We're busy(ish) again, but busy in that really brutal way of only being semi-productive during office hours and then finishing the day off with an 11th hour panic that comes in at 6:30 pm. Last night, I got home just after the babies were tucked in, and I snuck into their dark room to say goodnight. Loo asked me why I didn't get home early and why daddy wasn't home (he has evening classes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays). Kali heard me talking to Loo and burst into tears, wanting to be picked up.
I cuddled the (big) little one in my lap and told the (little) big one a "lights-off" story before leaving them to sleep.
After getting home "on time" pretty consistently over the past 3 months, I think they're taking my re-upped work schedule a little harder than when they hardly saw me at all last year. J and I are too tired to have the whole "why can't we move to a more reasonable part of the country" argument again. I know why. Because even when I do my internets searches for available jobs, there are none in the cities I most want to be in. *Sigh* For the time being, I guess I'll have to resign myself to being happy that the loans are being paid off and that the girls are getting fed.
***
J and I had a huge argument last night about HRC's win in the Pennsylvania primary. I told J that if I was Obama, I would say, fuck it, quit the democratic race and become McCain's VP. Because there would be nothing that would please me (if I was Obama) more than to truly screw the Clintons once and for all from their holy grail.
Not because Obama is some sort of saint – there's no point talking about one candidate taking the high road and the other not, the whole race is tawdry and tainted at this point. But because once again, it seems inordinately clear to me that we are a country courting mass retardation.
Because, apparently, rather than trying to learn about the credit crisis (too hard) or the food crisis (too hard) or the problems with the tax system (too hard) or even why it really would be problematic to pull out of Iraq without some sort of miracle happening in the next year (too hard), the electorate decided to spend a whole week waxing about how Obama is too friggin' elitist.
Yup, that's right, apparently the biggest problem plaguing America is the possibility that we might have an elitist president.
From The Economist:
The war between "ordinary people" and "condescending elites" is one of the great themes of American politics. "Ordinary people" are real Americans: they worship God, revere America and love their families. "Condescending elites" are crypto-Europeans – the sort of people who eat arugula, do sissified jobs in offices and universities and scheme to ban guns and legalize gay marriage. Mr. Obama not only put himself firmly on the "wrong" side of this great cultural divide; he implied that "ordinary Americans" are the victims of "false consciousness" for not falling in love with him.
But this pandering to "ordinary Americans" is annoying in all sorts of ways. Isn't America supposed to be a meritocracy? Two-thirds of Americans reject the idea that people's chances in life are determined by circumstances that are beyond their control, a far higher proportion than in Europe. Almost 90% say that they admire people who have got rich through hard work. Yet whenever elections come around politicians treat the people at the bottom of the heap as the embodiment of American values. And aren't Americans supposed to believe in self-reliance? America's farms are some of the country's biggest subsidy hogs... [And] as for family values, America's small towns and rural havens suffer from higher rates of marital breakdown and illegitimate births than the degenerate big cities.
But pander the politicians feel they must.
Fuck.
If there are elitists in this country, then I am most certainly one. I went to an ivy, I am a lawyer, I eat arugula. I associate with a hell of a lot of other elitists. Elitists who, for the most part, have stories just like mine – one generation from being poor farmers, parents who gave up everything so that their children could succeed. I am wary of organized religion, but that comes from a long history of being a lone Buddhist isolated in a proselytizing Judeo-Christian world. That's just personal. And I detest guns. Because they're loud and they're scary and they kill people.
I also know that I love this country in a way that only someone who immigrated from a far more oppressive, far poorer country could ever love America: with reckless abandon, and open to heartbreak. I love this country so much that for a full year in junior high school, every one of my outfits was made up of red, white and blue. (Seriously. I have pictures to prove it. Now you know why I got beaten up as a kid.) I turned myself from a 98 pound weakling to a modest athlete so that I could apply to one of the military academies because I wanted to serve my country. I love this country despite the fact that there are still people here who think I should "go back to where I come from."
I love this country so much that I feel heartbroken all over again when Americans says that Obama was talking down to them, condescending to them when what I heard was him saying: "Americans, you are bitter, and you know what? You have every friggin' right to be bitter." When did it become easier to connect with blue collar America by swilling some beer with them than giving them better health care, a social security program that will not go bankrupt, a truly progressive tax system, a fighting chance to become an elitist?
Why are we the country where it is cool to be anti-aspirational? You can bet that those factory workers in China, in India, in Mexico and Poland, they're not hoping that their kids grow up and land a nice factory job too. They're saving every damn penny so that their kids can go to school 12 hours out of the day (again, not kidding, the Chinese kids don't get out of their bu-shi-bans, or after-school tutoring programs until 9/10 at night), get a professional degree, and become an elitist too.
So, hate them condescending elitists? Well, good, because the way we're going, it looks like you ain't gonna have to put up with them for long, since they'll all be foreigners.
