Thank you for existing, Mary Wollstonecraft. :]

“Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.”

Read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in its entirety for free. ;]

“A Pit Bull or a Pretender?” by Ellen Goodman

It’s probably dangerous to admit to a moment of empathy. I’ll either get disqualified from ever becoming a Supreme Court justice or asked to turn in my press card.

But after watching reruns of Sarah Palin’s resignation from the governorship, after hearing every grammatically-challenged sentence and inconsistent paragraph dissected by some talk show host, I started to (blush) feel her pain.

There was the frozen smile, the vulnerability, the odd grab bag of unfiltered, unedited, unintelligible un-reasons scattered across the lawn. Palin quit to avoid being a quitter. She cut and ran as an act of self-sacrifice. She left her job to serve her country.

It wasn’t like watching a car wreck. It was like watching a midlife meltdown. It was seeing her self-image as a strong, confident, ambitious woman shaken to the core. All that was holding her together was chewing gum, family, and a little righteous anger.

What had happened to Sarah the Barracuda? The pit bull with lipstick? The mother of five, moose killer and marathoner who juggled a BlackBerry and a breast pump?

Ten months ago, when John McCain picked her as his running mate, it was like starting a middle-school basketball star in the WNBA. No, the NBA*. As governor, she once remarked about an opponent’s ability to spout off facts and figures, “Does any of this really matter?” I was among those who harbored the “elitist” belief that a vice presidential candidate should know as much about public policy as, say, Katie Couric. Yet, I delighted in the fact that because of Palin, conservatives lashed out against “sexism,” the religious right described teen pregnancy as a “challenge,” and it became politically incorrect for the most reactionary Republican to criticize working mothers.

I never believed that it would be easy for Palin to go back to Alaska after the bright lights, big cities lure of a national campaign. But I didn’t expect this.

“Life is about choices,” she said. I guess her choices were: wrestling with a state Legislature, paying lawyers’ fees for ethics investigations, and putting her kids through the wringer. Or making a bundle as an author and speaking star before audiences that adore her.

It wasn’t only “the politics of personal destruction” that pushed Palin over the edge. It was the politics of personal adulation. Even in the aftermath of the resignation, one blogger for RedState.com actually described it as “Sarah Palin sounded just like us! … This is the reason she is wildly popular in the first place. She IS one of us.”

What fans loved about Sarah Palin was her perceived authenticity. She was repeatedly described as “real.” I think it’s what Palin believed about herself.

Even after her resignation, she described her role as governor, saying, “This is who I am. This is what I am.” But, forgive that gosh-darned empathy, this is a woman who hit a moment when she doesn’t really know who she is. Or what she wants.

There’s been a lot of comparisons made between Palin’s rambling resignation speech and Mark Sanford’s soul-baring confession of adultery. Sanford fell head-over-heels in love–”Despite the best efforts of my head, my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body”–in ways that made us squirm for him and Argentina. Palin fell in love with her star turn. What we see are two middle-aged politicians discovering in the most painfully public way that they may not be the people they thought they were.

Sanford is not the straight-laced conservative family man he thought he was. Palin is not the pit bull, lipstick on or off, she thought she was. The woman who wanted to win didn’t want to govern. And when the going got tough, she got going…going…gone.

There are some who say that this is a clever gamble to run for the presidency. Searching for clues for the future in this decision is a full-time media occupation. But I’m guessing she is clueless about what she wants next.

“All options are on the table,” she says. But ironically, the soon-to-be-ex-governor and speaker, author and celebrity has only one option. Authenticity? The only job left for Sarah the former Barracuda is to pretend to be a candidate for president. In the middle of a midlife meltdown, the quitter is now the teaser.

[source]

*Okay, let’s all grow up a little bit now. We have the NBA…and the WNBA? No. Can anyone say “afterthought?” Let’s have either/or. I suggest we start a new tradition of equal value. Let’s either have an NBA open to both sexes, or a WNBA and a MNBA. Hello?

“The best marriage proposal in marriage history,” it says. Yeah, pretty much!

At first I was like, Oh, this is cute, with the whole megaphone thing and the I-met-you-at-this-exact-spot-one-year-ago thing. And then I was like OHMYGOODNESSGRACIOUS!!!1ILOVEITTTT.

The only thing is, and I’m probably a wanker for even suggesting this, but every time I see a video of someone proposing in public, I always wonder what the heck would happen if the other party should happen to decline? I saw one of those once, it looked like this:

Child of Empire [by Emily Mekash]

I’m a citizen of the most affluent country in the world. Both of my grandfathers were decorated war veterans. My ancestors owned slaves. I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance, the Gettysburg Address and the preamble to the Constitution without so much as batting an eye. I am an American.

Further still, I am a middle-class white kid who grew up in the Midwest. I was raised on a steady diet of patriotism and duty to God and country. In this setting, conscientious objectors were traitors and not voting meant shirking your civic duty.

I can vividly recall, when I was 8 years old, writing a poem about how great my nation was and reading it to a classroom of my peers. It was President’s Day, and we were encouraged to don red, white and blue clothing. Cory, one of my classmates, read a supernaturally long poem his mother had sent with him. I can still hear him shyly reciting something about Old Glory and the trenches in Europe. Looking back, that grade-school realm of empire seems surreal.

And whether you want to chalk it all up to ethnocentrism or naïveté, it honestly never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with how my country went about things. I never realized anyone else thought there was something wrong with the U.S., unless you count those “terrorists” in the far-flung regions of the “Middle East,” wherever that was.

My starred-and-striped worldview was called into question when, as a bright-eyed 18-year-old, I moved to Canada for college. Suddenly, I was surrounded by people who did not see eye-to-eye with me about the motherland. I was called “Yank” and “Yankee,” which, I suppose, was not nearly as bad as it could have been. And whenever my ignorance showed, some kind-hearted soul was there to inform others: “Don’t worry; she’s American.”

One day as I was having lunch in the campus cafeteria, the table talk turned to the Iraq war. I squirmed in my plastic seat. I was the only American at the table, and so I felt it my sacred duty to say something in defense of the pre-emptive strike. But before I had the change to utter a single “God bless America,” a guy at the table, in complete seriousness, called me a warmonger. Flabbergasted at the accusation, I excused myself from the table. American, Yankee, warmonger–being American was no longer a badge of honor and pride; it was an ugly epithet.

In the four years that have past since I began college, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with my country and the decisions it makes. I don’t support the war in Iraq. I don’t support government-sanctioned torture (or any other torture for that matter). Our economic system has made the rich even richer, and the poor even poorer. And yet, my mailing address is still Roseau, Minnesota. My passport has an eagle embossed on the front. Every April, my tax dollars go into Washington’s coffers. America has become my awkward cousin; I feel strong familial loyalty to her, but I don’t want to claim her.

Barack Obama has given me some hope for my country–hope that maybe the poor won’t be ignored, that this six-year-long war won’t go on forever, that my country won’t be forever run by rich white males (though we still need to work on the rich and male part), and that maybe the rest of humanity won’t think we are trying to turn the world into our own homogenized empire. I have hope that things can change, yet I know America is still America. Big. Rich. Powerful. Selfish. Blind.

In less than a month, I will be marrying a Canadian. Our plans in life don’t include a return to the red, white and blue. “Why do you want to leave the U.S.?” my polite American friends ask me. “You want to live in Canada!?” the impolite ones say, as if I had just told them I was planning to live in a pup tent in the Mojave Desert. Some days I feel as though I am caught in an international tug of war between the nation I was raised in and the nation I came of age in.

So for now, I live in that uncomfortable space of being a reluctant American. Of feeling bound to a country that I no longer agree with. It’s the awkwardness of being American.

[Emily Mekash is an intern with Geez magazine. She grew up in Moseau, Minnesota and now lives in Otterburne, Manitoba. This article is from Geez magazine No. 14, Summer 2009.]

So, this is me. Part of this is my story too, although I’ve not yet had the opportunity to live in another country. But when you’re taught that to be American is to be Christian, to be Christian is to be American, things get twisted and they can turn ugly fast. I don’t feel that, because I don’t support many of my country’s endeavors, I’m “unpatriotic.” I live here. But if the willingness to blindly accept my country and defend it right or wrong, the ethnocentrism that arrogantly claims “This is the greatest country in the whole wide world,” is what it takes to be a patriot, I’ll gladly reject that label. I’m a Jesus-lover first, before I’m either Christian or American.

Stupid news also makes me very happy.

Observe:

Man Who Stripped Naked On LA-Bound Jet Held by FBI

Drunk Man Terrorizes Neighborhood on Bulldozer

Chewing Gum Bandit Steals $650 Worth of Gum From Gift Shop

Man Test Drives Car, Never Comes Back

Vandalized Robot Returns Home [Okayyy, there was an article in the paper when the robot thing was stolen, but no photo, just a mom and a kid pleading for its safe return. NOW there's a picture--and I'm officially running for cover. Lock up your children, beginning: Now. More on the vandalism here. A neighbor writes in, "Re 'Mom, Bubby's home,' June 19: As a Kettering resident who has frequently experienced the eerie, unpleasant sight of Bubby the Robot, I would have gladly paid Bubby's kidnappers a considerable sum of money to send Bubby to the bottom of Eastwood Lake."]

And dangit, there was another one–one about vandals going crazy and tearing down someone’s barn. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble locating online coverage of this one. :/

Honestly, this was the best week in the news I can remember in a long time. How long? A very long time!

This just plain ol’ makes me happy.. ;)

<3

We are here to change the world.

Clearly, this is a day late, but big deal. I was at a baseball game when the Michael Jackson rumors started flying. People were getting phone calls from their friends watching the news or reading it online; people were making stuff up and going crazy. At first we were told Michael Jackson died. In a fire. He died in a fire, yes. Michael Jackson. We were speechless. Incredulous. Oh my goodness. We said, “……………WHAT?!!” Yes, all of that. A second phone call said scratch that, he died of a heart attack and then a coma. A Perez Hilton-in-training announced to the bleachers that Britney Spears, too, had died. It’s just a very hard thing to grasp. He’s the Elvis of pop, for heavens sake. He’s Michael Jackson. Somehow it just gets in your head that Michael Jackson doesn’t die.

Anyway, I thoroughly appreciate the local radio stations who’ve gone all-Michael, all the time. At least for the weekend. Kudos to you.

Here’s my favorite (non-Jackson 5, that is) MJ song, by far: Black or White. I’d post it here, but they’ve disabled embedding on just about all of them, it appears.

What’s yours?

Oh, and you can read about the kids-custody-thing here.