My Planned Parenthood

I've never used Planned Parenthood--I've been incredibly fortunate that my healthcare has been covered through my family for my whole life, and that my privilege to be a full-time at this point in my life has allowed me to keep that coverage into adulthood.

But that coverage has been dependent on a lot of things which were never certain--on my father keeping his job, on my maintaining a relationship with my father, on my ability to attend college and graduate school.  Without violating anyone else's privacy too much, I'll just say that I have both friends and family who currently or in the past have lacked health insurance to cover even the most basic care.  I have both friends and family whose health care is currently uncertain because it's being threatened by both state and federal budget cuts and government shutdowns, and being used as a bargaining chip by the so-called progressive left in this country.

I've been to Planned Parenthoods, various ones, several times, with friends who didn't have health insurance, who couldn't access health insurance for fear their parents would find out about their use of birth control, whose health insurance didn't cover the care they needed, who used to have health insurance, but who lost it due to unemployment, who had to leave college due to health issues and could no longer be covered by their parents' insurance, who left marriages and therefore lost health insurance.  Their lack of insurance has made me very aware of the temporariness, the contingency, of health insurance, and therefore care, in this country.

Emergency care is available to the uninsured in this country only to the extent that it stabilizes the emergency--care providers are under no obligation to treat the underlying problem which caused the emergency, or even to provide follow up care.  Government-assisted or -provided care is available on a contingent basis as well--contingent on what legislators believe to be moral, contingent on politically motivated budget cuts, contingent on the government staying open, which, as we're seeing on both a state and federal level, is not a guarantee.

I support Planned Parenthood because health care ought not be contingent.  It ought not depend on staying with an employer, in a relationship, on being born to the right parent, on maintaining a relationship with a parent, on student status, or on the moral, religious, political decisions of others, be they relatives or legislators.  Lacking either universal care or the political will to institute universal care in this country, I support Planned Parenthood because it offers care that is contingent on nothing more than individual need.

My Planned Parenthood

If you haven't heard already, Shakesville and What Tami Said will be hosting a blog carnival of posts in support of Planned Parenthood on July 7.  If you have been affected by access (or lack thereof) to Planned Parenthood, visit Shakesville or What Tami Said to see how to participate.  I have never accessed Planned Parenthood services myself directly; I'll be posting on the privilege which has enabled me to say that, and why it's important to me that Planned Parenthood be available (hint: it involves valuing affordable healthcare for everyone, even those who don't have the good fortune to be related to someone with a job which provides family healthcare).  If Planned Parenthood or affordable healthcare access is something you value, consider adding your own post.

In which links are substituted for content

Today is a sewing, errands, and perhaps even reading day, so here are some links that I'm thinking about.  The insightful Ethel Louise has a very smart post on the recent celebrations over Osama bin Laden's death, and her discomfort (which I share) regarding both the message such celebrations send abroad and their meaning for policy and thought at home.  While I saw my facebook overflow with the kind of nationalistic celebration at the news which is being reported in the media, I'm skeptical regarding the extent of such celebration.  The reports I've seen, at least of the street celebrations, seem to have been small in number and in participation, making me think that they are being reported out of proportion to the number of people participating in them.  Which makes me wonder why the media finds it important to focus on these celebrations--perhaps to convince viewers that the news of bin Laden's death is more important than it is, both symbolically and strategically?  EL has much more on the symbolic importance of the news.

Tenured Radical has a provocative piece on the intersection of war abroad and the war on women, responding in part to a piece in the Nation on the recent rollback of American women's access to basic health and reproductive services.  While teaching the 20th century history course this semester has been very difficult given my background, that course and the Obama administration's ambivalence towards the attack on half the nation's (and, through foreign aid spending policy, half the world's) population have convinced me of the conservative turn of both the GOP and the Democrats.  When Eisenhower, Nixon, and even Reagan look progressive compared to the sitting Democratic president, you know the left in this country is in trouble.  Which makes the use of socialist as a political slur all the more infuriating: what we have seen is the expansion of state power without the expansion of state protection.  Given the erosion of citizens' access to government after the Citizens United SCOTUS case, the non-wealthy in this country, especially women, are increasingly subject to the will of the government without a voice in its implementation.

In less upsetting news (or possibly more, depending on how you feel about sewing), I'm going to do So Zo's Me-Made-June challenge, and try to wear one item of self-sewn clothing during the month of June.  I'll be trying to take daily photos of what I'm wearing, but I'm only going to do weekly posts of the photos.  I like the idea of trying to move more away from purchased clothing, and I think I finally have enough clothing made to go for a month.  I'm planning on making a top or two to round things out, though, because I have a lot of dresses and skirts and not much else.

In RTW news, the jacket is coming along, but I'm stumbling on the handsewing in the jacket front.  Well, not so much stumbling as taking a long time.  I'm cheating all over the place by mixing methods.  I'm doing some of the RTW techniques, like the block fusing for some pieces, but the jacket front has different interfacing requirements, so I'm doing a mix of the pattern's couture methods and the pattern's suggested RTW methods.

As you can see in the photo, I'm doing fusible interfacing but also handstitching things like the tapes for the roll line and the pocket fold, as well as the pad stitching for the collar.  I also forgot somehow that the couture method requires an underlining (a layer between the outer shell fabric and the regular lining) to provide body, so I had to rip some seams and put in the underlining, which took some time.  It's also not benefiting from being schlepped around in my bag, which is the primary reason my knitting is on hold, because the second little sweater has suffered a few too many dropped stitches in my bag going from home to class for me to want to pick up for a while.  My jacket fronts were stuffed in my bag yesterday for between-class sewing, and suffered quite a bit of wrinkling in the interfacing.  It doesn't translate to the outer surface, but I hope it doesn't mean the interfacing will peel off at a later date from wash or wear.  Has anybody found a way to keep your bag from eating your projects?  (Or a way to follow the news without becoming totally disenchanted?)

On empathy, politics and feminism

Anyone who has been reading for any length of time knows that I've been struggling this semester with teaching a 20th century political history course far outside my background or training.  I just got done teaching The Conservative Ascendancy by Donald Critchlow and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory by Randall Balmer.  Critchlow writes about the social/political changes propelling the far right wing of the GOP into power since the defeat of Goldwater in 1964, and Balmer focuses on the social and emotional pull of evangelical Christianity in America.  What it's gotten me thinking about is the place of empathy in both politics and feminism.  Both Historiann and Echidne are relevant background readings for today's class.

The current narrative in politics seems to me to be about excising empathy from politics.  Barney Frank has called government "the name we give to those things we choose to do together."  The National Review, a right-wing publication, has called this "meaningless and stupid."  That, to me, sums up the problem we (in the US, and possibly Canada and the UK, with their right-leaning governments) are currently facing in the Right's rush to defund what social insurance the Progressive era won for the poor and middle class.  Government, even that which is not based on a Christian framework, should be about serving the least among us.

When your framework is selfishness (or some mythical context-free individual liberty), as Flint Knits recently posted about, government action and even individual charitable action becomes unnecessary and even an impediment to those at the bottom of the economy.  The free market and voluntary regulation which this philosophy seeks to "reinstate" not only never existed, as any thinking historian of either Adam Smith or the late 19th century will tell you, but it also does not work. It assumes the privilege of the upper middle class applies to everyone, even as the middle and lower middle class erodes into simply a gap between the working and upper middle class, because the upper middle class perceive themselves to be the norm.  As the NYTimes and Dean Dad have pointed out, markers of a well rounded, upper middle class liberal arts education like unpaid internships exacerbate the income gap by shutting out middle and lower middle class college student from the credentials race.

So what does that mean about government?

Snow Day

Snowmaggedon '11 continues, and for this, I present the Punch Buggy (actually J's creation): brandy, black raspberry brandy, orange liquer, blueberry liquer and lemon.

I drove J to work today in order to have the car for errands, and ended up stranded at the coffeeshop next door to his liquor store for several hours.  Fortunately one of my errand stops was in the same complex as his store, so I was able to buy many, many buttons before camping out in the coffeeshop and writing a few paragraphs for a paper I'm presenting in a few weeks.

J's work actually ended up closing early due to the bad weather, so I made him drive home, but it really drove home how fortunate (privileged?) I am in academia that I was able to cancel section last week due to bad weather with nothing more than an email to the prof and the students.  That's part of the benefit of being salaried rather than hourly, in that the hours I am in-building don't directly translate to the pay I receive, as J's hours in retail do.  My wages, benefits, and hours aren't the direct effect of union efforts, but it really worries me that the system I benefit from is under attack.  And not just because I benefit from it--because it seems to me the best way to maintain a happy, stable country.

I'm following the Wisconsin/Ohio/Indiana/anti-labor and anti-women news lately rather closely, but I'm having trouble making sense of it and I don't really know why.  I'm teaching anti-labor history in the course I TA right now, but the motivations as explained to me and as I read them in the materials for the course are so cartoonishly evil that they're easy to dismiss.  (Maybe this is part of the reason why my students find it so easy to dismiss connections between what they read and what they see?)

I think part of the problem is that, whether because of my liberal-midwest-elite-SLAC education or my liberal-poor-working class upbringing, I've come to see unionization, progressive tax codes, education, reproductive choice, and social safety nets as so self-evidently intrinsic to this functioning of this country that I can't see the logic of Republican attacks on them.  And there must be some appeal to that logic, or so many people wouldn't have voted Republicans in last election cycle.

But if the other side's logic is really so hard to find, is it much of a logic at all?  I can concisely state the pro-choice, feminazi socialist agenda is three sentences or less; I can't do the same for the pro (unborn) life, fiscally retrogressive capitalist agenda, and not for lack of trying.  I think it's emblematic of the problem that the right uses partisan rhetoric while the "left" tries to hang on to discourse or dialogue without another participant to dialogue with.  (And I am skeptical and disappointed in the state of the left in this country, which anywhere else in the world would be the centrist or even right wing).

So I suppose the point is this: booze good, politics disappointing and disheartening.

I want to be middle class when I grow up

The fellowship dress in action

Or, in which my supa-sekrit identity is revealed.  It was tights weather here for few days, so I made the mistake* of wearing my new dress to school.

(*I once TAd for Dr. Smackdown, a very senior and well-regarded female historian of women, and one of the first tenured women faculty, who told me and the other TA to never wear skirts when teaching lest we lose the students' respect.)

Anyway, I've spent the last few weeks conquering my bibliography and sputtering in incoherent rage over what's happening in Wisconsin and in the GOP's war on women and born children.  I just taught Grapes of Wrath today, and it felt much more like teaching a realistically near-future dystopia than period fiction.

My students were unimpressed when I tried to bring up the possibility of parallels between the anti-unionism in the novel and current anti-unionism.  They think the Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, etc, anti-collective bargaining bills can't possibly succeed, and even if they do, there will still be unions, won't there?  And it's not like people would be reduced to getting five cents a hundredweight of peaches without unions, because we've come so far since then, people wouldn't stand for it.  

They're very optimistic.