Two rants in one day… I was going to roll them all into my dear mr. president part 1 rant… but I figured they would be better off in two different posts. The previous one was a few days brewing… this one I have been working on since yesterday. I have come to a point where I am almost ready to throw in the towel and its not good. I had alot of hope for our country when I went to the polls to vote in November. If you read the first part of this rant, then you know that I believe Barack Obama is a smarter and better man than our last President…. but after the Presidents speech last night, I am angry and upset. Not because of what he had to say about health care, but because of how he closed out the Q&A session afterwards. The last question he took was about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr by the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police department.

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I voted for Barack Obama. For the first time ever I put political signs out around my house during the 2008 election season in support of Obama/Biden. I argued endlessly about why people should vote for Obama. I argued with my mother, my father in law, and others. I believed in the audacity of hope and the ideas he was tossing around. For the most part I still do. This post is going to be a two parter… the first part has to do with the economy, the stimulus, unemployment and some comments the president and vice president made recently. The second part won’t be so nice….

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ok.. I figured I would start with a small disclaimer that this is not meant to be a racist post.. but its going to end up sounding like that in the end most likely.. deal with it….

I was reading an article on CNN about how Obama addressed the NAACP and one of the concerns of the NAACP that would probably not be addressed directly by Obama was why the economic downturn is having more of an impact on people of color. Now, im not sure what numbers there are to back this up or in what regards it is having more of an impact on people of color. Perhaps they are hit with more unemployment and higher foreclosure rates. But, why would this economic downturn have such an impact on one group of people over another?

I keep hearing about Black America and how tough it is growing up on the streets when you are poor and have nothing. I have seen documentaries done that show the neighborhoods of where people grew up and live and they are taking video cameras through the streets. I’m not really feeling it. I guess maybe they are trying to attract the attention or more affluent people than me…

I grew up in a small town of less than 5000 people that was built on the anthracite coal industry and tucked away in the mountains of Pennsylvania. My house growing up was a 3 bedroom row home. Our yard was a small patch of grass between the cement base that used to hold up our garage and the lower level basement of the house. My dad had a stroke when I was 2 years old and my mom busted her ass to raise 2 kids and a husband that was left with the brain of an 8 year old after his stroke. The majority of the houses in the neighborhood were like ours, small 3 - 4 bedroom row homes. They were cheap to put up and the miners that first lived in them barely spent more time there than to sleep, shit and wash.

When I saw the houses in the neighborhoods on a Black in America segment on CNN one night, I practically shit myself. Here these people were complaining about the neighborhoods they had to live in. The houses they were showing were at lease 4 bedroom singles with fenced in yards. Run down, yes… but, I have seen plenty of run down houses in my own neighborhood so that didn’t really phase me because the houses they were showing still had great potential.

I guess my point here is that I didn’t have a whole lot growing up. I didn’t have a nice house, I didn’t have money out the ass, my father was a shell of the man my mother married and planned on growing old with, the school system in the area I lived was pathetic, the job market sucked stinky balls and some of the people are so backwards that you wonder how they function day to day. But, still through it all, there was one thing we always had and that was family, friends and the desire to do better. Despite that desire, I ended up dropping out of high school in my senior year. Now… while I am not black, I am a fat bastard. Literally. I weigh a good deal and while I will never know what it is like to live in a black persons skin. I do know what its like to be discriminated against. But, all that aside I persisted, I taught myself how to build Internet based programs, I figured out databases, I found a woman who deals with my 22 hour coding sessions and I busted my ass to try and build something for my future and my family. I don’t have a 9-5 job that provides steady income. I have a shitload of debt and sometimes we struggle to make it to the end of the month. But, I keep trying. I’m not sitting here at the end of the day asking what President Obama is going to do to help me because the economic downturn we are in has cut my income by more than 65%. I’m figuring out ways to make more money and working harder to get it. I’m not sitting on my ass collecting unemployment and crying about how im being held down by the upper class or better yet, by white people. I’m working my ass off to ensure my family has something for our future. Why is it that one of the most influential men in the entire free world is half black and groups like the NAACP is still insisting that the white upper class is holding back the black people? When do we stop blaming other people for our problems at the same time looking to them to fix our problems and start accepting the responsibility of who we are, taking advantage of the freedoms we have and being part of society instead of trying to blame it for all of the problems that are faced by an entire race of people? I mean honestly do we really need to continue being so divisive? Stop fucking blaming the white man and start looking in the mirror. When I see slums where black people are living in nasty conditions.. I don’t see white people selling the drugs they are using, I don’t see white people holding the guns and killing black people. I see black people doing these things. I hear horror stories from teachers that tried to do their jobs in inner city schools. Teachers that went into the job hoping to make a difference, but the kids don’t give a fuck. Caring about getting an education doesn’t come from the teacher. It comes from the home. Where the fuck are the parents that are supposed to be raising these kids and getting them ready to go to school? When my son was 4 I started telling him about all the great stuff that he will be able to do once he starts going to school. I prepared him. I told him he would meet new friends, learn lots of fun things and have fun at school. I took the time to help him prepare, even though I had to bust my ass working as well. I didn’t have the time I wanted for myself anymore. I gave it to my kids. My son is going into 3rd grade this year and even though the school system we live in isn’t very good and we can’t afford to move to a better district we still push him to do well and he does. Exceptionally well. Because of his hard work, he is in the gifted program and he loves school. He respects his teachers and he likes to go there and learn what they have to teach him. I don’t hear stories about kids like this from those teachers that moved away from the inner city schools after they were broken by the kids going to them. When are the parents going to get tough and start accepting some of the responsibility? It always seems to be someone else’s problem or fault. Get over yourself. If you are a piece of shit and your kid is a piece of shit. It is nobody’s fault but your own and probably your piece of shit parents.

I’m not trying to say that just because people are black or live in the inner city there is anything wrong with them. There are some amazing people in this world that have come from the slums and worked their way to be outstanding members of society. And I’m also not saying that only black people are like this. I know plenty of white trash trailer park morons who expect everything as well. But this rant is related to the article I read about the NAACP wondering what president Obama is going to do to help black people affected by the economic downturn. My question is, why don’t these people follow the the lead of President Obama and other black people who came from rough neighborhoods or troubled pasts and look inside to find their strength and do something productive with their life rather than try and point fingers and blame at others?

Yet they supply their troops with next to nothing. WTF?!?

I was watching the news earlier and they had a story about a military mom collecting donations to send care packages to our troops fighting in the middle east. Her son is deployed in Pakistan or some place the news informs me.

She’s looking for things like, towels, shampoo, tooth paste and TOILET PAPER.. She says they have a real hard time getting toilet paper. So wait… we spend all this money, and we can’t even give these poor guys something to wipe their ass with? Are you kidding me?

Now don’t get the wrong idea here. I think what this woman is doing is AWESOME!! Obviously there is a real need to get these items to our fighting men and women. She was saying that the women over there have NO access to feminine products. Uhm.. what? Are you kidding me? Shouldn’t that be something mandatory for them to supply to our female troops? It’s not like you can subsitute an oak leaf for that like you can for toilet paper.

My daughter was talking to a friends brother who is in the service. He said they supply them with socks that are so thin, if they aren’t careful putting them on, they put their foot right through them. But the best part, they can’t supply their own because they have to be a certain color green.

Dry socks are one of the most important things a soldier can have. They get a condition called trench foot from having their feet stuffed in those military issue boots for days on end and once your feet sweat in those paper thin socks, they are basically screwed. Their feet start to rot basically.

How in the hell do we spend billions of dollars for our military, but then supply them with equipment that doesn’t give them one of the most basic needs? Dry feet!

Maybe I’m confused as to how our military get around, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t all given Jazzy electric chairs to buzz around on and shoot people from. Wouldn’t protecting the feet of your army be a pretty high priority? Guess they are to busy spending $50 billion on the bradley fighting vehicle which is basically a monstrous piece of crap.

I’m just astounded at how inefficiently we run things in the US. So much money is wasted on nonsense, while our troops can’t even wipe their own asses because we don’t give them any paper to do it with.

Someone needs to get all the generals together and tell them they have to sit in the 120 degree heat with one pair of paper thin socks and no toilet paper for 6 months and see if anything changes.

The military supply company who makes these awful socks, needs to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are so fucking greedy that they can’t make a pair of socks that will actually keep feet dry for more than 5 minutes.

It’s funny, Bush jr was quoted as saying that America would be much easier to run if it were a dictatorship and he was the dictator. I’m almost inclined to believe that, except he shouldn’t be the dictator because he’s a buffoon. But someone who actually gives a shit about our country needs to step up and fix this shit. Today! They can start with the military and move on to the rest of the millions of problems we have. Provide real solutions and do something that makes sense.

In closing, I’d like to thank every single mother, father, grandmother, sister, etc who take time out of their own lives and money out of their own pockets to help supply our troops with the basic necessities they need to survive in the field. Our government should be ashamed of itself for there even being a need for them to do these things, but thank god they do.