A Short List of Things I've Been Told When I Challenge the Misogyny of Liberal or Left-wing Men

by Mona Shaw

The contrast between the response between Donald Trump's and Bill Clinton's sexual assaults reminded me of this.

It's fun for someone of my politics to take on the likes of Trump.  I get only praise and support for the most part.  This has never been the case when I object to the same behaviors by liberal or progressive men.  In fact, the reactions have been so brutal and painful that I've been cowed into silence more often than I care to admit.

Here's a partial list.

1,  How dare you try to hurt such a good man?

2.  Why should I believe you?

3.  You’re too worked up to be believable.

4.  You’re too calm to be believable.

5.  You’re accusations are too articulate to be believable.

6.  You’re accusations are too clumsy to be believable.

7.  Your story just doesn’t ring true.

8.  No one is perfect.

9.  We don’t know both sides of the story.

10.  Why didn’t you bring this up sooner/later/someplace else?

11.  Why can’t you forgive?

12.  It was a long time ago.

13.  Why can’t you let it go?

14.  Think of the good he’s doing.

15.  Just because he did it doesn’t mean you have to say it.

16.  Just because he’s an asshole doesn’t mean he’s not a good man.

17.  You’re creating divisiveness.

18.  We ALL need to come together now.

19.  If we go after every offensive person, we’ll have no one left.

20.  There are a lot of assholes in the world.  We can’t confront them all.

21.  If you know what’s good for you, you won’t open this can of worms.

22.  He’s mean to men too.

23.  Put on your big girl pants and suck it up.

24.  There are worse things in the world.

25.  You’re throwing away your credibility.

26.  You could be doing so much good instead of obsessing about this.

27.  Worse has been done to me, and I look passed it.

28.  You’re making good people uncomfortable.

29.  You’re making people take sides.

30.  He’s never done that to me.

31.  I’ve never seen him do that.

32.  Think about the greater good.

33.  You’re just bitter.

34.  I’m not getting into a personal matter.

35.  Why can’t you just ignore him?

36.  It isn’t just about you.

37.  Take the high road.

38.  You’re destroying the party, movement, action, etc.

39. You handled this wrong.

40.  You’re hurting the people with him who are there for good reasons.

41.  We’ve all been hurt.

42.  You’re just trying to stir up trouble.

43.  I don't believe for a minute that any man has gotten by with abusing YOU.

44.  You just want attention.

45.  You’re just feeling sorry for yourself.

46.  Why can’t you move on?

47.  You just love creating controversy.

48.  I have my own life.  I can’t get involved.

49.  Do you want some right-wing tea partiers in charge?

50.  You don’t know how to pick your battles.

51.  There are bigger, more important issues than this man’s abuse.

  

52.  Are you going to pay my bills if I tell the truth?

53.  I can’t help you.  I have to get along with these people.

54.  Why can’t you love people regardless of their flaws?

55.  Who do you think you are?

Cotton Socks Are Good Enough for any Working Man's Wife

by Mona Shaw

“Herbert Hoover said, ‘Cotton socks are good enough for any working man’s wife,’ That’s all I needed to know about the man,” my granddad told me.

It’s the “little” slights that wear one down. Someone, something persuades us to let it go. “Pick your battles.”  

But, each time you say nothing, a piece of your soul dies, and larger and larger parts of yourself believe the lies that you and your kind are less worthy. You even repeat their jokes or slurs for their approval. Eventually you collude with your own oppressor.  A hundred times a day you hear things like:

“Don’t worry about the poor,” they don’t vote.

“I have a high credit rating, and they still discriminate against me as a lesbian.”

“She dresses like she shops at Walmart.”

“I didn’t buy a $400,000 house, so people could build houses next to me worth $100,000.”

“The poor wouldn’t be stressed if they just got a job.”

“No offense, but I prefer to socialize with people in my own economic stratum.  We have more in common.”

“We don’t care what Joe Six-pack thinks.  He’s not supporting this university.”

“I was stunned and repulsed.  They were using pots and pans for serving dishes.”

“It’s only $500.  Anyone I know has shoes worth more than that.”

“My father, the bank president, says we should do this.”

“He claims to be poor, but he was eating a Dove bar.”

Or, the time a director of the UI Labor Center told her own secretary, “If you want a better salary, get an education like I did.”

And all the jokes: about hard hats, red necks, polyester clothes, trailer parks, fake wood paneling, welfare, hair-styles, fake fingernails, dirty fingernails, subsidized housing, Jello or mayonnaise salads, cheap beer or cheap perfume, raggedy-ass cars, velvet paintings, country music, pressboard or plastic furniture, Jesus nightlights, dime-store jewelry, lunch meat, ice-berg lettuce, Jerry Springer or Maury Povich guests, and cat clocks with rhinestone eyes and a wagging tail, etc.

Let’s not even get started on dialects, speech-patterns or grammar.

It is bottomless, the reservoir containing all the quotidian and ubiquitous ways to render the underclass inferior and unworthy.

So, it came as no surprise to me when Hillary Clinton was praised by “progressives” for a recent speech in which she defended people of color by stating many Black people were well-off.  She called Trump’s assertions about poverty in communities of color as bigotry toward those communities.

No one in the mainstream media or politics (including Trump, perhaps especially Trump) thought to counter with the fact that being poor should not be an insult. She suggested that while there is no shame in being a person of color that to consider someone impoverished was shaming them.  She completely ignored that people of color are, indeed, far more likely to be poor.

In America there is no shame as pervasive as the shame of being poor. Racism can still get one killed by a cop, but the tragedy of the death will still be gauged by the economic status of the victim.  “And he was a counselor.”  “She was a teacher.”

It doesn’t matter that racism catalyzes every instance of poverty, including that poverty suffered by white people.  The ruling class can’t maintain an underclass to work for poverty wages without methods to control them.  Racism is their most effective whip.  No race in the underclass realizes that enough.  Far too many have bought the lies that white poor people really are just inferior or that people of color are getting something for nothing.

Martin Luther King, jr. saw through this divide and conquer strategy, and he was in the process of addressing and organizing all poor people when he was murdered.  History shows that effectively organizing poor people and workers will get you killed faster than anything else.  Even the big unions won’t do that anymore.

The poor are inferior in every way in America.  Class bigotry is almost considered good manners.  It demonstrates refinement and good taste.

It’s really telling that Hillary Clinton’s reaction to the Trump speech was to defend affluent people of color rather than show compassion for the suffering of those banished to poverty.

It was also telling that the Democratic National Convention was a parade of Horatio Alger stories, the one who overcame, who grabbed her bootstraps and made something of herself (not poor, no more). 

It serves the American agenda.  If she saw poor people as equal, if she admitted that not every little girl or boy can be president or even earn a living wage, then poor people might deserve things like housing, food, or healthcare.  But in today’s America, where we can’t do everything for everyone, we know who will be left out.  And, it’s not the woman in the $12,000 jacket or any of her friends.  Cotton socks are good enough for any working man’s wife.

Of course, getting rid of Hillary won’t solve the problem.  She’s a snob, but everyone who runs for president in America is a snob.  Hillary is just the current spokesmodel for the status quo. 

It doesn’t matter who you vote for.  It matters if you continue to collude with the lie.  Not everyone can make it in America.  That’s a wholesale lie.  Our forefather’s never intended for that to be the case, and no one in power--or seeking power--wants that now. Change, when it comes, will come from the bottom up.  It’s time for decent Americans to cry, “Foul,” no matter where or how they encounter class bigotry.

Mona Shaw is a low-income Iowa grandmother of no particular importance and has no credentials whatsoever.  

A Song from the Underbelly: How I Stopped Worrying about Trump

I’m suffering from serious fear fatigue this morning.

Something is going to get me.  I know it.  It might be Trump pushing “the button.”  It might be the Russians stealing the election.  It might be the rising seas from Climate Change.  It might be an asteroid that comes to close the planet.  It might be some red neck who shoots me on the street for entertainment.  Maybe the economy will collapse, or we might have an earthquake in Iowa.  It is possible. Then there are the pandemics: from Ebola to Zika to that yet-to-be named deadly flu or an infection impervious to antibiotics.  This doesn’t include all the mercury and arsenic that’s in all of the food we eat.

Scores of people aren’t dying from anything of these things right now.  But, they might.  And the likelihood of all that rests on how I vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Now, if I had ever had any institutional power--ever--I might believe that how I fill in a circle on a ballot matters so much.  But, I haven’t, and I don’t.

I’m going to stop being terrified of Trump being elected.  I’m wiping that right off the list.  There, its’ gone.  Why?

First, he can’t do any of the things people are terrified he’ll do.  He can’t build that wall.  Mexico won’t pay for it. 

Next, he can’t deport all the Mexican from the U.S.  It’s logistically impossible.  There are too many of them.  God knows Obama has tried.  ICE has never been busier than during the Obama administration.  Clinton will follow that program.  The same number of Mexicans will be departed regardless, i.e. as many as we can find and round up.

He can’t even ban Muslims from entering the country without a constitutional challenge that he would certainly get.  Can he kill Muslims?  Sure.  But he’ll be hard-pressed to kill more than million or so that have been killed by the past two administrations.  And Clinton has promised to kill lots more in Syria.  I wonder, if we asked, who Syria wants to be president.

Is Trump crazier than bat shit?  Oh, God, yes.  But we’ve dealt with that before too.  E.g. Reagan had advanced Alzheimer’s and Wilson was a total vegetable while still in office. It was dealt with.  Hell, Truman dropped atomic bombs just to see what they’d do.  How insane was that?

Could he appoint some creepy Supreme Court justices?  Yes, he could.  But we’ve survived that before (See Bush II.), and we would again.  Let’s say somehow, the worst thing happened.  Let’s say Roe v Wade was overturned.  That would not make abortion illegal across the land.  Some states would make it illegal.  Women would have to travel to a state in which abortion was legal.  Yes, this will cause a harsher burden for poor women, but only the price of a bus ticket.  It’s not as if there is federal funding for women to get abortions now.  Or, did you forget the Hyde amendment?  Let’s be honest.  This isn’t a problem for poor women as much as it is an inconvenience for affluent ones.  Plus, these court decisions have a way of getting overturned.  See: Plessy v Ferguson, Bowers v Hardwick, et al.

Please. Please take a survey of all the women who are struggling economically.  Ask them their greatest fear.  They won’t say, “I may not be able to afford an abortion.”  (But academic and professional “feminists” have never been much interested in their opinion.) 

This brings me to another observation.  Clinton supporters (or big shot Republicans) don’t seem to be afraid of the status quo continuing.  And, there are some very real things to fear.  The War on Terror will continue, children will still be burned to death by U.S. drones.  Tens of thousands will still die on our own soil because they can’t afford the medical care they need. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Still, somehow, it’s become my moral obligation to just accept those things.  Collateral damage.  There have always been these things.  Nothing can be done.  At least not right now.

Then. I notice something else.  The people doing all the dying now aren’t usually the same people who are so afraid of Trump.  Then again, they’ll probably do okay with the status quo.  It’s sort of working for them.  They probably won’t bury someone they love next year who’s been killed in war or from lack of medical care.  Collateral damage is a bad thing to poor people thing, comfortable people don’t understand why that royally pisses some of us off.

The privileged equivocate these deaths.  They do it ALL THE TIME.  They NEVER say, “Yes, I know innocent people will die, but...”  Not in so many words.  They always sanitize the truth and talk about future organizing or lamentable foreign policy or something that makes killing these people sound not so bad. 

I suspect it’s because, you don’t lose much sleep over these folks. They’re not their folks.  But now the Trump specter has left them fearing for their own hides, and THAT’S scary.

They try to wiggle out of this with ridiculous spin and obfuscation.  They make up things that have no basis in reality like, “It’s a privileged position to not vote against Trump.”  Or, “It’s not about you.”  (No, it’s about them.)  I am sorry, but these are such an utter crock.  Marginalized people are going to die regardless.  We know that.  We’re not fooled.  You’re only able to sell that to comfortable “liberals.”  We know better, and that makes you mad.  It’s disgusting that you try to blame us for our deaths and continue to expect us sacrifice our lives for your comfort.

We didn’t create Trump.  You did.  You did it by using us as cannon fodder in your wars for profit and by colluding with and creating an economic system that makes it less and less likely we will survive.  From NAFTA TO GATT to the repeal of Glass-Stegall to shredding the social safety nets to putting us in prison so the rich can get richer, to bailing out Wall Street, etc., etc., etc.  You’ve been doing this on a fast-track since the first Clinton regime.  You’re not going to reverse that trajectory, and we know it.  Some of us are so sick of you that we’re voting for Trump.  It’s true, our Trump supporters may be the less aware of us, but we’re more aware than you are in any case.  You created this mess.  You did, and now you’re guilt-tripping us about it.

Still, I think about voting for Hillary.  I’ll admit it.  I do.  Even Chomsky says I should.  And, then, I feel nauseated.  Not figuratively, literally.  I have to lie down and stay very still for several minutes, or I’ll throw up.  I’ve—literally—had to buy heartburn medicine twice this month.  Because, because, because I know I’m voting for someone who will kill people I love.  I don’t think most of you internalize that “Sophie’s Choice.”  You certainly don’t show explicit empathy or compassion for it.

We really aren’t stupid, you know.  We know Trump isn’t our savior for the most part.  The minority of those who don’t will soon figure it out.  We’re survivors and quick learners.

I’m simply saying I’m exhausted of hearing about your current bogey men.  I’m going to figure out what I’m going to do on election day in my own way with information that makes sense to me.  I’m going to keep advocating for common people in every way, every time I notice something that hurts them.  I’m not going to stop doing that.  In between elections—and during them, for that matter—I’m going to entertain any action I can take to dismantle the Empire.

I trust my people.  We will figure out what to do, and we will do it.  It will take too long, but we will do it.  So, please, stop trying to get us to vote for your candidate by scaring us or rubbing in that we don’t matter.  I’m sick of being afraid.

The Sins of the Left

by Mona Shaw

There is no question that if Anita Hill had made the same allegations against a “liberal” nominee (say Stephen Breyer) to the Supreme Court, she would have not have been believed by even the same “feminists” who pushed her to make her experiences public.

There isn’t much I’d rather not do than write about this. To do so submerges me in days of pain while I think of women betrayed by “liberals” and “left-wing” activists.  Women who suffer at the hands of those on the “left” who dare to try to expose that abuse are far more often than not brutalized more by those who should have supported them.

Few will bother to read this.  Fewer will care enough to modify their behavior at all.  That’s a depressing truth that I don’t enjoy revisiting.

However, there is a tether here that goes to the core of misogyny.  It needs to be cut.  I.e., until we acknowledge this, the body count will go higher and hope for all women will remain lost.  Plus, the women we've casually thrown under the bus are human beings who matter.

Anita Hill provided a political payoff.  Most women don’t have that currency.  Moreover, the allegiance to class superiority is as dangerous to that woman as her abuser.  If a man is publicly identified as a champion of women’s rights, he can essentially do whatever he wants to women with very little risk to himself.

Anita Hill

The casualties are endless.  The betrayal leaves life-long agony in its wake.  Still, the “left” is just as inclined, if not more so, to cover it up.

One case is that of Anna Mae Aquash, an incredibly brave spirit and devoted AIM member.  Anna Mae was raped and murdered by fellow activists in 1975.  At first AIM blamed her murder on the FBI, plausible since the FBI is known to kill human rights activists.  And, it was likely the FBI that planted the false accusation that Anna Mae was an FBI informant.  Eventually two AIM members were convicted of her murder.

Anna Mae Aquash

However, darling of the left Leonard Pelletier, who many have said interrogated Anna Mae while holding a gun her mouth and knew of her murder during the time he was blaming the FBI, has never been charged in her death. This is excused with statements like, "Well we'll never know, and he is in prison for something he didn't do.  Let's just let sleeping dogs lie."

Sue Daniels

Susan Daniels was murdered by a fellow activist and former lover in 2004.  Daniels was a valiant peace activist whose stellar resume of activism included being arrested during a School of the Americas protest. It wasn’t only that popular activist Niklan Jones-Lezama murdered her.  For months his stalking behavior had left Daniels in fear of such an outcome, but was ignored and accused of “over-reacting” when she said so.  Even after her death, many insisted it was a set-up by the FBI.  "Sure, Niklan had some issues. but he was a kind and compassionate man."

It took 23 years for the anti-war activist Ira Einhorn to be brought to justice after he murdered his girlfriend Holly Maddux in 1977.  Many were aware that Einhorn treated Holly abusively, but dismissed at as a good man under great stress. 

Left-wing or progressive men, of course, don’t always kill women.  Most just torment and use them and destroy the lives of any women who tries to stand up to them. 

Brandon Darby a charismatic activist who was eventually exposed in 2008 as an FBI agent was given a pass for horrific misogynistic abuse. Later, Lisa Fithian wrote in a blog in 2010.

"There are many people in the activist community who have crossed Brandon’s path and have been hurt, demoralized, alienated, frightened, or run off by him. Those of us who were lied to or lied about, spied on, bullied, must deal with the trauma of his abusive behavior. We must also come to terms with the behavior of those who supported and enabled Brandon. And, as a community, we must deal with those parts of ourselves that were seduced, manipulated, and marginalized by Brandon so that we can defend each other, our political work, and ourselves."

When “leaders” lose people from the fold through a chronically revolving door, it should be regarded as a red flag.  Usually it's not.  These men are given passes because “no one is perfect. I prefer to focus on the good he does."  The abuser's accusations against those who leave or are forced to leave the “flock,” if not believed outright, are given undue credence, no matter how lumpy the rug becomes from sweeping people under it.

It’s characteristic for these men to go through women like Kleenex as sexual partners.  People will giggle about how many women had to be told about him when he went to jail or to the hospital, etc.

When a group of the women in leadership challenged Brian Darby’s sexual exploitation.  He gave a shameful, but common, response “I like to fuck women, so what.”

You can’t go to any leftist discussion group and not see blasts of misogyny.  I was recently threatened with being kicked to the curb when I suggested that “sleeping with underage girls,” was not only not a joke; it was rape.  “He didn’t mean anything by that.  You’ve gone too far.  Women like you give feminism a bad name.  I’m so sick of identity politics.”

Perhaps the most pernicious acts of all are those committed by those who want to be “fair” or “stay out of it.”  Fears of community reprisal or even looked at askance will leave those who should be the helpers refusing to get involved. The pain of that for woman abandoned is unmitigated.

I can’t join groups anymore.  I just can’t.  I’ve given up trying to find one that will hold their “leaders” to the very standards they espouse. 

Let’s face it most “progressives” would not have risked life and limb to hide Anne Frank’s family.  Most don’t want to risk losing cocktail party invitations.  Betrayal of these women isn’t simply lying about her to cover up wrong doing.  It’s expecting her to meet you in an out-of-the-way cafe so you won’t be seen with her.  It’s coming up with a contrived excuse for not supporting her, e.g. “She’s not qualified” or “I’m not comfortable with how she brought this forward. She's just not a good poster child for this issue.”

There is a bottomless reservoir of conscious-numbing salve used by those who just don’t want to get any of the pain on them.  A lot of people like to quote Martin Luther King that character is shown by what you do in times of controversy.  It’s just not something they want to do.  People like to say they’ve done the best they can, but only if their “best” won’t cost them anything.

Our enemy isn’t the right wing.  Our enemy is our delusion that we’re any better than any of them. That log in our own eye requires our attention now.

You Have Been Warned

I’ve been here before.  It was 1989.  I stood in Nollen Plaza in Des Moines, the state of capitol of Iowa, and said:

“Terry Branstad (my governor) is a murderer!”

People had a real problem with my saying that, even after I explained I only said it because it's true.  By the end of that year, the death count due to complications from HIV/AIDS would reach nearly 90,000. The first reported case was in 1981, and 618 had died by 1982.  There was no federal or state funding for research or treatment of the disease.  (Contrast this, if you will, to the all-out federal government and CDC response when 34 people had died from Legionnaires Disease a few years earlier in Philadelphia.)

I had a clever friend name named Rick Graf who would, tongue-in-cheek carry around a chart showing AIDS/HIV funding in “thousands of dollars” with a huge “0” next to it.  It killed Rick in 1995.

It was because people hated gay people, and they were okay with letting gay men die.  To object to these deaths was considered “being political” or being supportive of homosexuality.  A position even only a fraction of gay people wanted to take in public then.

But, I’d had it.  I’d begun to lose friends, good men, gifted men, and no one seemed to care.  The red ribbon I wore was problematic at my job.  I was accused of being “disrespectful” and “in your face” of those who thought it was wrong to be gay. 

“But people are dying,” I’d say.

“I know,” they’d say, “but….”

The “buts” were always stupid and thinly veiled in bigotry and self-interest.  It wasn’t as if I was without self-interest.  I didn’t want my friends to die--one in particular, my soul-mate and life’s best friend a gay man named Michael.  I made a secret pact with God, that if I took any sling or arrow thrown my way to stop this travesty, that he would spare Michael.  It killed Michael in 1996.

However, the truth has a way of winning, and justice won’t shut up.  Little by little, by too damned little, people joined the few; and the few became the many.  It took a little boy named Ryan White dying of AIDS to shift the paradigm.  Still, in 1991, when the Ryan White bill was finally passed, my “liberal” Democratic senator Tom Harkin, made a point of announcing that the bill was for those “who didn’t get AIDS on purpose.”

Michael and I went to one of the last showings of the AIDS Quilt in 1992 on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C.  He was sick by then and gaunt.  It ripped my heart in ways I can’t talk about much without weeping.  I still hoped he would live, you see.  We joined an Act-Up Demonstration and helped wrap a red ribbon around the White House.  We sat on the wet grass behind the White House on Xeroxed photos of George H.W. Bush.   Bush the first, would lose the election in a few months.  We prayed for that.  We believed Bill Clinton would do everything for gay people.  He didn’t.  He passed laws against us, in fact.

I sometimes sit alone in my living room and become very quiet.  I allow myself to feel the vacuum of the presence of all we lost because of an irrational hatred that is still given too much berth.  I imagine Michael’s clothing designs, Kevin’s musical gifts with children, Kerry’s exquisite talent as a concert pianist, Allan’s magical fiber creations, David’s beautiful baritone voice, Bill’s compositions….  I literally could go on all day.

We have no comprehension of the beauty that was stolen from our world because we let these men die.  It gutted the artistic community in a way that’s never been acknowledged.  Our souls have been irreparably damaged by this, and we don’t know have an inkling as to the totality of that damage.

Still, I survived.  But barely.  I’d struggled with clinical depression my whole life, but I didn’t know it yet.  I self-medicated with booze and a lot of it.  My emotional immune system was so worn down, that even a relatively mild blow would leave me in total darkness.  I didn’t know how to take care of myself and instead let my passion do the driving.  I would dovetail quixotic efforts for justice rather than rest in between.  I was furious with people who wouldn’t help.  I was flattened by good friends who, out of self-interest, would be betray me.  I attempted suicide six times.  It would take a good decade before I was properly diagnosed and received the treatment I needed. 

Then, one day in late 2012, a weird, miraculous drop of grace tickled my soul while I was having a goofy memory about myself, and I fell in love with me.  I’d never loved myself, but suddenly I did.  I became very protective of me in every way.  I became whole enough to know what being whole meant.  Ironically, this dissolved my resentments and left me better able to love and forgive.  Who’d have thought?

I’ve been here before.

Hillary Clinton is a murderer.  So is every member of Congress who is not a co-sponsor of HR676, the Single Payer Bill in Congress, which includes my congressman, Dave Loebsack.  Yes, David, you’re a murderer.  So, is every supporter of Health Insurance companies, an enterprise that every second of every day commits genocide with glee.

Others may not call it murder to let people die when the resources exist to save them, but I do.  So, there you have it.  Why mince words?  I really doubt the insurance companies will close shop or politicians will stop capitulating to them if I ask them nicely.

Only this time it’s poor and low-income people we hate.  I believe Hillary Clinton is of brilliant intellect, and I don’t believe Dave Loebsack is stupid.  They know we can afford Single Payer.  They know, in fact, it would cost us less than how we’re doing it now.  They know that until we have a Single Payer system that guarantees healthcare for everyone that some will suffer and die.  They know it.  God help their souls, they’re just lying about it to protect their own self-interests.  I’m truly sorry if this offends Hillary or Loebsack supporters, but it’s the God-blessed truth, and lives depend on someone telling it.  Imagine holding your dying friend and having some politician say we might get to your problem by 2020.

"Incremental change" or "doing what we can" is a lot hooey for not doing what needs to be done.  Or, at the very least being square with people about the reality of this mess.

Obamacare may have helped a few, but it’s not even a drop in the bucket that needs to be filled.  Don’t worry, the GOP isn’t going to get rid of most of Obamacare, especially the subsidies.  Stop believing the Bullshit Partisan Food Fight Theater.  The empirical evidence of what I’m saying is pretty easily available if you care to look.  The insurance companies want that cash, and their toadies will make sure they get it.  They’ll just increase the premiums and deductibles and the fines for not having insurance until we’re paying hundreds each month to them for nothing.  What a God-forsaken racket.

America hates poor people.  Americans make fun of how they dress, what they eat, how they talk, where they shop, and the music they love.  We’re just not that bothered if they suffer and die.  It’s not as if it’s happening to people who matter.  Admit it.

As I type this, I am keenly aware that there are millions who are suffering and in pain but afraid to go to a doctor. 

“What if I spend that money, and it’s only a virus?”

“I can’t miss work.”

“I wish there were a free or cheap clinic where I live.”

“I can’t spare the $50 to get in at the online clinic right now.”

Most will live.  Some will not.  They’ll have something serious that needed immediate care or an infection will turn to sepsis that a $4.00 antibiotic would have cured if they could afford to see a doctor to write the prescription.  The least consequence they’ll suffer is being terrified (actually terrorized), and feel pain longer than that should have.  That is inhumane and wrong by any standard of decency.

The number who are killed for being poor looks like an afternoon in the park compared to the AIDS/HIV epidemic.  Approximately 26 million Americans can’t afford the healthcare they need.  A little more than 100,000 of them will die this year. I believe these people are human beings who matter.

Therefore, I intend to do all in my power to make a living hell of the lives of anyone who stands in between me and an end to this holocaust.  I survived.  And, I’m much better now at taking care of myself.  And, I’m old now anyway.

Let me be perfectly clear, I want health insurance companies to die, and I’ll do anything I can to make that happen.  They are evil.  It’s past time to call them that.

AIDS taught me something.  If I yell loud enough, long enough, people will start to listen.  Oh, they may hate me.  They may say dumb-ass drivel like, “It’s not what she says, it’s how she says it.”  They may form bullshit committees and project that I’m not allowed to join. I don’t bloody care.

You have been warned.  I’m going to keep screaming my head off until Single Payer is the law of the land.  You know sort of like every other industrialized nation in the world?  As my friend Rick used to say, “Silence=Death.  So, I’ll just keep talking, thank you.”

Mona Shaw is a grandmother of six and a high school graduate who lives in the low-rent district in a small town in Iowa.

For Whites Only

I remembered this morning, in disturbing detail, listening to a group of white college students, in 1970, singing “Colored Spade” from the musical “Hair” at the top of their lungs and giggling because it gave them permission to say racist epithets. 

I know white people are more racist than they’re willing to admit.  I know this because I’m white.  You see, when I’m in the room with only white people, they say things about Black people that they wouldn’t say if Black people were in the room.

I’ve never been in a group that was strictly white and when the subject of race came up that someone did not say something derogatory about Black people.  The least racist was, “I don’t feel sorry for them because…”

I’ve heard the jokes, the derogatory names, and the contrived reasons “Black people get what they deserve.”  I’ve listened ad nauseam to the too-quick assumptions that if a Black person was hurt that they “undoubtedly did something to bring that harm on themselves.”

I’ve heard the “nacho cheese” joke, the “Polack marrying the nigger” joke, the “impotent” joke, and witnessed countless Amos and Andy style impersonations.  When I objected,  I’ve been told, far more often than not, that I had no sense of humor—“It’s only a joke.”

I remember being cautioned as a child for holding coins in my mouth because “a nigger might have touched that.”

I heard a woman object to a Black woman in a Zest commercial who said “I don’t use soap, and I bet I’m cleaner than you.”  That white woman said, “There’s no way that nigger is cleaner than me.”

I heard a relative tell me to stare at an interracial couple in the car behind us, “They deserve to be stared at!”

I heard a preacher’s wife tell me interracial relationships were “sick.”  I heard an esteemed Christian elder in my church say the week after Martin Luther King was murdered, “That nigger got a better funeral than Christ.”

I heard a relative at the planning of my grandmother’s funeral ask about my bi-racial cousins, “Are the nigger babies going to be there too?”

I remember a sister giggling when she left a family gathering and announcing how she was “heading to Angular Street (Burlington’s Black neighborhood) to do some coon hunting.” 

I remember hearing endless griping about how Black people kept wages low, because “those niggers will work for anything.”

I remember hearing a man say, the morning after Obama was elected, "That nigger isn't my president."  He said that loudly at the breakfast buffet at the motel where I was staying.

Some of my memories are from the past.  (What memories aren’t from the past?)  But it hasn’t changed so much, not really. 

There is a sign now in my city’s buses that lists the rule “Don’t use the “n” word,” because, well, it’s been a problem.

Just like week, a pizza delivery person told me she didn’t like that Black people had been hired. “I’m not racist,” she said, “I’m just not comfortable around Black people.”

I’ll repeat what I said to her.

I grew up poor and working class, so I know that my people have been brainwashed by rich white people to believe that the Black man who’ll steal their job is their enemy.  I know how enduring the endless class epithets of poor people being stupid, lazy, and worthless, leads some to believe that “at least” they’re better than someone out there.

I’m more patient with the racism among poor and working class people because of this.  (Also, I’m related to some of these people.)  I try to be gentler because I need for them to see we share a common enemy: the wealthy class who pits us against one another to control us and keep us all subservient to them.  I try to tell them, “It’s wrong!  It’s bloody, deadly, ridiculously, masochistically wrong.  And until we get that piece (and more), our lives will never improve.  Ever.”

It’s also true, that many poor and working class people agree with me.  In nearly every situation of racism in an underclass gathering, one of them will have my back if I object.  Things can get pretty lively after that, but when I’m with more than five poor white people, I’m rarely alone.

That’s how poor and working class people are different.  I’ve never been a group of only affluent white people when I wasn’t alone in objecting.  Everyone else remained silent.  Oh, later, some would agree with me.  Some would pat me on the back for “speaking up.”  Just as many, though, would reprimand me for “making people feel uncomfortable.

One of more mendacious memes spread willy-nilly in our culture is when a “racist” is portrayed as a “hick” in a hard hat.  Poor people don’t have that kind of power.  They can be as ignorant as licking a frozen pipe, but they are not the Master.  The masters of racism sit in board rooms in $2000-dollar designer suit.  That’s the image that should be in those memes.

It’s not simply that I’ve seen racism no less among affluent white people.  It is, however, more threatening and dangerous.  These white people have power to hire, fire, and set policy.

Their racism has no oppressive circumstance.  They’re just aggrandizing another privilege in their already too privileged lives.  They seek to buttress their sense of social superiority.

I watched a university faculty member become indignant and offended (“I can’t be racist.  I married a woman from the Middle East!”) because a Black student objected to being told by that professor, “Buckwheat say ‘O-tay!’” every time he answered a question correctly in class.

I heard faculty endlessly claim that the reason there weren’t Black people on university faculty was because “they’re just not as good.”

I had a white, male, singer in a university opera--in spitting anger--accuse me of “kissing the ass of that Black bitch” because he thought I gave an African American singer more attention than I gave him.

There was never a single faculty search during the 17 years I worked at the University of Iowa School of Music that I didn’t hear some white, male, faculty member gripe, “Affirmative Action is going to make us hire some Black or Puerto Rican lesbian.”  

I remember--40 years after MLK’s death--listening to a professional white woman explain to me the “difference between African Americans and niggers.”

Regardless of class, I have seen and continue to see racism so often in groups of white people that I’ve even wondered—though I know this is not true—if Black people know just how bad racism is.

The best evidence of our reluctance to look at racism may be illustrated by how perturbed white people can get when others want to talk about racism.  When something is really healed, it doesn’t bother people to talk about it.  It’s not talking about racism that separates people of a different race.  It’s when we refuse to talk, or discourage talking about it, that leaves us keeping each other at least at an arm’s length.  We white people might want to be more interested in learning if our words, thoughts, and actions exacerbate racism than our hurt feelings that someone might think we’re racist. 

I’ve done this.  Yeah, it really stings when someone thinks I’m racist.  But I lived through it, and I became a better person by listening.  It’s not about me, and it’s not about you.  We’ll never be the experts on when something is racist or not.  We’re white.  If you’re against racism, and I believe most white people at least want to be.  Let’s acknowledge the racism still present in our culture.  Let’s work together to end the cruel and bloody legacy of slavery and all of its tropes.

There is not a single epithet in the song “Colored Spade” that I’ve not heard come from a white person’s lips with derogatory intention from every white socio-economic class, and I still do.

So, please don’t try to tell me that racism isn’t so bad in the United States.  I know better.  I’m white.