bts

Back to school...
Whoo-hoo!!

Paige is starting her senior year (!)
Brittani is a junior this year,
and Maya is now a big 2nd grader-- the big kid in her 1-2 multi-age classroom.

Wayne and I went out for coffee after we took Maya to school, and we were talking about how in just two more years, only Maya will be heading off to school in early September. Paige and Brittani will hopefully be in college, so they would begin in late September.

Weird.

Okay, now on to the big stuff: the whole freaking Sarah Palin thing, which has been making me CRAZY since last week.

My initial reaction when Wayne awoke me with the news on Friday that McCain had made his choice: good for McCain for being bold enough to choose a woman as his VP. Then I was irritated as hell that the first female VP could be a woman whose political stance tends to be unfriendly towards women, children and families. Oy. Those crazy Hillary supporters will now go to McCain just because the VP has a vagina.

I won't sway from Obama-Biden because they support policies that I believe in. I am pro-choice, and I want that protected for generations to come; I want a national health care system that will provide care for ALL Americans regardless of income. Health care should be accessible for every one of us; we shouldn't be bankrupted due to medical bills that can amount into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; we shouldn't have to avoid getting care because we can't afford a $100+ doctor visit (see this episode of 20/20).

I feel like we could probably skedaddle out of Iraq sooner rather than later, and tons of money that could be allotted towards health care and education is being diverted to war funds. I'm really not an expert on governmental spending, but I am smart enough to know that war is costly in many ways.

The thing that has been driving me absolutely insane when I listen to liberals on the radio is that they are focusing on the wrong things when discussing Palin. They shouldn't worry about her lack of experience or be so sexist as to suggest (or outright state) that she cannot be a good mother and a good politician. They must not be able to hear what they sound like. It's sick. How long have women had to hear such things? Decades. Generations, even. But from liberal Democrats??? It is, quite simply, embarrassing. Do women need to wait until their children are grown before they can pursue positions in male-dominated careers? Do women need to choose which is more important: career or family, while men can have both. That doesn't sound like equal rights to me. That doesn't sound like a liberal perspective to me, either. Who are these people?

I have heard liberals on talk shows even say that Palin should not have birthed the most recent addition to the Palin family. Sick. As a woman who is pro-CHOICE, I support women who choose to birth and those who choose to abort, but I would never suggest that a woman should have aborted her child or that she should have kept a child that she aborted. I swear, some of these people are just so freaking flustered that McCain chose a woman, while Hillary is left hanging, that they will attack like mad dogs.

And of course, Monday a bomb was dropped: Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is 5 months pregnant.
OMFG.
Sarah Palin is obviously an unfit mother who cannot even manage her family properly, so how do we entrust her to help run a country???
Please.
Teenagers get pregnant. Teenagers who live in places like Alaska get pregnant. I wonder what the teen pregnancy rate is in Alaska. There are certain places where there is nothing for teenagers to do but drink beer and have sex. I lived in a place like that when I was a teenager, and I imagine that Alaska is similar. Oh, I found a document, and Alaska and Washington have similar teen pregnancy rates, and they are pretty much in the middle for the nation. North Dakota with the lowest and DC has the highest, which kind of goes against my rural areas = more sex and beer theory. Oh well, I never claimed to have any idea of what I'm talking about.
Here's the link, btw.

My grandpa told me once that it was partly my parents responsibility that I was pregnant at age 18 (almost 19 and a high school graduate). What??? Um, my parents were nowhere near me when I conceived Paige. Ew. Granted, they never did have the "use condoms, oral contraception" talk with me, but I already knew about those things; I didn't value what they had to say at that point anyway. There comes a point in the teen years when a parent has no control over what's going on in the teenager's life. That's when you hope that you have instilled some good sense in the kid, but sometimes horniness wins out over good sense. I would have to say that 98% of the time horniness will win out over good sense, and then all that's left is the guilt afterwards. Well, sometimes there's pregnancy and/or disease afterwards, too.

Luckily, Bristol Palin has a ton of resources to help her with this whole having a baby thing. It really ain't no thang, her pregnancy. She will, most likely, turn out normal...as will her kid.

One thing that irritated me today when watching Good Morning America: they showed a picture of Bristol Palin wearing a basketball jersey that said JUNEAU across the front (like a high school photo--not a current photo). How annoying.

I hope the media begins to steer away from thrashing on Sarah Palin for being a woman and instead focus on the issues that really matter.