from Washington, D.C., where I am on vacation for the first time in almost fifteen years.

We are staying in a charmingly small hotel very near a major Metro station, a short-for-normal-people walk away from the Capitol and the National Mall.

This is, I remarked to my husband after we checked in and dropped our belongings to the floor in exhaustion, our honeymoon.

Neither of us quite intended it that way, but that is certainly what it feels like. I am exceedingly grateful to have the opportunity to spend this time with him.

Until now, my favorite day in memory was the day he and I lazed around La Jolla, visiting art museums, picnicking under the cove, sunning near the shore. The ability to take our time, to enjoy our surroundings and to revel in the other’s company, was nothing short of blessing. The appropriate word for the feeling that day was contentment.

And this weekend, we are returning to that place — in a sense not of geography, but of sentiment. And I thank God for this opportunity, and not a moment of it do I fail to appreciate the blessing it is.

to post this page from El Malcriado, “The Voice of the Farm Worker,” out of Delano, CA, on October 15, 1986:

“A good example is the Woodsville-Linell camp under the administration of the Tulare County Housing Authority. The camp’s single-room shacks, built in 1938, have no windows, no inside water, and no toilets.”

It is doubtful that conditions have improved enough to note since the day this was written.

These were the conditions my schoolmates, my friends, lived in.

And nobody seems to care.

Want to talk about inequality? Let’s start here. Let’s start with Linell Camp. These people are not our enemies. These people are not even our friends. We don’t consider them family. We don’t even consider them dogs. We consider them household appliances.

We make this evident in how we treat them.

[Ed. note in comments.]

I braved Pittsburgh alone for the first time. I was scheduled for testing for a state civil service position. I took the T into Gateway Center, and when I climbed off of the escalator, I discovered….

I was an hour early, so of course I stayed and wandered around. A selection of my favorite photos follows. More over at my Flickr page.

The most vulnerable – the children, immigrants, rural families – are worst affected by this epidemic. Despite evidence that hunger causes chronic disease development and impaired psychological and cognitive functioning in children, an estimated 13 million children are living in households that are forced to skip meals or eat less due to economic constraints. The worst affected are children of 6 million of America’s undocumented immigrants: on a daily basis they go without such necessities as milk and meat. Tulare County in California, the number two county in the nation for agricultural production, is one of the hungriest and poorest areas of California. Many of the county’s towns (Alpaugh, Earlimart, Plainview, Woodville, etc.) host mainly Hispanic farm-laborer families who have come to America for a better life, but have found that their employment to put cheap produce on America’s and the world’s tables has left them starving amidst the bounty. These families suffer from the worst economic and social injustices as they live in lean-tos made of plastic or cardboard, dilapidated trailers, wood shacks, caves and even parking lots and yet are surrounded by grape fields, orange and peach groves. (from commondreams.org)

I grew up in Tulare County. The numbers have changed over my lifetime, up and down, but the fact remains: my home land produces a significant fraction of the food you eat.

Tulare County is home to the Latin@s who came to this country hoping for a better life. Hoping to share in the abundance. The vast majority of them are Mexican@, but there were also immigrants from all over Central America. My area also had a large-ish (relative to the rest of the country) population of Armenians, Laotians (“boat people,” my mother called them) and others. You would see billboards printed in any of the above languages — I didn’t really realize the significance of that until I visited other areas of the country — and not only a few, either; if you passed ten billboards in a day at least two were in Spanish and depending on which areas of town you traveled, a good chance of seeing one in Asian characters.

There were, of course, smatterings of high-class white folk, but the majority of the rest of the population in the central San Joaquin Valley is lower-middle class and poor whites. So there was always struggle, tension, in my land. But at the same time there were some facts that were accepted without argument even by the lower-class whites who were supposed to be in opposition to the brown folk: the fact that their labor was necessary to the standard and cost of living the country enjoys, that the labor was heavy and burdensome, that it was not something middle class teenagers would be doing on their summer vacation if not for them il-legals, that it was their labor that put food on your table, no matter your socioeconomic class. There was not the haughty detachment that many whites experience; this labor is what these people live, and it is impossible to deny. It is, in a broad fashion, a part of your family.

(As an aside, following from that, most of the racism expressed by these lower-class whites was not “they’re taking our jobs” and such, it was instead that Mexicans were a dirty people, and they drive bad and they talk too fast, and if they speak in Spanish they must be talking about you, and so forth — it was employed against POC as people, not POC as transients, if that makes sense — white folk knew well that brown folk were here to stay, and had as much claim to this land as they did — they just struggled to assert their dominance over them, rather than trying to push them out. I point this out not as an excuse or to say one is worse than the other, but to try to make a distinction to point out the grand delusion that most American whites hold about undocumented laborers, how blind and stupid they are about the reality of life for these people and those around them. And, as an aside to this aside, how little these middle-high-class American whites know about the reality that lower-class whites live in, and how strange it is for the two to ally based purely on pigmentation.)

Anyway — you couldn’t step foot in the unincorporated county land (the land between the towns; the county was all agricultural space with dense areas of population about 10-15 minute drives away from one another) without seeing them — bent over in fields picking strawberries and grapes, gathered together in orchards harvesting apples and walnuts — with the only exception being the two months of winter, when the Tule fog sets in and nothing is gonna grow anyway. (Then January comes, along with the rain, and everything blossoms green again.)

These people work for corporations who know well what they are doing. They import workers — in many cases purposefully, as in the company itself pays someone to sneak people across the border so they can work for them — and take advantage of those who come on their own. They pay them shit wages, and work them many hours. I suppose I don’t need to say there is no such thing as sick leave, vacation time or health benefits. I went to the same low-income clinics these people went to when their children fell seriously ill. They didn’t go to the doctor for a cold. They went to the doctor when they feared they would die if they didn’t — and even then sometimes, many didn’t…

They lived by and large in shit conditions; there were some high-lower-class/lower-middle-class Latin@s who rented or owned their own homes in the city proper (there’s pretty much no such thing as an apartment, or second stories or attics or basements, in the Central Valley), but most of the “illegal” workers lived in far more questionable conditions, oftentimes outside the city, sharing space to save money, going the summer (which ranges 95 to 118 degrees) without any sort of cooling or air conditioner, and no such thing as a garbage disposal or dishwasher in their kitchens.

These are the people who enable you to fruit and vegetables — fresh or frozen, either or both. Without these people, living in these conditions, you would not have such access to these foods.

You are subsidizing slavery.

I consider it nothing less.

I’ll leave you with the words of BFP.

To this day, I avoid blueberries. And bananas make me sick. How much blood of the murdered flows through the flesh of bananas? How many years of lost childhood flow through the skin of poisoned blueberries/strawberries/tomatoes/grapes….?

Is a vegan lifestyle really a “cruelty free” lifestyle? Why is it so easy to prioritize cruelty inflicted on animals over cruelty inflicted on brown people? Why can people list a whole litany of wrongs committed against animals by the food industry–but at the same time those people “never really thought” about what happens to the workers?…

My pharmacy called me to tell me that the prescription refill I put in for last night is too soon, so I should wait until tomorrow to come pick it up.

Normally when I get a message to call them about something, it’s “You don’t have any refills left” or “Your doctor won’t refill it until you’re seen” or “Your insurance says you’re over your quantity limit” or my favorite — and it happened multiple times — “Your insurance says you’re in an assisted living facility, so they won’t fill it.” (“Um, I’m sitting in my apartment right now.”)

Did something go wrong? Did I die in my sleep last night? Or fall through a cosmic portal into an alternate dimension where the second law of thermodynamics actually states that the universe should work toward harmony and order at all times?

Much like if your children are being quiet, something bad is happening, if my medical care comes easily, something must be horribly wrong…

How the hell did I, of all people, pass that drug test?

I just bought myself a skort.

Don’t laugh. I went in looking for a comfortable pair of shorts so I wouldn’t die of heat exhaustion this summer. And I’m not comfortable wearing above-the-knee skirts in general, but I grabbed this pair thinking it was shorts, then tried it on for the heck of it, and discovered… I look damn cute in that thing.

So. Skort.

Still looking for those shorts, though.

…if feminism is a social-justice-for-everyone (with the possible exception of middle-class white women) movement, then gender is just one commitment among many.

Give me a fucking break.

As Jill says,

And it seems to me that white middle-class feminists shouldn’t be doing the same thing that the white guys have always done: We should not be telling other women to forgo their issues for the ones we deem important. We should not be telling other women to wait their turn.

If feminism is losing its focus, it is not because it pays heed to the needs of all women. More likely, it comes down to this:

This is not a movement.I repeat, this is not a movement.

It’s an exclusive networking club.

No, not the adorable PDA between Michelle and Barack. Wordpress, inexplicably, sometimes turns comments off on a post I am writing. It just figures that it would do so on a post in which I was really hoping for response. So I’m bringing it to the top again. Thanks.

Read more…

I weighed in at 164 at the doctor’s office on Friday. That is 0.1 BMI away from overweight! Whee!

But I also feel smaller. Maybe the Lupron is helping reduce the bloat in the tummy? There is definitely a difference looking in the mirror. Less to squish. Which is rather a surprise considering the previous immutability of my weight.

It is very obvious my GP does not like that I am on the Lupron, not at all. “It’s not like taking an Advil,” he says. That’s not news to me, though. When I told Matthew same, he remarked: “Then what are you supposed to do? At least this is helping reduce the stuff that is causing your pain.” Which is approximately how I feel about it. I know it’s a serious treatment. (GP does think the dizziness and spasms are probably attributable to it, since nothing else came up on x-ray and bloodwork.) But it will be an improvement over the status quo. A lot of the anti-medicine-type folks fail to understand that concept. GP has been reasonable so far, so his views on this matter were somewhat of a surprise.

Halfway through the Lupron, at this point, so long as I don’t have to repeat the therapy at the end. After that first monthish, my symptoms were greatly reduced. Including the dizziness and spasming. They aren’t gone altogether, but they’ve been largely stifled.

He is sending me to physical therapy for the back pain. Welcome development, that. Especially as I am applying around for new jobs, and kind of hoping for a clerical job with the state. I’m in contact with the local vocational rehab services as well. I mean, I sit on my ass all day anyway, but if I am working full time I am going to need some help adjusting to sitting on my ass in a place without access to all the accommodations I have built for myself at home.

I am still adjusting to the idea of working full-time. I’m not totally sure I can do it, but on the other hand, I don’t really have much reason to doubt it either. Especially considering I was unable to sustain any sort of work-for-pay before my current medicine regimen. I am the same person, with the same medical conditions. All that has changed is my treatment.

I don’t think I’ve ever written here about the catch-22 I faced there. Without that treatment, I was disabled, unable to work at all. When I was on disability, I qualified for Medicare, which would pay for that treatment. But with that treatment, I was (tentatively) able to earn SGA. Which would disqualify me from those disability payments. Which would mean I’d lose my Medicare. Which would mean I no longer had the treatment that enabled me to work.

Fortunately they do actually continue at least Medicaid coverage for workers with disabilities, at least in Pennsylvania, but only temporarily. After that, you’re at the mercy of your employer.

The fight for universal health care is, then, quite intimate for me.

Over and out.