Terror hits home

My friend Laurie Olmon, whom I've written about before ("Candidate Confidential," August 2010) shared some distressing news with me: last weekend, persons unknown vandalized her campaign signs with the slogan BABY KILLER. In lipstick, an interesting choice.



At first, I reacted as I would to any friend who'd been bullied, with words of support, all very "you go, girl!" kinda stuff. I wasn't worried.

Hours later, I watched the video of the MoveOn worker getting her head stepped on by a Teabagger in Kentucky. I clicked links that would allow me to download Rachel Maddow's documentary "The Assasination of Dr. Tiller." I started to worry, and I remain so. Very, very worried.

Obviously, this vandal knows that Laurie does not literally kill babies. I've been called this name a few times myself--in the presence of my two young children, no less. No, the term "baby killer" is not meant to be a literal accusation; it is meant to invoke fear. "Baby killer" is a term that successfully whipped a lunatic like Scott Roeder into a homicidal frenzy. It transforms a debate into a fight, a discussion into a brawl, a disagreement into a head-stomping melee that puts someone in the hospital.

It means something to use those words. It means the same thing to Laurie and me as it did to Dr. George Tiller: YOU ARE A TARGET.

I don't mean to suggest that this vandal means to kill Laurie, any more than she (lipstick, remember?) truly believes that Laurie has committed murder herself. But isn't it something that this angry woman didn't write "FUCK OFF"? Nor did she scribble "YOU SUCK" or "I HATE YOU." She chose her words very carefully. She wrote what she did to scare the shit out of someone who put herself in the public eye to protect the rights of others.....not unlike a certain dead doctor from Kansas.

What to do? Here's a few ideas:

• Attend the Rally for Sanity Minnesota, Saturday October 30, in the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol. I will be speaking on behalf of the Cackle of Rads...er, Minnesota NOW around 12:45-ish, though that may change. Check my Twitter feed for updates: @radicalhw.
• If you have the means, consider making donations to the following: the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers in North America; the National Network of Abortion Funds, a group "connecting rights to resources," because a woman only has a choice when she can afford to pay for it; and the radical cacklers at the National Organization for Women.
• Vote next Tuesday like your life depends on it....because it does.

Autumn and impermanence

From the Upajjhatthana Sutta:

Birth will end in death.
Youth will end in old age.
Wealth will end in loss.
Meetings will end in separation.
All things in cyclic existence are transient, are impermanent.

The late fall is a very difficult time for me, for evidence of our cyclic existence is everywhere. As the leaves fall, we attempt to laugh at the specter of death by hanging plastic skeletons from trees and sticking gag gravestones in the dirt. I eat tiny Milky Ways by the bagful to keep my anxieties from taking me over.

Today is the 8th anniversary of the death of Paul Wellstone, and an essay I wrote for the occasion is up at Minnesota Public Radio News, called Paul Wellstone, a teacher in life and also in death. Wellstone is only the most famous person I mourn in October. On the 29th I remember the last time I spoke to another Carleton friend, Liz, who called from her hospital bed in 2007 to wish me a happy birthday. My grief for her feels so fresh that I remain shocked that three years have passed since she died.

I like Buddhist philosophy for its insistence that all things are connected. Death exists because life exists, and life is a good thing. Fear exists because hope exists. Chocolate exists! My children anticipate Halloween so intensely they quiver, just like I did in the days when I could disconnect skulls from the heads they used to live in.

The Uphajjhatthana Sutta also includes this reminder: [The Buddhas] cannot remove our suffering with their hands....I am my own protector.

That's the way my essay on Paul Wellstone ends. I just wish that mourning Liz were as easy as joining a campaign.

Smart People Into Kicking Emmer

SPIKE! Can you dig it? If you can come up with a better acronym, let me know. Tom Emmer must go down in flames come November.

There are so many reasons to detest Emmer that it's hard to pick just one. Regressive tax policy? Slashing our state's already pathetic social safety net? Support for racial profiling laws like Arizona's? Ugh. All of these positions are typical of a person who refuses, as the Native American aphorism goes, to walk a mile in another person's moccasins. If Emmer wants to experience the freedom from government that he claims to want, he ought to visit Mogadishu. While he's there, he can ask how many of the remaining citizens have relatives who emigrated to Minnesota. I suspect he'll find quite a few, as the Twin Cities area has the largest concentration of Somali expats in North America, and I don't think they came because they preferred the weather.

Last week I wrote up a press release on behalf of Minnesota NOW on what was just the latest evidence of Emmer's indifference to people who neither look, think, nor love like him:

October 13, 2010

All Minnesotans, regardless of party affiliation, are shocked by the recent spike in gay teen suicides across the nation. Here at home, 15-year-old Anoka resident Justin Aaberg took his own life in July, a desperate act his mother believes was motivated by unchecked bullying at her son’s school. Minnesota NOW, as a partner in the Safe Schools for All Coalition, hopes that renewed attention to this public health emergency will finally increase momentum for anti-bullying legislation that could do so much to protect vulnerable adolescents.

But that won’t happen if Tom Emmer is elected Governor, warns Shannon Drury, State President of Minnesota NOW.

When Rep. Emmer was asked by a Fox 9 debate moderator on October 9 how he’d respond to this crisis, Emmer said he does not support this kind of legislation. Rep. Emmer said, “we should all be able to have [our] point of view and respect each other but we don’t need more laws trying to get in between people.”

With this statement, Emmer implied that bullies are entitled to their so-called “point of view,” even as they harass and intimidate their peers quite literally to death. “Sexism and racism are also points of view,” says Drury. “Would Governor Emmer fail to enforce other Minnesota civil rights statutes as well?”

Minnesota NOW, the Safe Schools for All Coalition, and a bipartisan majority in the State Legislature supported the Safe Schools for All Bill that was vetoed by Governor Tim Pawlenty in May 2009. Today, State Senator Scott Dibble and Representative Jim Davnie (both DFL-Minneapolis) announced plans to re-introduce this bill in the upcoming special session. Minnesota NOW’s statewide membership applauds the Senators for moving this important bill forward.

Rep. Emmer claims “we don’t need more laws,” yet he supports a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage (Source: http://www.emmerforgovernor.com/issues/socialvalues/). “Apparently, Emmer does support more laws, after all—laws that reinforce his social agenda at others’ expense,” Drury says.

“Minnesotans are compassionate people. They want to do whatever they can to prevent another death like Justin Aaberg’s. They don’t want other parents to have to do what Tammy Aaberg did—bury her child.”

Dan Savage 2012!

This is too good not to repost in its entirety. From Seattle's The Stranger, October 11, 2010:

Confidential to the White House
by Dan Savage

Fuck you, you pack of co-opting cowards.

Seriously. You can do a more than offer hope. You have the power to make it better. Right now. Suspend enforcement of DADT. Don't appeal the decision by a federal judge that declared DADT unconstitutional. Stop defending DOMA in court. Keep your promises. Make it better. And if you're not going to keep your promises or do what you can to make it better, White House, then you could at least have the simple human decency to shut the fuck up.

State-sanctioned discrimination against LGBT people legitimizes the kind of anti-gay attitudes and beliefs that lead directly to anti-gay bullying at the ballot box and anti-gay bullying in schools. You can do more. Enough with the speeches. Enough with the pretty words—particularly lifted ones.

Fuck you.

"Choice" is dead.

...long live "choice."

Remember my Women's Press column about dropping the word from our activist vocabulary? My cat sure did. During an unusually thorough basement cleaning, we discovered my beloved sign from the 2004 March for Women's Lives in sorry condition indeed, for Brixie had pissed all over it.




I had no "choice" but to throw it in the garbage. Appropriate, don't you think?

Who cares about Minnesota girls? I do.

Today in Minnesota Public Radio News:

Girls need the right to confidential reproductive care, a commentary by Shannon Drury.

The hardest part of parenting is letting go, as Khalil Gibran recognized. I wrote on this subject a year ago for HipMama.com, in a piece titled "Growing Up is No Rainbow, or: Childhoodphobia!" Clearly I have some anxieties about how to raise a healthy, self-possessed daughter.

Her stubbornness and determination were on full display this morning, when she decided that, since the sun was not yet up, she wouldn't have to get ready for school (try explaining the earth's rotation to a grouchy five-year-old). As Matt always says, our job is to build her confidence to unrealistic levels so that when the outside world tears her down, she'll have plenty left over to survive, even thrive. I wonder if that's why she thinks she can control time.