “Whitewatergate” (say in dumb guy voice) is just a pathetic effort by Republicans to discredit him. Truly, they’ve stooped to new lows by biting at every “scandal” that just suddenly conveniently pops up. If I were (stupid enough to be) a Republican, I would be quite embarrassed by my party’s desperate measures.**

*Oh man. If only I had known back then what was to come with George W. Bush….
**Ah, the good old days. I almost look back on that level of interaction with fondness. Yeesh.

The Notebook

December 11th, 2011 by Suzanne | 5 Comments | Filed in Damn, hilarity, random, those were the days, unshaved snatch

While I was at my parents’ house, I dug through a storage box of papers that I have in my room. When the folks were visiting me in NYC at the end of October, they regaled my friend with an (embarrassing) tale of a one-woman protest I staged at Marshall Field’s department store when I was in high school. (I had read about the terrible attitude the founders of Guess? jeans had toward women in Backlash, and I thought women should stop buying their clothes. I was escorted out, politely, by security.) My friend thought this was great (i.e. – hilarious), so I wondered if I might find one of the fliers I had made up so he could continue to be amused by me.

Instead, I found a notebook that I had to keep for a few months as part of my AP Political Science class. The first entry is Jan. 31, 1994, and it runs through April 22. Everything I wrote almost 18 years ago is a topic that I subsequently wrote about on my blog (minus the unshaved snatch stuff, but I would have if it was an issue back then, I bet): abortion rights, income inequality, my hatred of Republican shenanigans, education, Jewishness, genocide, the pressure for women to be thin, etc. I swore a lot. I made little jokes.

On one hand, it is cool to see that I was so passionate and sort of advanced at a young age. On the other, I realized that I have not changed much in 18 years. That’s disturbing. Here’s a good sample:

America: Land of the Free or the Hypocrites?

March 31

I tell you, the more I learn about this country, the more I hate it. All we are is a bunch of hypocrites. “Equal opportunities for all!” “Land of the free!” “With liberty and justice for all.” BULLSHIT! I watch the news, I read, I observe. Very rarely do I find these notions of “democracy” actually in operation. Usually, I see the oligarchy that really runs this country paying lip-service to it.

I was talking to my mom about how disillusioned I am and how I can’t stand living here, and she said that compared to other countries, the US is a heaven. I said that I know that, but I can’t stand living in the Land of the Hypocrites. Whenever I see some patriotic themed thing, I feel sick to my stomach. It is just a lie.

My mom said that no place is perfect. She said she was worried because of how bitter I already am at such a young age. She told me that I was searching for a utopia and asked me if I was too idealistic. I suppose I am. She told me that idealism is good, and it’s how good change is brought about, but when it makes you bitter, it can be very bad. I have that bad mixture in me of idealism and realism. I know how I want it to be (how it should be), but I also know that the powers that be will never, ever let it happen. Hence, I am bitter.

The way America is moving today, with such a gap between the wealthy and poor ever widening, I hope that the discontented masses will rise up and end our past injustices. Oppression must end, in one way or another, and I’m curious to see how it will happen.

Seriously. I wrote this about one month after my 18th birthday, but I will bet that there are at least five posts on this same theme on CUSS. In fact, these are so freakin’ topical that I will be posting them up on CUSS over the next few weeks (months?).

New Is Rarely Improved

May 30th, 2011 by Suzanne | No Comments | Filed in Damn, random, those were the days

Some time in 2006, Husband went to an investor conference and returned home with an iPod Shuffle. He already had a regular iPod, so he asked me if I wanted it. At the time, I mainly watched TV while I worked out at the gym, but it was free, so I took it.

Immediately I did what any self-respecting 30 year old woman would do: I decorated the slim stick with PowerPuff Girl stickers. My favorite, Buttercup, went on the front, covering the private equity firm’s name. Two little stickers (an amoebic villain and Bubbles) were stragecally placed over the Apple logos. I loaded lots of Madonna, The Beatles, Led Zepplin, and Dido onto it, then added random pop crap from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. It was very exciting to have such a high tech music machine.

About a month ago, I noticed that the machine was not charging fully when I slipped it into the USB port. It had not synced properly for years, so I had not updated the music in ages, but that didn’t bother me. The lack of charge was a bigger problem. When I thought it was charged and went to run, it sometimes turned out to not be charged, and I had to run without music.

Generally, that was not too awful, but as the date of my half marathon rapidly approaches (THIS SUNDAY!), I realized that running 13 miles while listening to the sound of my panting was not a very enticing prospect. So, although I hated to replace my machine, I went to the Apple store this afternoon. I was pleased to see that the iPod shuffles have dropped $100 since they first debuted. I liked that it would clip on to my shirt or pants so I need not waste precious limited pocket space (when stupid manufacturer’s even bother putting in pockets). I liked that it was a shiny blue. It even holds four times more songs than my old one.

What I do not like is that I cannot figure out how to get it to sync with my computer so that the music plays alphabetically by artist rather than song. Also that I seem to be unable to avoid hitting buttons when adjusting the clip. I hate that the USB port is a little thing I have to plug in and then it hangs off the computer like a limp dick, and I’ll be screwed if I lose the stupid connector. The small size also offers less surface area for PowerPuff Girl stickers. (I did cut one down a bit, though, so at least I have a little personal touch on it.)

As much as I like to think that I am flexible and can adapt to change, the truth is that I’m a creature of habit. Even if my old habit is not as nifty or convenient as the shiny next version, I will prefer my semi-functional comfort to whatever is new. (I’m barely over surrendering my StarTAC cell phone in 2006, although I am not going to lie – I really love getting emails and internet service on my phone. I just wish it made better calls. Sigh.)

Anyway, so that’s the excitement here. Now that Memorial Day is over, I’m just looking forward to the half marathon, then having two days off work* for Shavuout so that I can go to the library and do some research on Warsaw. Maybe I’ll even be able to listen to music while I do these things.

*FYI: I am trying to keep things mild here at CUSS now that I have this new job.

When I Grow Up

May 19th, 2011 by Suzanne | No Comments | Filed in hilarity, random, those were the days, writing

“There are about a million things I want to be when I grow up,” I wrote in a semi-autobiographical story when I was in fourth or fifth grade. “First of all, I want to be an author, second an advertiser, and third a baseball umpire.”

By the time I mastered grammar and punctuation, I moved on to other professional aspirations. At the age of twelve, I resolved to become a district attorney in order to improve safety in poor neighborhoods. In my bat mitzvah speech, I asked God for a scholarship to nearby Northwestern University so that I could later attend a good law school.

Of course, I wound up going to NYU as an undergrad, then dropping out of Fordham Law School on my third day. Instead, I worked for a year at a government agency. I turned down a 3/4 tuition scholarship to policy school at NYU because I wanted to go to school full-time and instead went to policy school at Columbia while working part-time at a community development financial institution. (“I don’t need math,” I had told my math teacher my junior year of high school, “I’m going to be a lawyer!”) I turned down the opportunity to work at the Ford Foundation in a program associate program and continued to work at that organization after school, then at another CDFI, building an expertise in child care facilities development in affordable housing projects. Just like I always planned!

Then I burned out and started writing. I had some personal essays and policy articles printed in local papers. Off the Beaten (Subway) Track came out in August 2008. I entered a creative writing MFA program a month later. I went back to the nonprofit world, working for the first time at Jewish organizations, first as a grant writer, then as a program officer.

I guess achieving one of my three original goals isn’t bad. Who knows what will happen when I grow up?

Expirations, or Let the Past Be the Past

February 21st, 2011 by Suzanne | 1 Comment | Filed in Damn, evil, other rants, random, those were the days

Once again, I have a cold. I took NyQuil a few nights ago to quell the symptoms so I could get some sleep, crucial to a speedy recovery. I noticed that the bottle indicated that it expired in April 2005. I threw out another (unopened) bottle I found in a storage container that expired in 2001. Ditto a box of Immodium AD that saw its useful life end in February 2008.

No matter how hard I try to keep up with the present, it seems that the past exerts itself. In addition to our various old medications, I am surrounded by outdated ideas. Husband and I went to a cheese tasting and class last week. One of our classmates asked the instructor what the difference between pasteurized and raw milk was. I braced myself while she explained that the government liked to make decisions for people that really overreached to promote “safety.”

“See, when you get your dairy from small family farms that you know well, it should be up to you whether to take the risks or not,” she said.

Of course, the vast majority of people in this country are not intimately familiar with farms for a variety of reasons. Further, pasteurization laws were created exactly when most farms were small and family-run. This was no assurance that the food that people received was safe, or even food at all. Even the best intentioned farmers may not have had the knowledge or capacity to ensure that bacteria and other harmful agents did not infect their products. People got sick and died. That doesn’t factor in the farmers who just wanted to make a quick buck. A series of scandals involving milk thickened with other agents that killed people occurred. Food safety laws came into being for a reason. It’s not just the evils of corporate farming that they protect us from. History, conveniently forgotten like my bottles of NyQuil, show us that these laws saved people, particularly children.

Another good lesson that is rotting away is that of unions. It is true that many unions have gotten as powerful and lazy as the industries they counterbalance. However, unions rose out of the same corporate powered atmosphere that we live in today. They gave workers a voice and ensured that people could work in safe conditions and make decent livings. As unions have, overall, lost power in the past two decades, many of those protections have eroded. Now we again have corporations making huge profits while laying people off, claiming that they are good for everyone. We have politicians trying to use armed force to make union members regret standing up for themselves. While we blame government unions for every problem under the sun, the private sector laughs its way to the bank. They can buy all the fresh NyQuil they want.

The rest of us, forgetting our lessons and supporting this race to the bottom, will have to make do with the expired and potentially tainted products that are left over. We need to throw out the bad medicine. It won’t cure our ills.

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Game Day

January 23rd, 2011 by Suzanne | 1 Comment | Filed in family, random, those were the days

Today is the day for which my father began preparing me since at least 1985, if not earlier. As child growing up in the Chicago area in the 1980s, I was a huge Cubs fan (in those days, games were only played in the day, so I could watch them on TV easily, not like today when baseball starts at night, but I digress), but I didn’t care much for football. My dad, on the other hand, didn’t care to much about baseball, but was a boisterous Chicago Bears fan. Every Sunday in the fall and early winter, he would scream at the TV and jump up and down so hard that the house shook. After a few of our friends were startled by the commotion, my sister and I decided it might be best not to invite people over on game days.

The Bears are playing their arch rival, the Green Bay Packers, this afternoon. If this had happened in the ’80s and even early ’90s, my dad would round my sister and I up and make us hum the Bears fight song with him to get psyched. Well, he would get psyched. We would roll our eyes and wander off to play Barbies when we were released from our duties. It was my own fault that we had the ritual. I saw a team button at a garage sale one summer that played the fight song when you pressed it, and I bought it for him. I gave him the tool of my own short-term torment.

When I spoke to my dad last week about the game, I told him how eagerly I anticipated it. He said he himself was not too excited. “They’re playing in their own stadium and not expected to win,” he said. “It’s not looking good. When you aren’t even expected to win in the home field, it’s not worth getting worked up about.” But I told him that I was not giving up hope. He taught me better than that. For a special game like Bears versus Packers for a chance at the Super Bowl, I learned my lessons well. I’m putting on my scary bear hat (solidarity!) and yelling, “Go Bears!!!!”

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It’s Time

January 17th, 2011 by Suzanne | 8 Comments | Filed in random, those were the days, unshaved snatch, writing

Five years ago when I started blogging, the Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants was the perfect title for my efforts. I wanted the space to share my sometimes offensive, sometimes outrageous, sometimes obnoxious thoughts on the ridiculous standards and pressures that people face in the US these days. The title was a grab for attention in a crowded field of blogger blogs. I thought that the only people who would ever want to link to it would not be deterred by the title.

Over time, however, I turned down opportunities to participate in various blog activities because the parties behind the show wanted me to drop the “Campaign for Unshaved Snatch” part of the title. I understood their concerns, but declined to do so. It didn’t matter to me that CUSS wasn’t syndicated or part of an ad network. The blog was what it was.

This past week, though, I realized that my post on blood libel and Sarah Palin had potential to go further, but that the blog title probably discouraged people from reading it. (Maybe.) Whether that was true or not, I really haven’t written about bikini waxing in a long time. I still find it vile on a personal level, but unless some new terrible trend pops up, I said what I needed to say. My posts have been so much more about family, Judaism, politics, racism, and yes, other rants these days.

It’s time to retire the original, full title. Oh, I’ll still use my logo and sticker (which I adore), but I’ll just be CUSS. (I’ll still swear, so the CUSS part is relevant.) I may or may not reapply to the ad network that rejected the application they solicited from me years ago. I’ll continue exploring in short posts what bothers or excites me, what I hate and what I love, who I hate and who I love, and hopefully even continue to improve the quality of the writing on the site. Some posts will be sad, some funny (I hope), some obnoxious, and some outrageous. The day I begin to bore myself (and/or the people kind enough to read CUSS) is the day I’ll call it quits. Hopefully that is a long time from now, though.

Passing on the Crown

January 15th, 2011 by Suzanne | 1 Comment | Filed in family, oh happy day, random, those were the days

Last week I received a box in the mail with a postmark from New Orleans. I didn’t recognize the return address, so of course I was suspicious that it was a bomb sent by anti-choice zealots. Why I would be a target for them given my utter lack of influence is beyond me, but they are not necessarily a logical bunch. Also, it’s kind of egomanical for me to think they would care enough to try and eliminate me.

I stripped the tape and opened the box with caution. As I did so, I remembered that my aunt had recently been to New Orleans on vacation, so I ripped through the packaging with abandon. I was fairly certain she would not have anyone send me a bomb.

Partly wrong – her gift was, as they said on the street about ten years ago, the bomb. It was a handmade headband/tiara in super funky colors with a cocktail glass on top. (Which given my teetotaler status, is ironically hilarious.)

I put it on and pranced around my apartment. When Marcus, my nephew, was born in April 2009, I thought a lot about the aunt I wanted to be. My aunt was my role model. She was admirable in every way: she lived in Chicago, painted, and taught kids with behavior and learning disabilities in a low income community. Aunt Ivy (as she was known to me initially) also went to Haiti and was a VISTA in Miami, working with the Haitian community. In the early 1980s, she went to Israel on an archeological dig and brought some pottery fragments back for me (legally, I assume). On one of her trips, she stored her belongings in the basement of my parents’ house, including his amazing rattan chair that I loved sitting on because it reminded me of a throne. (Unfortunately, they were ruined in a flood.)

Aunt Ivy always planned cool things for me and my sister to do. She took us to museums and cultural events. When she got married, she changed her name to Chaya and then we she had my cousin Rebecca, she made sure that Dana and I were included in the neat things she did with Rebecca. She found neat little knickknacks in her jaunts around the city and suburbs and saved them for us. Now that she’s into the internet, she’s my newest blog reader! There was never a time when I did not feel loved and highly valued by my aunt.

It made perfect sense for me to aspire to be the kind of aunt to Marcus (and now also to my brother-in-law’s daughter). Wacky and fun, but serious about the world, too. When I put the headband/tiara on my head last week, I felt like I was taking on more than an important title; I adopted her legacy. I’m so grateful to my aunt for everything. I can only hope that my nephew and niece will look up to me the way I do to my creative Aunt Chaya.

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