A reminder…from my friend Candy.

For those who turn up their noses at the words feminists and feminism or scoff that feminism is a dirty and utterly pointless word please read this and realize the following list is of NINE things a woman couldn’t do in 1971 – yes the date is correct 1971.

In 1971 a woman could not:

1. Get a Credit Card in her own name – it wasn’t until 1974 that a law forced credit card companies to issue cards to women without their husband’s signature.

2. Be guaranteed that they wouldn’t be unceremoniously fired for the offense of getting pregnant – that changed with the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.

3. Serve on a jury –  It varied by state (Utah deemed women fit for jury duty way back in 1879), but the main reason women were kept out of jury pools was that they were considered the center of the home, which was their primary responsibility as caregivers. They were also thought to be too fragile to hear the grisly details of crimes and too sympathetic by nature to be able to remain objective about those accused of offenses. In 1961, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a Florida law that exempted women from serving on juries. It wasn’t until 1973 that women could serve on juries in all 50 states.

4. Fight on the front lines – admitted into military academies in 1976 it wasn’t until 2013 that the military ban on women in combat was lifted. Prior to 1973 women were only allowed in the military as nurses or support staff.

5. Get an Ivy League education – Yale and Princeton didn’t accept female students until 1969. Harvard didn’t admit women until 1977 (when it merged with the all-female Radcliffe College).  Brown (which merged with women’s college Pembroke), Dartmouth and Columbia did not offer admission to women until 1971, 1972 and 1981, respectively. Other case-specific instances allowed some women to take certain classes at Ivy League institutions (such as Barnard women taking classes at Columbia), but by and large, women in the ’60s who harbored Ivy League dreams had to put them on hold.

6. Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. Indeed the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for any legal action was in 1977.

7. Decide not to have sex if their husband wanted to – spousal rape wasn’t criminalized in all 50 states until 1993. Read that again…1993.

8. Obtain health insurance at the same monetary rate as a man. Sex discrimination wasn’t outlawed in health insurance until 2010 and today many, including sitting elected officials at the Federal level, feel women don’t mind paying a little more. Again, that date was 2010.

9. Also, take the birth control pill: Issues like reproductive freedom and a woman’s right to decide when and whether to have children were only just beginning to be openly discussed in the 1960s. In 1957, the FDA approved of the birth control pill but only for “severe menstrual distress.” In 1960, the pill was approved for use as a contraceptive. Even so, the pill was illegal in some states and could be prescribed only to married women for purposes of family planning, and not all pharmacies stocked it. Some of those opposed said oral contraceptives were immoral, promoted prostitution and were tantamount to abortion. It wasn’t until several years later that birth control was approved for use by all women, regardless of marital status. In short, birth control meant a woman could complete her education, enter the work force and plan her own life.

Oh, and one more thing, prior to 1880 which is just a few years before the photo of this very proud lady was taken, the age of consent for sex was set at 10 or 12 in more states, with the exception of our neighbor Delaware – where it was 7 YEARS OLD!

Feminism is NOT just for other women.

KNOW your HERstory.

Shared from Feminist News and CNN Sent from my iPad

Why don’t men ever wear veils, or cover their faces, unless they’re robbing a bank or some such thing? Why are women taught to see themselves as beautiful when they are hiding, covered or veiled? Let the men wear veils for awhile and you’ll see how stupid it really looks. Oh, right, men would never DO anything that made them look fragile, weak and powerless, so never mind.

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Photo:  Sara Outeiro
Pexels

Neon…

Wow…this is a sign that can be taken soooo many ways.  Who decides what anyone deserves, other than one’s self or a jury and juries are weird all by themselvesf.  Jury of a person’s peers?  They would have to be similar to each other in more ways than age, so that doesn’t actually work.  Socio-economic differences, race, gender, etc., mmmmmm lots going on there, belief systems, ethnic differences, right?

Anyway, when I saw this, all kinds of things went through my mind but I finally settled on cookies and cake.  Everyone deserves that at the very least.  I mean we could talk about corruption, pollution, violence and all the other things, and argue the points but I’m going with cookies and cake because it’s easier and it’s delicious.

I do know that as long as we allow republicans to walk free and run for office after the part they played in the Washington riot…and as long as people go to catholic churches where priests rape children…well, then we do DESERVE IT…we deserve the evil things we ALLOW them to continue doing.

Photo:  Jon Tyson
Unsplash

Okay, so…books…QUESTIONS

Are there any novels for men, where the main character (male from a small town) weeps, is devastated by a breakup, runs away to open a bookstore that he conveniently inherits from a long lost relative, where he meets the love of his life and they live happily ever after?

Are there any novels for men that have children in them, other than the one’s they are hired to rescue, or kill?

Are there any novels for men that deal with caring for parents, or sick spouses, or kids?

Are there any novels for men where a woman is the hero?

Are there any novels for men where they are RESCUED by a woman?

Are there any novels for men where they are hunted, and kept in a basement for a year, constantly abused and tortured, then murdered, by a woman?

Are there any novels for men where they defer to women?

Are there any novels for men where men are made to look like weaklings, victims, pathetic, sad, lonely, inept, terrified human beings?

Are there any novels for men where they talk about how fat they are, talk about their thighs and body image, dieting, their nails, hair or the clothes they wear?

Are there any novels for men that are long boring sagas about family life and relationships?

Are there any books for men where the men are afraid to go out at night?  Afraid to be in their house alone?

You know, I could go on and on and on and on but where would these books be shelved in a bookstore?  Nowhere, that’s where, because they don’t exist.

We are constantly conditioned and brainwashed by our culture, to be something we they want us to be.  Women never have a chance to find out who they are or what they can be.

 

 

Okay, so…Neon…LIFE GOES ON.

LIFE GOES ON, is a current fact.  Life doesn’t need us as a species, to go on.  If we become extinct, life will just make more life out of whatever’s available. That’s what this place is all about…making more of itself.  It’s all about reproduction and making stuff.  Facts are often temporary.  They change as things change.  What was once a fact is no longer a fact.  The fact that humans still believe things to be true, when they aren’t is just silly, but we never stop doing it.

People believed the world was flat and that we were the center of the Universe.  Neither of those things were ever true.  Same goes for god and all the other things people make up.  Racism, sexism and all the rest are based on lies, not on facts.

But we rely on facts, even though they may only be opinions.  We act as if what we know about the universe is a fact, until astronomers and physicists tell us “new” information showed them that the facts weren’t facts at all, so pardon our mistake, but here are the new facts.  I’ve noticed they are more careful about how they say things nowadays.

History books are lies, pretty much every single thing we have access to is an opinion, prejudice, manipulation, or tool for conditioning.  Today we have “fact finders,” so people can check to make sure the facts are facts, but who are the “finders?”  How can they check to find out whether facts are true or not?  Who checks the facts the finders use to check the other facts?

Sometimes we can see through the lies but that doesn’t really change anything, which is pathetic.  We’re a species that started out small and manageable, then grew until we became too big to move in any direction, or know what’s real and what’s not.

I remember when Deb and I were marching in Washington for CHOICE.  The crowd was gigantic.  Thousands upon thousands, upon thousands of people were there.  The group was so HUGE that you had to hold on to each other or you could easily be swept away and be unable to swim backward.  Once the crowd started moving it was impossible to turn them around, or do much of anything with them.  The crowd took on a life of it’s own and we could literally hear the chanting, wash over the crowd, moving as it went from front to back, because there were so many of us that it actually took TIME for the words to pass through/over us.

Thinking about that now, I can see how dangerous it was.  If anything happened, there was nowhere to go.  We were trapped in a sea of bodies.

But here’s the thing…lies and false statements keep growing until they are out of control and become facts that we can’t run from.  We can’t inform the hundreds of thousands of people that they are being conditioned and used by the lies they hear from the pulpit, the rich, and those in charge.  People get dragged along in the stream of false information.

Priests are still raping kids because that’s what they do.  Everyone in the church knows it and nothing is done, other than covering things up and paying people off.  Because that’s what the catholic church does.   It’s lies are believed, it’s secrets kept.

It’s like that with pretty much everything.  So, we pick and choose what we want to believe and think of as facts, when we have no idea what’s real and what isn’t.  All we have is information from people who may or may not know what they are talking about.  People who may want to use us for their own purposes.  You’ll notice that the news doesn’t come from the STREET, from the people are are IN THE NEWS.  It comes from the rich who own the networks and have their own agendas.

We are being played, everyday in every way, every day.  The rich, including the catholic church, continues to get richer and everyone else gets by.  I love that the pope asked the poor people to help the sick and really poor people.  I asked our guide, when we were watching the pope stand in the the tiny window at the Vatican and tell everyone to give more, what the church gives to the poor and she said, “They give nothing.”  But the pope has a cool bullet proof car, and satin robes, let’s not forget that, when he drives past the homeless in the streets.  Oh, and they have money to pay lawyers and silence people.  We need to remember that as well.

My fact is that the church controls and manipulates people to support it while hoarding, lying an raping kids.  A lot of organizations lie to get power and control.  The church is a business.  Think about the people the pope hung around with, you know, Hitler.  I’d tell you about it but you can look it up and decide what you want to believe, just like we all do, with everything.

If people stopped giving to the church, or evil companies who pollute and will not stop, things would be different.  Those who support the church are supporting rape, lies and greedy egomaniacs.  But those are just my facts.  Obviously, people still give their kids to priests and still support companies who destroy the environment. That’s why they both exist.

I’ve said this before, but have you seen any new Hummers on the road lately?  People stopped buying them and they’re pretty much gone.  There’s wasn’t a boycott, the cost of gas and other things convinced people to look elsewhere.   WE HAVE THE POWER TO BRING ABOUT CHANGE but we don’t use it.

Anyway, the reason I wrote this…LOL…is because LIFE GOES ON, but only for now.  In the end, as far as the current FACTS show, the Universe will die.  There will be NO light and it will be so COLD, we can’t even imagine it.  Dead planets and stars…dead everything in a pitch black sky…no movement, no life as we know it.  PITCH BLACK, FREEZING COLD STILLNESS.  DEAD.

Life goes on for the moment, would be a better way of saying it.  As our sun/star turns into a red giant it will eat the inner planets.  Oceans will dry up, everything will be gone.  We’re so used to life that even writing this, I feel as if we’ll be watching it happen.   But no one will be around to one will be taking notes, the sun will EAT the planets.  Then it will turn into a white dwarf.  And, as they say, that will be that.

I mean the universe is speeding away, faster and faster and no one has a clue what DARK MATTER IS, or DARK ENERGY.  It’s weird, but we have no facts, because we make everything up and then define it and sell it as truth.  And yes, if a tree falls in the forest, of course it makes noise.  It’s weird that we’re willing to die for things we make up.

But when you think about it, what else would we do if we didn’t kill each other and hate each other and give our freedom away to the rich greedy people.  If we didn’t work until we died, pray to invisible gods, build weapons and release killer germs into the air?  Seriously, how boring would it be to do whatever we want to do all the time?

I think people learned what life COULD be like, during the lockdown.  They don’t seem to want to go back to work for a paycheck that won’t even cover their basic bills.  It will be interesting to see what happens next.  People woke up.  Good for the people, but really bad for the manipulators.  Snicker, snicker.  Once eyes are opened…as the old saying goes.

 

 

Photo:  Andrea Santis
Unsplash

 

 

 

 

Is here anyone who isn’t hated? I can’t think of anyone, can you? I don’t think the virus is as dangerous as we are.

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Okay, so…THE PIETA

A lot of people see The Pieta as a religious statue, but I think it’s a statue of just another gang killing.  Another killing over IDEAS and BELIEFS, neither of which are actually real, but simply made up by someone for profit, or because of  generations of brainwashing and conditioning..

The Pieta has nothing to do with anything, but a mother holding her dead son, something that happens pretty much everyday, in cities everywhere.  Wars are just really big gang fights over greed, insanity and clashing ideas and beliefs..  They last a long time,  but still, no different than this picture.  A mother looking at her dead child.  That’s what the Pieta IS…It represents MOTHER’S MOURNING THE SENSELESS DEATH OF THEIR CHILDREN, because men love to kill.

And again, what kind of god sends his only kid to die for him? If that’s not a red flag, you’d think the rapist priests would be but…brainwashing really works.  You can tell, because people still go to church and they still send their kids, as well.

 

Photo:  Luis Quero
Pelels

Okay, so…here’s the problem

The biggest problem the masses have, and the reason we don’t get very much done is…  there are so many issues.

I’ve said this before and it’s the truth.  We have a million little groups, all working for the thing/s they think are important to them.  And yes, all the issues are important to the people working for them, but there are so many issues that no one group has enough power or backing to ever get anything changed.

Resources are divided to such an extent, that all groups are pretty much powerless when working against the machine.

In order to get anything done, people would have to come together and work on one issue. They would have to pool their resources and then hammer it home.  If we continue to work on our own special issues, we are lost and will never get anywhere that will actually matter.  A group may be thrown a crumb or two but real change will never be forthcoming, unless it suits the people running the show.

Power divided can not accomplish anything.  If we work together on an issue…we can bring about real change.  The people who enslave us know this.  That’s one reason they keep the issues alive, like a juggler, keeping the balls in the air, so that we fight against each other, or don’t join together so that we’re powerful enough to make a difference.

Again:  Where are the kids fighting for gun control, so they aren’t killed in classrooms?  Where are the marches for BLM?  Where are all the groups that cause a stir, get their pictures taken, get beaten or arrested and then disappear?  They don’t have enough power or money to KEEP GOING.  To keep the pressure on.  If we ALL worked on one issue, we might be able to stay the course.

But everyone thinks their issue is the most important one and that’s EXACTLY what the people in power encourage.  They love it when we are fractured, broken into small groups, because then they don’t have to be afraid of us.  Massive outcries, are a different story.  BOYCOTTS and a constant pressure, from huge numbers of people can make a difference.

But how to pick an issue, when people are suffering, because of ALL the terrible things that are ALLOWED to happen.  Things done on purpose, to keep us in line.  Things to keep us fearful.  Things to keep us from attacking the power structure itself.

Now our country has been purposely DIVIDED and the people responsible are NOT held accountable.  It’s just one more thing.  The republican senators, like the rapist priests, and all the rest, walk free, after the terrible things they do.  But we the people, don’t have that privilege.   More and more, the difference between the freedom of the people and the actual rights of the rich, are more and more evident.  We know who the guilty ones are and we SEE that nothing happens to them for what they do.

You only have to look at the blogs to see what the issues are.  Who is fighting for what.  All important to the people working for their rights and lives, but nothing is going to happen unless we work TOGETHER.

Divided we are minnows.  Together we are sharks.

Think about it.

If we actually CARED about the environment we could all just stop using plastic bags.  No marches, no anything.  Just REFUSE to use plastic bags and get paper or bring your own.  The issue would GO AWAY IMMEDIATELY if we ALL just stopped doing ONE SIMPLE THING.  But we bitch about things endlessly and never act as a group.  People don’t care, or don’t bother.  Not all issues cost money or take time yet they can make a HUGE DIFFERENCE, and we still don’t do anything about it as a people.  How can we bring about big changes when we can’t even ask for paper instead of plastic?

This is for Holly…

These are the stickers that are on all of the doors everywhere.  As if they’ll actually DO anything at all.

PROTECTION…a poem

we have to protect black lives
we have to protect women from violence
we have to protect children
we have to protect asian lives
we have to protect immigrants
we have to protect poor and hungry people
we have to protect the imprisoned
we have to protect ourselves from the police
we have to protect ourselves from our government
we have to protect animals
we have to protect the environment

WHO DON’T WE HAVE TO PROTECT
AND WHO ARE WE PROTECTING EVERYONE FROM

FROM PEOPLE WHO HATE
FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES
FROM REPUBLICANS
FROM THE RICH
FROM THE POWERFUL
FROM THE GREEDY

FROM EACH OTHER

THIS IS REAL INSANITY

WHO AND WHAT DON’T WE HAVE TO PROTECT
OTHER THAN RICH WHITE MALES

 

Photo:  Jason Leung
Unsplash