Voting Against the "Undesirables" - A Guest Blog Post

It's been a busy year so far...

Okay, so busy is a relative term in this case. The first two months of the year, slow months work-wise, were mostly spent engrossed in video games. Having never played much of anything past a Wii (Mario Brothers and MarioKart, for the most part), and the odd Xbox Kinnect (hello, Rise of Nightmares), mostly because of lack of ability...it was a surprise when, shortly after Christmas, we picked up a controller and suddenly it all clicked. So, after spending the better part of two months engrossed in Halo ODST and Borderlands 2, it was time to come up for air. Work picked up, it's time for (continuing) training for our first 10K, and gardening season is right around the corner. Not to mention finishing the new garage and studio space so we can work on adding something to the growing collection of paintings. Then there's the matter of this blog. This poor neglected blog.

And Hey. It's election season, in case you hadn't noticed [that it never ends, really]. And what an election season it has been, eh?
While we have not bothered to write anything here regarding thoughts and feelings on the current political climate, you can be sure to find the Twitter and Facebook account riddled with thoughts and opinions like the bullet spray from an uzi.

This past week we came across a Facebook status written by a social media buddy Sean Swanson, and it pretty much summed up one of the concerns that had been rattling around in the back of this brain with all the usual garbage. So, instead of coming up with our own post that basically reiterates what he said, we asked if we could post what he wrote as a guest blog post. He happily accepted the offer.

Sean is a super guy, by all accounts a great father and husband, who, despite serious health issues, turned his life around a year ago and since then has lost a massive amount of weight.  He works hard at maintaining a healthy lifestyle in order to mitigate the symptoms of his illness. Witnessing his transformation has been awesome. He has been an inspiration to those who strive to stay fit, and meet their personal workout and health goals. He also supplies his Facebook friends with very hilarious memes and entertaining content, in between the serious intellectual bits. He is appreciated.

In a private conversion Sean made sure to mention that what he wrote here also applies to mental illness, which we agree with wholeheartedly.

Image Source

There are a lot of things to consider this election season before stepping up to that "ballot" box. The mature and conscientious voter will do so not simply thinking of what the candidate they favor can offer them, but what he/she can offer the country and the individuals in it, as a whole; a vote not motivated by blind hatred for swaths of fellow human beings; a vote not motivated by pure self-interest; a vote not motivated by false propaganda, by celebrity cult-like following, or by indoctrination of religious or party affiliation.
A vote by the people, for the people.

Without further adieu.

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Voting Against the Undesirables

I had a thought which frightened me this morning, and like most frightening thoughts it led to more frightening thoughts.

I have blood family who have told me to my face that if it's a choice between Clinton and Trump they will vote Trump. They say they don't support his hate or his rhetoric and I believe them, mostly. They say they support his views on this treaty or oppose hers on abortion, etc.
I get that. In more normal or reasonable times I would think that individual policies are legitimate reasons to vote for one candidate over the other.

But let's call it what it is. This man has a list of undesirables. Black people, Mexican people, Muslim people, gay people.

And then there's that other category, the one I'm in.

People with disabilities.

I don't look much different than an able bodied person, 9 days in 10 you couldn't tell the difference. But it's there. In my genetic code, I have cerebral palsy and substantial hearing loss and historically, people like me don't make it through the vetting process of men who espouse fascism.

Neither will my kids. They're both perfect. No disabilities of any kind. But they inherited my genes. They can and will pass down my weird mutations and undesirable traits to any children they might have.

So they go on the list. Can't have those pesky differences getting passed into the gene pool.

You might be thinking "Wait, Trump hasn't made mention of disabled persons."

But he has. Maybe not in a by line of his speeches but he has mocked disabled reporters at his rallies.

And does it matter?

He doesn't have to name off every person to hate to his supporters. They get the point. They know the Other.

"What is the cause of a pogrom? Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks - all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction.
They are not us.
We are not them."1

The fact is that if we have to choose between Clinton or Trump it is absolutely a choice of the lesser of two evils. But it's an evil of a magnitude greater than the other.

It's a choice between an opportunist who has often changed her moral standing with the siren call of the day, at best behind the times and at worst feckless, and a man who wants to label the Other.

Lots of other republicans I know have said they just won't vote if Trump is nominated. They'll abstain. In an election like this, a choice not to vote is an approbation of men like Trump. If enough people choose not to vote because they don't like either candidate much they're essentially handing the election the candidate who has so inspired such a furor of hate and his hard inner core of supporters who finally have a standard bearer for their hatred.

You will sanction him with your silence if you choose not to vote on Election Day.

Others might say "he can't change the structure of the United States, the president doesn't have that power."

Of course he can. Presidents pull in majorities for both the house and the senate every four years. It's called the coat tail effect. Essentially, congress people who wouldn't normally be electable gain office because they are in the same party of the presidential candidate and most voters vote straight ticket these days.

If you don't think a president can effect fundamental change in our nation with the backing of the house and senate just look at what President Obama accomplished in his first two years in office when he had a supermajority. Think of the harm he could have wrought, had he chosen to.

And think of that list of your neighbors, your friends, your acquaintances you chat with over the coffee pot at work, who all fall on the list of undesirables.

What makes America great is the diversity of her peoples. We are the melting pot. The bootstraps nation. The nation of refugees and outsiders effecting real and lasting change.

We are not homogenous. In point of fact, the founders of the nation came here to escape the homogenous old countries. Who only a handful of years after our nation's founding saw the rise of death camps in those old countries. And to those death camps went the list of undesirables, almost indistinguishable from the list of undesirables that Mr. Trump has presented time and time again.

We are better than this. We must be better than this.

"We are contrary creatures, us humans, but that isn't something we need be afraid of, or even much troubled by. And if you make a list of those people who worship consistency, you'll find they're one and all tyrants or would-be tyrants. Ruling over thousands, or over a husband or a wife, or some cowering child. Never fear contradiction, it is the very heart of diversity."- Steven Erikson

"We are not enemies, but friends, we must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it's must not break our bonds of affection." - Abraham Lincoln

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1 quote from The Malazan Boo of the Fallen Series

It's Our Birthday Post!

(This entry may seem to have little direction - we've been feeling a bot out of sorts the last 18 hours or so)

Yep, it’s our birthday.

We’re pretty sure at least half of us thought by the time we got to this age we’d have accomplished a lot more, somehow. Of course there is also those among us who thought we’d never see this age, or maybe it was more of a hope than it was a thought.

Last year for our birthday we went to Vegas for the weekend, worked a couple of days, then went to the lake with friends for the next weekend. It was probably one of the most enjoyable birthdays we had ever had that we can remember (we don't really remember any more than the last two or three, other than visits to the zoo for some of them). Towards the end of the week-long celebration last year the relationships with everyone (us and our inner working, friends, that with Significant Other) got strained and it wasn’t long before all of the connections began to unravel. But it was a fantastic birthday week.

Guess the icing on our birthday cake THIS year is losing our job (two weeks ago tomorrow) for seemingly bullshit reasons (mental illness, and some other stuff that they have no real validation for); and now being in a position where we are feeling like we are not qualified to do much and feeling very vulnerable, it’s proving difficult to find work in the city where we live.

“It’s gonna suck and be hard having to step back in skill level to find a job” we told The Father on the phone with morning when he called to wish us a Happy Birthday.

“Well, a lot of people are having to that now, honey” he replied.

“Yes, but we have just gotten to the skill level one up from being a cashier…” we said. (though we might make more money as a cashier, our end wage at the previous job was $11.85 an hour, as a manager, and we'd only been making that for about a month or so - it was a required wage increase after a year of employment)

It’s true, we do have a lot of skills, some of us are just not good at using them sometimes, which really makes us as a whole feel inadequate these days.

We have had awards for customer service in jobs we have had in the past; but then we got fired for our lack of them at this one (allegedly).

We’ve been commended on our ability to multitask and complete things- we’ve organized catering jobs and owned our own business for two year whose only downfall was its lack of funding for adequate advertising and a stable kitchen rental - but then in this last job, the one we got fired from, they stated our performance was poor. (There is no proof of this, or the performance stadards we apparently did not comply with, however)

When we brought this up with The Father, feeling like we lack people skills now, among other skills, sobbing into the phone the day we got canned, he defended us by saying that of course we did/do, that’s it’s just that this year has been a lot of stress, and confusion and difficulty for us, and that it’s made it hard.

He’s right, we know he is. Despite the fact we have disliked most people our whole life, we were better at covering it up like all the people who have to do it on a day to day basis (and we know they exist, they are among a huge percentage of our Twitter followers). This year without the skilled mask of The Other Girl it became hard for us to find the balance.

Like we told James the other night, The Other Girl was much better at stress management and many other things. I recognize she had a lifetime of dealing with everything, of learning skills to manage our situation, and I have just become fully in charge the last 6-7 months. He agreed and said that it’s not surprising that there is a learning curve.

The unfortunate side is that we were starting to hit our stride at work, have gotten so much better at overcoming the learning curve; even Important Boss agreed we had been improving, right before we got shit-canned. Too little too late…that’s the story of our life most of the time.

So, The Father offered us a place in his house today, when he called to wish us a happy birthday (and met James on Skype!), for a couple of months at least, while we try to sort things out, as an alternative to going to live with The Mother…and option we are still considering, at least for a couple of months, or through the winter, depending on how long it takes us to find a job in a nearby big Metropolitan city.

Living with The Father has its disadvantages, as much as living with The Mother. There are too many to state here, but James is helping us formulate a plan, a couple of directions we can take, as alternatives and if we indeed decide to live with one of our parents again.

It’s not New York (where we’d really love to move), but some day it could be - so this next week James and us are talking about taking a trip to the city where Baby Brother lives, so that we can check out the area, see if they have a neighbourhoods where we would feel comfortable, and check out job prospects.

It would be easier to write in more detail about where we plan to go, if we could talk about where we are located geographically, but for obvious reasons (especially given the recent unemployment) we still have to keep our real life name/ location/face secret, because despite what people who follow us think, and despite what people who know us think, it’s still scary to a potential employer to hire a person with mental illness, and it’s also harder to find a job if you’ve been as public as we are with our life and illness.

We really don’t blame them, employers and people, because it’s the lack of knowledge and understanding of mental illness in general that causes the fear, and one of the things we are attempting here with our writing in this blog is to help people understand that mental illness does not mean you are unemployable, it only means that to an employer. Mental illness does not mean you are scary, it only means that to people who refuse to understand. Mental illness doesn’t have to be hidden, it shouldn’t be.

It would probably be easy for us, in this next move, to be put on disability. Who are we kidding, it would be super easy. We’re just not willing to take that route, at least not in a permanent capacity, because we ARE capable of working, we’re even capable of management (which is what we used to do) – we DO have skills…it just takes an employer who is willing to be understanding.

It’s just a shitty time to be unemployed, no matter what country you live in, we know that. We only wish we could be eligible for unemployment/benefits of some sort so the stress of finding a job was just a little more decreased, because we want to work…we’re going mad over here with all this extra time that has to be devoted to tapping a dry job market.

Alright, enough about that…

On a note about us and our day with James yesterday at the museum, we didn’t mention it to him, even though he knows our Bethany has been missing (we have discussed, and others have agreed that he missing presence among us has probably been due to high levels of drinking) but she did make an appearance yesterday, twice…so she’s around again. We know he knows when she was here, he videoed her colouring at a table in the hands on science portion of the museum we went to.

It’s probably the curiosity over this new person in our life that made her finally show herself again. She was mostly uncomfortable and quiet during the time she decided to make an appearance, and then we were a bit uncomfortable when she left if…maybe she was here because usually we take her to the zoo on the birthday, and so she’s waiting to find out if we get to go this year.

Yes, we know the zoo is a sad place, she loves it though…

We’ll talk more about this and other things in a blog post, it’s our birthday and we are hungry and have things to do…like paint, watch a movie, play on Twitter, have James make us brunch and enjoy the day, and try to plan a trip to a secret location in the states for later next week….first order of business though is trying to figure out our mobile Tweeting options for when we leave the city we are in!

~Frank

Our 5th Birthday?