transmothra - signs of the collapse

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

Finally, the United States of America has confidantly voted into office its first black President, and today is the first day of the Future after all. I am so proud again to be an American.

We owe a tremendous debt to black, female, latino, and other “minority” voters, many of whom have until today been disenfranchised - not just for what they have done today, but for what they have done in the past to bring us to this moment.

I can’t help but recall the more joyful lines of Walt Whitman’s loving ballad to his President:

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won.

(Of course, i have omitted stanzas which are not needed and do not serve this day; the poem, after all, is an elegy.)

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

We voted today.

• Poll workers didn’t know what they were doing. One lady was on the phone with the Board of Elections the entire time, asking a new question for virtually every single voter. They could not locate the provisional ballots initially.
• Holly, who registered and until today showed up on the local Board of Elections web site, had to vote via provisional ballot. I did not. She and i both independently witnessed two other couples having the same problem. The poll worker said that it had been happening. But also insisted that Holly wasn’t registered, and that the web site had provided incorrect information. How the web site would even have her name is beyond me.
• We had zero privacy. There were no boundaries, and i filled out my ballot within inches of people standing in line who could all see every choice i made very clearly. Thankfully, did not get lynched afterward for voting strongly anti-American.
• Also, there were only two tables set up for filling out ballots, and two chairs for each. Holy fuck that is not going to get people in and out, or entice people to wait when it takes hours and hours to get to that miserable but glorious point.

However, do not let these things stand in your way! If you have problems:

• Contact your local Board of Elections,
• Contact your local and/or national party HQ,
• Contact 1.866.OUR.VOTE, and
• Make your local media aware of the situation

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

My old friend Jason Stafford died Sunday morning from ALS or complications thereof at ~7:45am.

The obituary will run tomorrow in at least one local paper (thanks Tillie and Travis and Kevin and Dani). You can find the obits for the Dayton Daily Nothing and the Springfield News Sucks at the following addresses:

http://www.legacy.com/dayton/Obituaries.asp
http://www.legacy.com/springfield/Obituaries.asp

Viewing Wednesday 6-8pm
Funeral 11am Thursday
Gilbert-Fellers in Brookville
http://www.gilbert-fellers.com/

Will be seeing you there, in blackest black.

I wrote an essay about my friend here:

http://jeremyjarratt.com/2008/11/03/in-memory-of-froot-loop/

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

This is an open letter to white people, to poor people, to working stiffs, and everyone in between. This is not directed at those whose conditions are extremely comfortable.

I have a number of friends who have confided in me their fear that if Barack Obama gets elected, he will work to ensure that blacks thrive and whites suffer, or something to that stupid effect. This is something i simply do not understand, and i hesitate to call those people ignorant buffoons - but it’s difficult not to.

I believe that one of the biggest social problems in America today is that minorities feel disenfranchised. I know from experience that it’s hard not to wallow in misery when you’re depressed beyond the will to live. Maybe i’m completely wrong, but i think that minority groups are overflowing with people who feel that there is no real hope - and the natural fringe elements that are set to negative action, either in abject hopeless despairing nihilism, simple apathy, or as a means to an end. It’s sad to see this happen in the colorful but hopeless ghettos across America (just as it is sad to see it happen in salt-white Appalachia, etc., only perhaps more so within minority communities, due to the fact that it almost certainly could have been prevented generations beforehand).

Can you imagine the positive potential of having a President who is not white, inspiring people of all colors, all over America, with the idea, realized, that anyone truly can be what they want to be, do what they want to do, and become who they most wish they could be? Can you imagine people - of all stripes - actually living up to their full potential, or at the very least, earnestly trying to do so? I don’t know, it just sounds like a promising idea to me.

“But I feel disenfranchised,” whines the white friend, in mock-misery, either not realizing or not caring that they sound as if they truly believe themselves to be somehow more important than anyone else.

And of course you do - there’s no need for the belligerent, dramatic moaning. But you are not just an angry white male. Of course you feel disenfranchised - you are; you make less than half what your boss makes, while doing more than twice as much actual work! (Should your boss pay more taxes than you? Perhaps we might ask: should you, who makes far less than your boss does, pay less taxes than your boss pays?)

You are a member of the largest single group in America today: the working poor. You are a member of the majority. If you are a white male, you are a member of multiple majorities. What can the largest group of people do if they pool their efforts?

What can the majority do?

You are not without power. You can affect change. We can change the world. And we will, but we have to do it together.

The real minority in this nation is the wealthy. But they are not without tremendous power! The power that the rich have been enjoying for centuries dwarfs the kind of power that you and i can ever even imagine yielding. And yet, we are the majority.

I have heard many claim that the United States is a meritocracy; it is no more a meritocracy than it is a magical wonderland of lollipop-cities filled with rainbow-riding unicorns. The United States is currently a plutocracy; an oligarchy; an aristocracy, ruled over by a minority of the extremely wealthy.

It’s time to take our country back from the hands of the merciless, the pitiless, the rich plutarchs who tell the rest of us what to do and hold us down so they can continue to sit on our breaking backs with their sacks of pilfered riches. Stand up, you workers, and let those riders fall where they may!

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

(I posted this as a response to some angry and unpleasant conservative’s blog post comment, and figured if i was going to do any research at all, i may as well reap the benefit of publishing it here as well, since that person might not be able to read very well anyway.)

McCain is 72 and has had melanoma. That means skin cancer. The average life expectancy in the U.S. is currently about 75 years for males. And he was a smoker for many years of his life, quitting in 1980 when he was about 44.

You do the math.

If McCain’s elected, we MAY very well wind up with a backstabbing moron who thinks dinosaurs and humans coexisted a mere few thousand years ago, speaks in tongues, believes in witches, can’t pronounce the name of the thousands of planet-killing warheads she’s going to have her hands all over, and thinks that the END of the fucking WORLD is a GOOD thing(?!!).*

But she winks and says something folksy (meaning, retarded and hillbilly) and mindless Republicans all over the country swoon.

It never fails to shock me how brutally ignorant conservatives are.

*in my book, anyone who WANTS the world to end is on the side of evil. Like Doctor Doom evil.

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

So… if Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in evolution… can we call her unevolved?? And nobody even gets upset??? Really?!

Sarah Palin

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.