Who Cares?

Am I the only person in the world who couldn’t care less what is going on in Tiger Woods’ personal life?  Am I the only one who thinks that it’s none of my business?

I mean, it’s not like he’s mis-using taxpayer (your and my) money to make out of town/state/country trips to see “call girls” and mistresses. He’s not some hypocritical lawmaker preaching morality legislation while getting caught propositioning gay prostitutes in airport men’s bathrooms nor is he running for President and having a love child with his publicist while his wife recovers from cancer or something like that.

Tiger Woods is just a celebrity golf player, an “athlete”.  His personal life affects no one beyond his family and the women he cheated with.  He really has no obligations to anyone else and no one else really needs to be informed of all of the seedy details.

He’s not a world famous neurosurgeon; he’s on on the brink of discovering the cure to cancer; he is unlikely to negotiate peace in the Middle East or even convince the Democrats and Republicans to compromise on a Healthcare bill while President Obama is in office.   There really doesn’t need to be all this fuss about how his marital strife might affect his work.  It’s golf.

December 11th, the night I was stuck in the hospital when I had my appendix removed, the big story on all of the news channels was Tiger Woods infidelity.  They brought it up every 20 minutes.  Why???

With yesterday’s press conference where Tiger apologized to his fans for letting them down, the media again are busy calling in “experts” to speculate what the public are thinking.  On talking head on CNN had two “experts” come on to discuss how men and women would be receiving the message differently.  What annoyed me was the fact that no one ever bothered to consider the thought that maybe many women, especially those who don’t care for golf, don’t care.

In fact, some of us don’t care who Jennifer Anniston is dating or what Paris Hilton is doing or who the Kardassians are or what happened to Jon and Kate or any of the Real Housewives from Atlanta or New Jersey or wherever they are now.  I actually suspect that most of us don’t care about any of them.

Or is it just me?

When I started this blog, I had intended to stay away from blogging about politics.  I’ve experienced some very emotional political confrontations online since 1994 and I’ve run into more than a few plain ole nutcases.  I was bitter for a long time between 1996 and 1998 and it had more to do with the interactions I was having online with both lefties and conservatives than it did with the actual politicians, though they really added fuel to the fire.  I admit that I was also angry at the political system, my country, half of the voters, all of Congress, everyone in the White House, and so on too.  I felt helpless and lost.  There was so much that I felt needed to change and there was so much anger and hatred in our own country and so much that wasn’t being done and wouldn’t get done because of the extreme blind rage everyone felt for everyone else over misconceptions and quotations taken out of context and blown out of proportion by talking heads and supposed leaders.  I honestly felt that we were stuck.

I can’t say that we are any better now with a Democrat as President of the United States than we were with a Republican.  President Obama seems to have done very little in his first year than take a World Tour and push a few buttons to make it look like he’s working.  He announced that he wanted a Health Care Reform bill but he was rather vague on exactly what he wanted so he let Congress do all the work and basically let that drag on most of the year until it never got done.  He promised to close GitMo but a year later, it still hasn’t been done — and all of those other secret prisons that he promised to close?  Well, there’s a catch to that, because he’s closing all but one, which he’s transferring all the prisoners to.  He seems to be embracing a lot of President George W. Bush’s policies after spending a year and a half talking trash about him; and after promising us peace, he’s increased drone bombing in the Middle East this month by about double.

Then there’s the economy…I have to say that I saw a lot of road construction last year, so I know some of that stimulus money was sprinkled around, but I don’t think it got very far.  I know that the banks aren’t lending money and one of my credit cards that I had since college and have kept paid off for over 10 years, dropped me — just because I kept them paid off.  I can’t get a debt consolidation loan, nor can I refinance my house, but I have excellent credit.  Plus, I just got a bill for $1000 from the hospital for my emergency appendectomy.  Got to love unexpected expenditures — like having to buy a new car last year right after the Cash for Clunkers ended.

Anyway, I’ve had to reduce my payments to my 403(b) and I’m looking for anything and everything to cut from my budget.  Loki will be getting the cheep dog food and homemade doggy treats, it seems.  I might be wishing I hadn’t taken that bag of stuff over to the soup kitchen.

So, anyway, I didn’t listen to Obama’s State of the Union the other night.  I had a good idea of what he was going to talk about.  He was going to try to put a spin on how he inherited a bad economy and 2 wars from Bush and that’s why nothing got done last year and because he’s an excellent speaker, he was going to make it sound so good that everyone who heard him would believe that everything will magically be all right if we just clap our hands and believe in fairies.  Well, I never understood why everyone hung on every word that came out of his mouth.  Words are just words; they are inanimate; they have no real power and like thunder, they do nothing but get attention.  Action, deeds, lightning — those things have power; those things change the world forever.  Like Janet Jackson says, “What have you done for me lately?”

I suspected back in ’07 that Obama was going to be all talk in the White House — he had very little experience and his voting record showed that he preferred not to commit, decide or be more than a warm body.  I said as much then, but everyone was swooning over him.  At least I can honestly say that I remain critically distrustful and very much apathetic.

I can’t say that much has changed in Congress even though the majority has changed with the Presidency — still nothing is getting done, despite Obama’s promise to bring them all together.  As I told my mother, I still feel that anyone who voted for The Patriot Act should be voted out of office and an all new Congress should be elected.  I don’t think anyone who voted away our rights without reading the document and then voted to continue it should remain in office.  Maybe if we get rid of all of the old standards and have an all new Congress and everyone is on the same footing, work will actually start getting done again.

All of my life, I have never understood why it matters so much to some people how other people live their lives, especially if no harm is being done to anyone.  I’ve also never understood racism or sexism or any of the -ism’s, though I’ve been a victim a time or two in some form or another of various types.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about love and hate and fear.

Despite having no desire to get married myself and finding myself hopelessly alone anyway, I am a hopeless romantic.  I think everyone hopes there is someone out there for them.

And if you are among the lucky pairs to find happy blissfulness and for some reason want to be committed to each other in some sort of ritualistic ceremony involving all of your friends and family that ends with the signing of a contractual paper that joins you in the eyes of the law, if not some religion, what if someone with some sort of authoritative power said you could never be married?

It’s hard to believe that in the 21rst century that sort of thing still goes on.  There are still arranged marriages in some cultures, even here in the U.S.  When many of us think about them, we think about how ridiculously unmodern they are.  We tell them to ignore their family values and traditions and marry who they want and love.

But as a society we are hypocrites.

Just within the last week, mortifying news has come out of my home State of Louisiana of Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell of Tangipahoa Parish who refused to marry an interracial couple.  According to him, he doesn’t marry interracial couples because he’s worried about the children’s futures.

“Perhaps he’s worried the kids will grow up and be president,” said Bill Quigley, director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Justice, referring to President Barack Obama, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas. (Many angry man wouldn’t marry interracial couple)

How can it be possible that in the same year that our first black President has been sworn into office, there are still bigots in authoritative positions in government?  This man has had the power for 34 years to marry or apparently to refuse to marry couples.  In all that time, no one noticed or mentioned that he was turning away interracial couples.

In case you’re wondering, in 1967 the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws — laws that banned interracial marriage and/or interracial sex — are unconstitutional.  At that time, there were still 16 states with laws in effect.

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival….Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.  (Loving v. Virginia decision)

Less than 42 years ago.  Not even a half a century.  A blink of an eye ago.  We are not that evolved.  In fact, Alabama became the last state to repeal their mixed-marriage law just 9 years ago in 2000.

Now, Bardwell really has no business deciding who can get married and who can’t as long as they love each other, right?  After all, if no one is getting hurt, it’s really none of his business at all.  It’s nobody’s business.  The only, one’s who needed to be making the decision about whether or not a long term commitment was what they really, really wanted to do, are the people who are going to be getting married.  Bardwell just needed to do his job.  If he were a doctor and someone were injured, he would be expected to help that person.  If he were a police officer and someone was being robbed, he would be expected to stop the robber.  He ran for Justice of the Peace, he knew what the job detailed, he needed to keep his opinion to himself and do his job.

I don’t know if it is fear or hate that drives this kind of behavior, this need to restrict and subjugate someone who is different in some way — maybe they look different or they pray different or they love different or they think different or they dream different — you know, all of those beautiful, wonderful things that make life and the world so interesting and entertaining.  I suppose there are people who need to find ways to make themselves feel superior or special or right or righteous or chosen somehow.  By denying basic rights to another human being based on a singular difference, they fake their way to this place in their own eyes and perhaps in the eyes of their peers.  They build themselves a false superiority, a hypocritical righteousness.

And so I come to current events.  I’m so very conscious of the current hate-filled anti-equality movement to keep same-sex couples from marrying in this country now.  In Maine for the last few months it’s been building into a nice quiet storm as the November elections approach.  On May 6th, Governor John Baldacci signed into law a “freedom to marry” bill overwhelmingly approved by the Senate and House, making  Maine the fifth state to allow same-sex marriage.  However, immediately afterward, anti-gay groups gathered signatures and mounted an attack campaign to put a referendum to have the law repealed on the November ballot.

The Freedom to Marry bill specifically states that no one of Faith will be required to marry any same-sex couple; no Faith-based facility will be required to hold a same-sex wedding ceremony.  Basically the new law indicates these marriages are state marriages and Churches can do what they want.  There are in fact a number of Churches and religious groups backing the law though.  So, the argument about what God says about marriage should be left to Church sermons and not to public debate.

So, what the anti-gay movement has been focusing on is attempting to scare the public that same-sex marriage will be taught in our schools.  They even have a commercial with a couple of parents from Massachusetts stating that now that same-sex marriage is legal there, their first grader was taught about “boys marrying boys”.

My initial reaction to these commercials  was “So what?”  Maybe it wouldn’t be so confusing to kids if they knew that some of their friends just had a Mommy and some just had a Daddy and some have a Mommy and Daddy who don’t live together and some have a Mommy and a Daddy with a Step-Mommy and some have two Mommies and some live with their Grandparents and so on.  Not all families are the “traditional” Mother, Father, and kids anymore, if they ever were.  Often the people pushing that “traditional” crap aren’t even living it themselves anyway.

But what I really noticed about all the publicity leading up to this upcoming vote is that the commercials supporting keeping the new law seem friendly and have happy music; they show families of different types who are all smiling and happy; they talk about equality.

The commercials against the law are all dark, unpleasant, alarming; no one is smiling; no one has anything nice to say; they are about doom and gloom.

Less than 50 years ago, sixteen (16) States still believed it was morally wrong for a white man and a black woman to get married just because of the color of their skin.  No one bothered to ask them if they loved each other, if they thought they could live without each other, if they could imagine a life without each other.  They were born the same way, bled the same way, and eventually they would die the same way, but the pigments of their skin were a shade different and that was all that mattered for 16 States until the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional.

How many years is it going to take us until it’s only sixteen States that still deny any adult of any sex  to marry and adult of any sex?  And how many until it’s none?  How many until we’re talking in surprise about one Justice of the Peace in some little town who somehow has been getting away with refusing to marry same-sex couples for decades after it’s all mainstream?

It wouldn’t be so difficult if people would mind their own business.  After all, what’s going on in one person’s marriage isn’t bothering someone else’s marriage.  What should it matter to anyone who is married on earth?  If it doesn’t hurt anyone here, then it’s God’s job to judge when it’s all over and done with.

A full four years after Katrina, there are over 14,000 families still seeking housing assistance in the Greater New Orleans area.

As a former New Orleans and Jefferson Parish resident, I’d like to point out that four years later, there are still organizations working to help and it’s not too late  for you to donate your time or money to the St. Bernard Project, a grassroots nonprofit organization that constructs homes in less than 12 weeks for about $15,000 each.  Visit stbernardproject.org.