I've reached the saturation point of bullshit that I can handle. So much so that the driver who honked at me this morning under the misperception I was taking up too much of his lane (never mind the parked cars that kept me from pulling over or the fact he was going approximately 15 miles over the speed limit) reduced me to tears. Because of the stress of the last several weeks, I’m tearing through my extremely limited supply of migraine medication at an unprecedented rate. As my last checkup included a demoralizing lecture from the nurse practitioner on my BMI being too high and a grilling on why I needed to take sumatriptan instead of Excedrin Migraine (1), I was not eager to call and ask for more medication. Fortunately, I received the answering service and left my request in the form of a message.
In addition to being placed on indefinite probation, my supervisor oh-so-casually mentioned to me on Thursday that they were relieving me of my responsibility to facilitate an annual client meeting as they had decided to “go in a different direction with the group”. This was followed up with an email from the unofficial leader of the group (2), who thanked me for my service.
And promptly assigned responsibility for the meeting to an individual who, slated to present at the last client gathering, bailed two hours before it was scheduled to take place without submitting any of his materials and without telling me (the person who was supposed to get the materials for incorporation into the meeting) directly.
An individual who has created for himself quite a reputation for pawning his work off on his all female team who he endearingly refers to as “my girls”. If I'm still employed when the next meeting comes around, I am going to get a great deal of pleasure out of saying “NO” to organizing slides and taking notes.
I was bluntly honest with my supervisor. I admitted that I was not terribly upset that I was being relieved of this particular duty, as the leader of the group is especially difficult to work with (2) and preparations for the meeting take an inordinate amount of time. But the timing of this decision goes a long way to confirm my suspicions that they are building a case for my dismissal. Removal from the group also disqualifies me from any year-end bonuses that may be distributed.
As an example of my mindset, this exchange between J and myself from a few days ago:
but does it really matter? They are just saying the same shit your family says. I'm just tired of being the bigger person. Really tired of it. Where has it gotten me, really? I'm being pushed out of my job, my mom wavers between passive aggressive and abusive, your family acts like I'M the crazy one when I do defend myself and the people that I count amongst my closest friends feel free to demonize my values and totally disregard my feelings.
The furor over Park51 (formerly known and Cordoba House) has made a specific subset (aka libertarian/conservative) of my friends go insane. I violated my steadfast rule of not engaging with friends or family members over controversial targets and put myself squarely in the line for a series of ad hominem attacks that summed me up to be a lazy hypocritical communist liar only interested in taking away other people's property from two of my friends. This should, on the surface be laughable.
I'm not laughing in the least. I've spent the last several days crying and trying to pinpoint when it was that I learned that it was not OK to defend myself and I should not bother trying. I think sometime during my adolescence, between teachers who told me I should just suck it up, stop being childish and that I deserved the bullying and my mother, who proclaimed that my expectations of behavior from other people were “too high” (3).
I'm “hypocritical”. The agency for this accusation is based on the claim that (as a liberal) I do not criticize the way they treat Muslim women. When I pointed out that conservative Christians are more than happy to give just about every other religious creed (including Christianity) a pass on their treatment of women and that it was inconsistent to demonize an entire faith while simultaneously claiming that they were the only parties who cared enough to speak out against the terrible treatment of Muslim women, I was told that listing the negative practices of other religious faiths was “excusing” the mistreatment. What?
Here is a short list of known liberals who actively campaign against the mistreatment of women (including Muslims) : Nicolas Kristof, William Jefferson Clinton, Hilary Clinton, Greg Mortenson, Oprah Winfrey, William Gates, Jimmy Carter. Granted some on this list are not directly speaking out against the mistreatment of Muslim women. Instead they are building schools, funding vaccinations, supporting micropayment programs and training programs, all work that gets on with the job of helping women help themselves. The argument that liberals don’t care about the rights of Muslim women is disingenuous, as it assumes that liberals deliberately exclude Muslim women whenever they discuss the practice of FGM, forced marriage, stonings, rapes and other atrocities committed upon women everywhere.
I'm a “Communist liar.” I don't even know what to say this one, except to check the calendar and make sure it is 2010, not 1955. Ditto for “taking away people's property”. I don't have any idea what to do with that statement, it doesn't make sense.
And the worse accusation, that I'm “lazy”. I’m “lazy” because I support welfare, social security and programs such as WIC, even though I’ve only asked for a handout once in my life and paid the money back as soon as I had it available. Aside from that one example, I have never asked any individual, organization or governmental entity for money. The time that my parents covered the gas bill and paid my federal taxes while I was in graduate school? They offered when they saw how little I made on my previous year's tax return.(4) When I wanted to move back to PA after my stint in South Carolina went awry? They offered to me a room in their home until I got married, so I could save money towards a place to live. When J was underemployed and making only enough money to pay the mortgage and nothing else, I got a second job. When we got behind on the gas bill because I was not making enough money from two jobs I arranged a payment plan.
I put 10% of my paycheck towards retirement savings every month because I don't have any expectation of relying on social security. Until Baby Alien arrived I was saving an additional 1K a month as rainy day money. I used that money to fund my maternity leave and did not ask for a cent from my employer. I don’t carry a balance on my credit card for longer than two months and I pay all my bills on time.
I’m “lazy”, even though the original statement, “Would you support the building of a shrine at Pearl Harbor” is a bad analogy that could have been confirmed as such with a 10 second web search using the terms “shrine” and “Pearl Harbor”. I’m “lazy”, even though I’m not the one that proceeded to argue that there shouldn’t be a Shinto shrine there either, because the Japanese attacked the United States. What the fuck does the practice of Shinto have to do with one sovereign nation attacking another? Japan doesn’t have a national religion.
Want lazy, you who could not bother to spend five minutes to determine the source of "the shrine at Pearl Harbor = cultural center at Ground Zero" analogy or the groups currently using it. One of those groups? The same subset of people who attempted to argue that even “if” Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, he wasn’t a US citizen because Hawaii was not a state when he was born. Granted that group backpedaled (eventually) from that assertion, but using an intellectually lazy group of crazies as source material for your arguments is being intellectually lazy squared.(5)
Want lazy? You did not bother to pull up a map and actually look at the location of Ground Zero or the proposed location of the cultural center. You argued that because the wheel of a plane went through the roof of the building at the site of the cultural center, it is part of Ground Zero. When it was pointed out to you that using where parts of a plane fell is poor criteria, as it includes an enormous chunk of Manhattan, you declared all of Manhattan to be sacred and went off on a rant about how the area should be zoned Mosque free. When it was pointed out to you that zoning the area to not allow the building of a Mosque or Muslim community center violates the first amendment, you conveniently ignored that oh-so-inconvenient establishment clause by arguing that if an HOA can dictate what color a property own can paint his or her home, then the city of New York can zone Manhattan as Mosque/Muslim community center free.
In arguing as such, you conflated “freedom of expression” and “freedom from religion”. Freedom of expression means that the government can not prevent you from saying what you want. It does not protect an individual from the private consequences of public speech. Home Owner Associations are not public government entities, they are private organizations.
Freedom from religion means that a public government entity can not permit a city to zone an area as free from one specific religious faith. It is either all or nothing. You want a Islam free zone in all of Manhattan? Fine. Kiss goodbye to every single church, synagogue and religiously affiliated community center in Manhattan as well. You are aware that under that criteria, that list would possibly include the YMCA?
So for calling me a lazy hypocritical communist liar, fuck you. Go to hell.
(1) Excedrin Migraine gives me the shakes, a side effect so bad that I would prefer the pain and nausea instead.
(2) See posts from April 2009.
(3) Blaming my mother is so passe, yet here I am.
(4) I would have done my own taxes, but my father enjoys that sort of thing and it became a ritual for him to do it every year, just as I would wrap my mother's Christmas presents from him every year.
(5) Try to follow the logic of the organization who is offering such sparkling arguments, gentlemen. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, located on Hawaiian island of Oahu (a U.S. Territory since 1898) in 1941, they were attacking the United States so Shinto shrine near Pearl Harbor = BAD. But when Barack Obama was born in 1961 on the Hawaiian island of Oahu (the same exact island attacked by the Japanese 20 years earlier), he was not born in the United States, thus can’t be a citizen. Which one is it?
Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1893 and became a U.S. Territory in 1898. In 1900, citizens born on the Hawaiian islands were granted United States citizenship. So even if Hawaii had not been an actual state in 1961, Obama would still be considered a U.S. citizen because he was born on a U.S. Territory to a U.S. citizen. Which I learned in 20 minutes of research.
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