7.04.05: Fireworks on the Fourth ‹ Blog

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Voltaire

Fireworks on the Fourth

July 4, 2005

First of all, Happy Independence Day to all my American readers. Now let me explain why this country’s going to hell.

I was going to write a “funny and heartwarming” (Roger Ebert, The Sun Times) entry about the injured squirrel my husband and I caught on Friday, but this morning I’m in a very foul mood, and with good reason. Between the squabble for the new Supreme Court justice (damn you, Sandra Day O’Connor; you couldn’t have waited just a few more years?) and the Minnesota state government shutdown (stupid goddamn politicians can’t do their fucking jobs), I’m starting to feel like Caligula—if the country had one neck, I’d lop its bloody head off.

For my foreign readers, let me explain why the Supreme Court fiasco is… well, a fiasco: Sandra Day O’Connor strongly pro-choice, and was part of the thin majority that has kept abortion legal in this country. Now that she’s gone, Bush is going to sweep in and appoint a justice more in tune with his pro-life views—and abortion will go back to being a dangerous, dirty, back-alley affair. Don’t want your sister throwing herself down a flight of stairs in an attempt to induce a miscarriage? Don’t want your daughter to be found dead in a pool of blood, with a wire coat hanger as the cause? Then you’d better pitch a hell of a fuss to keep Roe v. Wade from being overturned. At the very least, go check out NARAL and send your senator(s) an e-mail.

I honestly thought I would get at least a few paragraphs out of that topic, but I find I can’t go on without feeling genuinely sick to my stomach. It’s like I’m stuck in a time warp, being dragged back to the turn of the last century, before women had the right to vote. Oh, but my gender is royally screwed right now.

For my out-of-state readers, let me explain what Minnesota’s government shutdown is about: our wormy governor, Tim Pawlenty, slithered into office on the traditional (if moronic) Republican platform of “no new taxes”—which, of course, always leads to trouble down the road, when the state needs money and the politician can’t go back on his word. Oh, he’s tried getting around it—adding “fees” to everything under the sun, cutting funding for state health care and libraries and other important things. Then along came the Democrats with their new funding plan, which would spend money on health care and other social programs. But wait—where will that money come from? Taxes? He’d already drained that well dry, and couldn’t plumb for anything more. Since raising taxes makes Republicans twitch, he came up with what must be the wickedest political plan since invading Iraq: threaten to shut down the government because there’s no money to run it, and blame the whole thing on the Democrats (because those spendthrifts want to spend money on state health care and other silly programs!). So, with the new fiscal year looming and no agreement on what programs and offices should be funded, the brilliant folks in charge decided to simply shut down all the programs that don’t have an official funding amount. Basically, a government shutdown is a real wrench in the state machine: state parks are closed, state health care immediately ceases to be effective, certain government programs and offices disappear, and a bunch of state employees get an unpaid two-week vacation. No one can get their driver’s license, because the Department of Public Safety is down. The Department of Health is operating on a limited basis—unless there’s an outbreak of bubonic plague, they’re going to be pretty much gone for the duration of the shutdown. There’s no set amount of time for the shutdown; until the parties agree on the funding, it’s a total blackout. If it’s longer than two weeks, though, all the state employees who are stuck in limbo get permanently laid off.

Pawlenty, always the weasel, has been acting like it wasn’t his idea, he never wanted it to happen, those gosh-darned Democrats are the ones screwing it up for everyone! Oy. Of course, Pawlenty made sure that the state parks stayed open, since spoiling people’s holiday weekends would mean lots of grumbling, and the people most likely to go vacationing at parks are the ones who aren’t really affected by this decision—well-off Republicans, who can afford health care and are snug in their private-sector jobs. Meanwhile, my mother can’t go to the dentist or the doctor because she has no health care; if she gets sick at all, she has to go to the emergency room and pay the full bill.

Call me naive, but I thought that when a person is getting paid to do a job, they’re supposed to do it, not throw up their hands and surrender. And since I’m technically paying these politicians’ wages, I’m feeling quite the angry boss right now. Pawlenty, who used to just make me shudder with revulsion, is now starting to affect me the same way our President does; I can’t listen to him, I can’t read about him, and I can’t watch his evil smirk for more than thirty seconds without throwing something at the TV. If Pawlenty continues at this level of incompetence, he should be President before we know what hit us.

Now that I’ve gotten those two rants off my chest, I feel a lot better. The situation may not have improved, but at least my head’s clear enough to let me sit down and decide what I can do to improve things. I’ve got to call various political offices to vent, I’ve got to sign various petitions, I’ve got to work a few organizational donations into my monthly budget—hell, if I’m done by noon, I might just sit down and type up a letter to the President. I tend to get active when I’m royally pissed.

It’s not that I don’t love my country; I just hate what it’s going through right now.