sounding like the enemy

Someone I have known for a long time said to me that I sound disturbingly "like a conservative".

I suppose it's true enough. This election has been bringing a lot of rage to the surface. Many years' worth.

Yeah - I'm angry at the Democrats. And I have more sympathy for the conservatives than I would have thought possible six months ago. The belief that the Republicans are the cause of everything that is wrong with the USA has become unsustainable for me.

I have watched - sometimes alarmed, sometimes amused - as the religious wingnuts who have taken over the local schools have behaved really outrageously. But I have only recently become aware that the liberals, giving as good as they get, are the other half of a looming hurricane - each side feeding the other in a series of ever-more-inappropriate feedback loops. And it makes me angry, because there are kids in the middle. Schools ought to be one place where the kids' needs come first - before politics.

Then there is grief. I have known for years, of course, that affirmative action cost myself and my family a lot. Affluent liberals can insist that reverse discrimination never really hurt anyone, but when you're the one who sucks it up, you know a lie when it smacks you in the face. Until this year, my consolation was the thought that my loss was setting things right. I liked that thought. An injustice for an injustice is okay, when you believe it's really making the world a better place. But I can't believe that any more - and so there is grief. I am mourning the loss of the belief and the faith and I am feeling instead the sting one feels when one realizes one has been used. There are twin wounds, both feeling very sandpapered at the moment; there is anger that my fellow poor people are being manipulated and 'played', and there is anger that I got 'played'. And I feel stupid for not recognizing years ago that this ain't between me and no black community. This is between me and some rich white guy who decided to pass the buck when it came time for him to pay his moral debts.

There is anger at the feminist movement, where I suddenly feel a lot like the stereotypical taken-for-granted housewife. For years I accepted that feminists could spare no time, attention, energy or resources on any of the problems I cared about, because they were out there doing battle on the front lines on behalf of someone else. But now I ask, why was it, when I quit my job because I couldn't find day care, why did they lecture me on how I was failing them? As if my weakness were some sort of betrayal to the sisterhood or something. When I say I couldn't find day care, I mean I couldn't find any, affordable or not. The jobs available to me required working nights and weekends. There ain't no such thing as day care on nights and weekends - not unless you've got kin. Even the day shift was a real problem. Local day care resources said you pick your kid up by five - and since day care is the only profession in the universe that finds the very concept of "overtime" to be a moral outrage and an abuse, well, if you're not here by exactly six o'clock, we're assuming that you're deliberately exploiting us and we're handing your kid over to the police as an abandoned child. (No kidding.) So the day job I had always ended with me sitting terrified in traffic, hoping please dear God I wouldn't be late.

But here's the thing - the feminist movement consisted of lots and lots and lots of women. Why didn't they do something about child care, other than lecture the women who couldn't find any? I was living in one of the largest cities in the USA at the time. We all had problems with day care (I know that because all the day cares had waiting lists). If they'd cared half as much about me as they expected me to care about them, they coulda organized a co-op and we could have all watched each others' kids.

I can hardly think of any liberal issue - the very issues I have cared most about over the years - without feeling a surge of resentment. The environment? Why was it young mothers who had to put their kids in cloth diapers - how come nobody ever suggested the affluent rich liberal males wipe their backsides with cloth not paper?

So yeah - I'm fed up. And it doesn't help that the conservative-pretending-to-be-liberal media is lining up, chanting "white trash, white trash" everywhere I look. Where is the Democratic outrage, the concern for equality and justice for all?